Design versus Technology

Success with e-learning comes not from the fact it employs technology for delivery, but rather from how it interacts with learners individually. In other words, it's instructional design that determines the quality of all instructional experiences, whether delivered electronically or not. Technology has many capabilities, but we have to be selective of which ones we use, and when we use them. We have to avoid doing things just because technology enables them, whizzy or not, and harness technology in ways that achieve desired outcomes.

We must not mistake appealing new delivery technologies for good instruction—even if learners report liking it. Good design, not the latest delivery technology, is essential to success. Good e-learning design is good because it uses available technologies effectively to make learning happen. It's the design that will make the experience boring or inspirational, exhausting or energizing, meaningful or meaningless. It's the design that creates value out of the capabilities technology offers.

Three Priorities for Training Success

There are many facets of instructional design that may tempt us to lose focus. This is especially true in e-learning because its multimedia nature offers an endless array of prospects for invention and artistic expression. Typically, there's also the frustration of overwhelming amounts of content that subject-matter experts want to see included. The success of any effort to create effective e-learning depends on keeping priorities straight and focusing on those things that contribute to learning success.

This topic is actually one of the few simple and straightforward topics within all the complexity of successful instructional design. Design success comes from doing just three things well:

1. Ensuring learners are highly motivated to learn
2. Guiding learners to appropriate content
3. Providing meaningful, memorable, and motivational learning experiences

We'll review each priority briefly here, as it will be a recurring message throughout the book and given further attention in subsequent chapters.

1. Ensuring Learners Are Highly Motivated to Learn

Learners must always do the learning; we cannot do it for them. Motivation is essential to learning because it energizes attention, persistence, and participation in learning activities—all the necessary components of a successful learning experience.

The importance of motivation is certainly not new in the literature of learning and instructional design (Keller and Suzuki, 1988; Keller, 1987; Malone, 1981). Robert Mager wrote, “No teaching goal can be reached unless the student is influenced to become different in some way than he was before the instruction was undertaken” (1968, p. 8).

Unfortunately, consideration and explicit treatment of motivation has been absent in the preponderance of e-learning. Only recently, most notably with heightened interest in gamification, has bolstering motivation crept into design plans here and there. This is good news, but learner motivation needs always to be front and center.

I've seen the remarkable effects of stimulating learner motivation and attitude, but there's still much work to do before designers feel they can devote enough attention to this issue.

Spend wisely! As shown in Figure 5.1, there is typically very little attention given to bolstering the learner's motivation in e-learning designs. In contrast to traditional practice, I would suggest that if you have a very small budget, it might be appropriate to spend nearly the entire budget on heightening motivation and to make learner attitudes as positive as possible. For more average size budgets, perhaps up to half the budget should be used to bolster motivation.

Why spend so much on motivation? Highly motivated learners will find a way to learn. If necessary, motivated learners can be quite creative in finding sources of help, information, best practices, and so on. They will support one another, exchanging information and teaming up to find missing pieces. If your training program gets you only this far, you've probably already won the toughest battle. Now you can go on to make your performance solution even more cost-effective by addressing the remaining two priorities.

2. Guide Learners to Appropriate Content

Highly motivated learners are eager to get their hands on anything that will help them learn. To take advantage of this motivation, it is important to respond with appropriate materials in a timely manner.

There's much more to this than meets the eye, and it's not just the challenge of creating clear, understandable content—which does take time, effort, and expertise. But clarity is just one essential criterion for good content. Content must relate to what's motivating the learner, and it needs to be focused not just on knowledge, but also on performance outcomes.

Making sure content is appropriate for an individual learner means either providing excellent navigation (indexing) to help learners identify appropriate material or applying an assessment that will determine what each learner needs and then making that specific content available. In either case, e-learning is often a cost-effective means of providing access to appropriate content.

Keep in mind that exposing learners to information is not teaching and will rapidly sap motivation if it doesn't enable learners to accomplish what they're seeking to do. Maintaining motivation while building performance skills and confidence requires well-crafted, rewarding learning experiences and plenty of learner practice, so be sure to address the third priority, too.

3. Provide Meaningful and Memorable Learning Experiences

Motivation and good content are usually not enough for learners to acquire new skills reliably. Unless provisions are made to guide learners, help them practice sufficiently, and learn from mistakes, skill development will be too slow and require a lot of effort. In many cases, there is a wide chasm between (a) providing good resource materials and (b) achieving sustained performance competencies.

