Seth Tee, Author at Fabric LMS

Utilizing Redundancy in eLearning

Leave a Comment / Instructional Design / Seth Tee

When writing a research paper or a blog article, you’re focused on keeping it short and sweet. Get to the point and move on. It can be tempting to apply the same approach to eLearning. But, on the contrary, eLearning is a medium in which saying more can be better; redundancy and repetition are tools in your instructional design toolkit. We’ll take a look at using redundancy effectively in eLearning. Mainly we’ll consider approaches to communicating the same concept in slightly different ways, at different times or different situations.

The unique thing about teaching people is that it’s your job to ensure they’ve learned what they need to learn; and that can take unique approaches for everyone. We can’t simply broadcast our piece, hope the audience gets it, and call it a day. Otherwise, why would instructional designers exist in the first place?

Good Teachers

Think of what it takes to be a good teacher. Is it one who speaks as few words as possible in their lecture? Probably not. Good teachers adapt to the needs of each student. They can identify what students are struggling with and have a follow up that helps them understand the topic better. Maybe they ask a meaningful question, tell a relatable story, or use a role-play activity. And if the first follow up doesn’t do the job, they’ll keep trying. Good teachers have many tools available to help everyone, not just the straight “A” whiz kids.

Why Redundancy is Worth the Effort

When we say redundancy, we don’t mean chanting the same phrase over and over (although that might be effective for brainwashing). We mean it in the good teacher way: preparing alternative explanations in your content for learners who might need it. This might take the form of additional multimedia, questions, feedback, examples, activities, and more. eLearning is about helping the stragglers, not just the people who already get it.

The concern about this kind of redundancy is that it is more work to create because more explanations mean more content. When we are on a time crunch, it’s normal to ask why create content that only 10% of users might need. However, it is an instructional designer’s job to create the necessary redundancy to teach as many people as possible. That 10% is your main audience, they are the ones who need training (your product) the most.

Adding Good Redundancy

The interactive nature of eLearning offers instructional designers an opportunity to add redundant content that only appear when needed. Additional explanations shouldn’t slow down learners who understood the content on the first try and are ready to move on. Your design should integrate these pieces into the content as a response to user input in the same way a teacher responds to their student.

Provide learners with ways to access the extra content by interacting with it. Display content when learners answer questions incorrectly or choose to dig deeper. Don’t just display everything at once and overwhelm them. Think of more possibilities, cases, common mistakes, etc. that expand on the core concept. Go several layers deep. Collect information from students and subject matter experts; find out what needs further explanation.

A Practical Approach to Using Redundancy Effectively in eLearning

Here is an approach you might use to fully teach a new concept. Start with the core concept but anticipate ways the learner might misunderstand it or questions they might have. A subject matter expert would be able to provide a lot of suggestions in this area. Build content blocks for this additional information but prompt the learner before displaying them. Think of it as a “choose your own adventure” design where more content is presented as the learner interacts with it.

Here is a set of possible ways to explain and re-explain a concept in a lesson. The notes marked with an asterisk are potential core steps that always appear. The rest are optional content that only appear if prompted.

Introduce the main concept*
Provide examples
Explain it again using additional graphics or analogies
Ask questions related to the materials *
Provide hints and clarification for wrong answers
Cover common mistakes and misconceptions
Display links to additional resources
Summarize the core ideas and take-aways*
Provide resources and job aids that can be used later
Add a frequently asked question about this topic
Provide a way to collect feedback and questions– respond to them!

Just running through this hypothetical list, we have created 11 different avenues to explain a key concept. However, only 4 of these show up at first; the rest are designed to appear only if the learner expands the section or answers a question incorrectly.

While some learners might have all they need from the core steps, they are likely a small minority and our work as instructional designers is not done. Each additional resource might help a greater and greater percentage of learners understand the content.

Conclusion

Redundancy can be a good thing in eLearning but it’s all in how you apply it. Most learners need multiple attempts to truly grasp a new concept. Instructional designers are constantly challenged to provide a experiences that help push learners over that milestone. We have to anticipate where learners could get lost and prepare content to get them back on track. Consequently, we also have to find clever ways to check if the learner needs to see the content or not. These are all things to consider in using redundancy effectively in eLearning because redundancy itself is neither right or wrong– it’s how you use it.

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Converting Manuals into eLearning by Adding Engagement

Leave a Comment / Instructional Design / Seth Tee

Instructional designers are often given the task of turning manuals into eLearning. That sounds easy enough given that the manuals are already a finished product that say what they need to say. But we know that there are core differences between these types of resources; that’s why it’s usually not the best approach to dump a stack of manuals on a new employee. Manuals are intended to communicate specific steps in the briefest way possible. They are structured to be easily referenced and are mostly print focused. They assume you already know what to do with the information they are presenting. eLearning, on the other hand, is intended to be an experience that brings the learner to the point where they can do something they couldn’t before. So, we’ll look at converting manuals into eLearning by adding engagement; ways to keep the learner’s interest and attention.