Delivering meaningful and memorable instructional experiences is important, and both are essential qualities. If either is deficient, you get no useful outcomes. That is, if you can't remember what you'velearned, it won't guide future performance. And if you can remember that you learned something, but just didn't understand it—well, that isn't going to help you either.

The importance of practice cannot be overemphasized, especially practice that is spaced out over increasing periods of time (Thalheimer, 2006). One can read extensively about delivering good speeches, handling a difficult customer, or managing a complex project, but guided and independent practice will still be necessary to reach needed levels of proficiency. In many cases, it is preferable for learners to make mistakes in a learning environment where guidance is available and errors are harmless, rather than on the job where guidance may be more difficult to provide and errors could be costly and damaging to people, equipment, materials, or the business itself.

Let me emphasize the importance of meaningful, memorable, and motivational (M&M&M) qualities of learning experiences before we go on to specific design requirements within each of the components of e-learning.

Meaningful Experiences

If a learner doesn't understand, then that learner will not gain from the experience. This is instructional failure. Designers of single-channel deliveries for multiple learners, such as classroom presentations, must decide whether to speak to the least able learners (in hopes that other learners will tune in at the appropriate points) or target the average learner (in hopes that unprepared learners will catch up and others will wait patiently for something of value). The approach often results in many learning casualties and is always expensive and a waste of time.

Further, if learners don't see valuable implications of learning the content, such as its applicability to the work they do or don't see advantages of the process being taught over the one they currently use, the learning experience is also likely to be of little value. When different learners perform different functions, it is important to help learners see the relevance of the training to their respective responsibilities. We shouldn't just assume they will figure it out on their own.

Well-designed e-learning has the means to be continuously meaningful for each learner. It can be sensitive to learner performance, identify levels of need and readiness, select appropriate activities, and engage learners in experiences that are very likely to be meaningful.

Memorable Experiences

If meaningful experiences and the knowledge they convey are quickly forgotten, or if learners don't remember to apply what they learned or know how to apply it on the job, the learning experiences might as well not have occurred. Employee time spent in training is expensive to employers. It is not usually the goal of training simply to give workers some time off the job, only to return with no improved abilities. Thankfully, e-learning has many ways to make experiences memorable, such as using:

• Interesting contexts and novel situations
• Real-world (authentic) environments
• Problem-solving scenarios
• Simulations
• Risk and consequences (serious learning games)
• Engaging themes
• Engaging media and interface elements
• Drill and practice spaced over time
• Humor

I need to mention that some of these elements easily become distractions, if not used well. Used effectively, however, they can make learning experiences more memorable. But they need to be used judiciously. And just as some advertising commercials can be recalled for their humor or creativeness, we don't always remember what product they were attempting to promote. Not good.

Motivational Experiences

Learning is all about behavioral change. We don't teach and learn just to fill out a report card; we teach and learn to perform tasks we couldn't do before or to do them more proficiently. It's most important neither instructional designers, their organizations, nor learners focus on posttest scores. The focus needs to be squarely on performance outcomes.

To get where we want to go, learners need to be motivated to learn and motivated to use their learning for improved performance. As we'll detail in Chapter 9, there are many ways to do this. Then we'll discuss seven keys to motivational e-learning in Chapter 10.

The Takeaways

It's important to see and use e-learning as a means to an end. It's not the ultimate goal. The ultimate goal is the targeted performance outcomes. The three priorities for training success suggest a correspondingly prioritized approach for effective e-learning application.

1. First, use e-learning to provide multimedia experiences that stimulate emotions, set expectations of success, create a positive learning attitude, and help learners visualize success and the rewards that accompany success. If this is all you have time and budget to do, you may still succeed in reaching your performance goals, because highly motivated learners with the right attitude will overcome many obstacles to learn, even if they have to do it on their own.
2. Second, use multimedia and navigation components of e-learning to help learners find the instructional content they need and to communicate content to learners clearly and on demand. It's like setting out a smorgasbord for a hungry crowd!
3. Finally, use e-learning's interactivity to present individually adjusted levels of challenge, engage learners in active learning experiences where feedback includes presenting the consequence of learner actions, and provide sufficient, spaced practice for long-term retention.