Here are some areas to consider in when looking for opportunities to add engagement to some otherwise dry manuals. And to do it without change the accuracy of the information being taught.

Structure & Guidance

Structure is the order you present your content and how you transition between concepts. Learners remember things they were previously told about (priming), things that appear at the beginning and end of a list (primacy and recency effects), and things that are grouped together logically (segmenting). Learners also benefit from context, stating where the knowledge is relevant and what you should already know before starting the course.

These and many other learning effects can be used to structure your content. Consider how you can use segment and order the information. Furthermore, provide details on what you’ll learn in this course and what you should already know before getting started.

Suggestions

Break up and order your content in a way that makes sense to learners
Use introduction and summary activities to bookend chapters
Navigate and transition through each topic to tell a story or illustrate a workflow

Informal communication

If formal communication is the barebones text of the manual (the absolute minimum of what you need to know), informal communication is everything else around that. These are the pieces that explain the concepts or share personal anecdotes. Where formal communication is succinct and accurate (like a dictionary definition), informal communication can highlight, clarify, or provide motivation. Think about how you would explain a concept in person to someone who isn’t getting it right away– you wouldn’t tell the learner to just read the definition over and over again. Instead, find ways to add a personal touch where it might be needed most.

Suggestions

Include additional explanations in a casual tone separate from the “main” readings
Share anecdotes and stories that complement the materials
Suggest common mistakes and how to avoid them

Multimedia

Multimedia means simply using more than one media to communicate your information. Undoubtedly, some knowledge work best as videos, infographics, or simulations. You wouldn’t try to teach someone to tie their shoe using plain text. In the same way, we want to find the best way to illustrate your concepts beyond text. Visual diagrams, infographics, and animations are better at showing processes and relationships. These kinds of multimedia, when used correctly, are much more likely to stick with the learner.

Suggestions

Present important concepts using multimedia that fits
Create infographics that learners can keep as a job-aid for later
Ensure your multimedia is aligned with Mayer’s principles of multimedia learning

Feedback

Feedback provides immediate information to the learner in response to an action. Consider how often teachers ask their students “do you get it?”. They do this to ensure the learner is following along and to gauge if more explanation is needed. It also produces new opportunities to teach when learners have their brains working on a challenge. Think of your eLearning course as a kind of teacher that anticipates when to check-in on its learners. Find ways to add feedback events in your training.

Suggestions

Prompt learners to get their input throughout the content with interactive elements
Give meaningful feedback beyond right and wrong
Show outcomes based on the learner’s response

Application

Application shows how the knowledge being taught is used in a new situation and context. It’s important for learners to see theoretical concepts applied in reality, possible variations, and repetition of consistent elements. Altogether, these experiences help learners understand the knowledge far more than just reading the usual manual descriptions and steps.

Suggestions

Use case studies and examples to illustrate concepts in action
Provide practice problems and questions the learner can use repeatedly

Assessment

Assessment involves checking that the learner actually understands what they need to. This helps prevent learners from moving on unless the have adequate knowledge of the materials. Formative assessments are used along the way to find out areas where the learner needs improvement. Summative assessments occur at the end to confirm the learner understands the content.

Suggestions

Add knowledge check questions along the way to keep learners on the right track
Use quizzes and exams at the end of chapters to prove learners know their stuff

Conclusion

While it may seem to be a simple and common task, converting manuals into eLearning gets at the core value of instructional design. Manuals serve an important purpose in every organization, but they do not satisfy training requirements by themselves. That’s why we suggest converting manuals into eLearning by adding engagement and .

The next time you are given a manual and are asked to “you know, make it engaging”, try comparing your materials with areas above. Hopefully they inspire ideas that build on the core materials with a little extra engagement.

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6 Questions to Ask Yourself Before Looking For a New LMS

#1 What type of content will you publish?

Online training happens in many formats: multimedia, interactive eLearning, scheduled webinars, in-person classes, and more. Your specific training might be better suited to certain mediums—many skills are taught best when shown by video rather than by reading while some skills can only be taught in person. Thinking about your type of content also means thinking about the skills and knowledge you are training.

What is the best medium to train the skills you need to train? Which tools will you use to create eLearning content and is your prospective LMS compatible with those tools? What devices will your audience use to access your training?

Of course, resources are another factor. Not everyone can budget for programs that are entirely multimedia focused or interactive. What medium (or mix of mediums) best fits your budget?

Being able to say that you want a training program that is primarily made of interactive SCORM activities, or videos, or in-person classes will greatly shape how you approach your LMS search.

#2 How will you assess your learners?

Assessment is just as important as training and likely just as specialized to your industry. How do you confirm that learners have what they need to know before you send them off to do their job? Some common ways to find out are online quizzes, manager observational checklists, or surveys.

When assessing knowledge, what kinds of questions or inputs will you be using the most? When should learners be quizzed—immediately after completing the training or some time later? Are there other forms of assessment in your organization—do they need to be part of the LMS?

Clearly stating how you intend to handle assessments means you can look at the capabilities of an LMS and determine if your strategy would run smoothly (or at all) on that platform. Consequently, missing out on this requirement could mean that your LMS won’t track one of its most basic goals: determining whether your training works.

#3 Who is your audience and how are they assigned training content?

There are many different ways that LMS’s assign content to learners which usually stem from the industry they started in. For instance, educational institutions often implement self enrollment while businesses often want to automatically assign content based on roles and departments. Furthermore, within an organization there may be a mix of assignment rules depending on the type of content.

In your ideal workflow, how is the right content assigned to your learners? This can be done automatically based on the learner’s role, assigned over time at certain milestones, or by a manager. Will different types of content require different assignment rules?

Try to outline the rules you need in place to optimally assign content. Then, look for how each LMS aligns with your rule; misaligned rules and functionality can lead to massive overhead work, consistent human error when executing workflows, and disengagement with the platform.

#4 What measures do you need to report on?

Think about the numbers that you will need to analyze whether your training program works. You might start with standard numbers such as completion percentage or average quiz scores. Additionally, certain organizations need to track time spent training while others might need to categorize the type of training being completed.

What is the main indicator that a learner has completed their training in your organization? What do reports do you need to generate on a regular basis? How are reports often broken down (e.g. by department or by content type)?

Reporting tells you the impact of your LMS on your organization but going without it will leave you in the dark. Make sure the key measures you’ve identified are tracked and available in the LMS. Check how easy is it to get these numbers out of the system; reporting should become part of a regular routine.

#5 Who manages accounts

Every LMS needs to create accounts for learners that help track progress, restrict access, and create reports. How those accounts are created will depend on your organization.

Are accounts created by a central admin team? Or by managers at a location or department level? Can learners self register? Or is there an external tool from which to sync learner accounts?

How you handle learner accounts should fit your day-to-day operations and not create a lot of new work. LMS’s can help by providing integrations with existing tools, or distributing the work of managing accounts to the right people.

#6 How much help will you need?

If you started asking yourself these questions and your ideal LMS seemed to become larger and more complex, that might mean you need help with your project. It’s unlikely that any one system will meet your requirements exactly. Therefore, some additional work will be necessary to make your vision happen.

What applicable skills does your team have internally? Based on your answers above, what skills would help make your vision happen? What is your timeline and can it be met with your resources?

There are many services offered by LMS companies or external companies to help fill gaps where needed (e.g. software development, custom configurations, instructional design, and more) to build the best possible product. Include these as part of your plan if needed!

Conclusion

Taking the time to think through the ideal way to deploy your online training program means you will be better prepared to start meeting and evaluating potential LMS solutions in a deliberate way. Answering the questions above simply gives you an idea of the kind of solution you need. You might discover new details along the way to change that plan but it is always best to have an initial plan.

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Including Experimentation in your Training Workflows

Leave a Comment / Productivity / Seth Tee

It’s been about a month since the ATD 2023 conference and hopefully those of us in the industry have been able to put our big ideas into practice. This year’s conference brought out lots of great ideas; whether it was unlearning our assumptions about our jobs, giving high impact players freedom to thrive, or considering how we encourage constructive feedback. ATD reminds us that there are many innovators out there digging into a multitude of hypotheses and finding real applications. It should also remind us that you don’t need to be a professor or a published author to discover new applications. Working in training & development means constantly searching for better ways to educate that produce real world effects. No matter how small or specific your area of education is, there are valuable gold nuggets to discover—better ways to educate that result in faster training times, longer retention, or improved performance. But with our packed schedules and tight deadlines, when do we have the opportunity to look for these gold nuggets? Here are some ideas for including experimentation into your training workflows.

Create With the Purpose of Discovery

When it is time to create something new (which will inevitably happen if you’re an instructional designer), be deliberate about what you create. Consider a new approach to your training but be selective—one big idea is enough! It might be a storytelling device, a game, a social activity, a journal, or one of many other possible teaching strategies. The point is to try add something new to your training to see if it makes your training better.

It is easy to fall into a routine with every new course; but it’s unlikely doing the same thing over and over again is going to lead to a breakthrough. Instead, treat each project as a way to apply something you haven’t tested yet. Keep your changes small—it is better to thoroughly test one small change rather than try to separate the effects of many changes.

Set Up Your Training Program Like an Experiment

Just because your idea is new, that does not mean it’s good. Experimentation simply requires controlling the training implementation in a way that lets you see if your new idea makes any difference. The classic way to do that is to create 2 groups: an experimental group that receives the new training and a control group that receives the old training. Make sure you have a way to clearly target the different training content for your 2 groups.

Keep in mind that we don’t want to harm the control group by giving them bad or inaccurate training. We just want to provide them with a continuation of the old way of training.

Does this mean we are doing twice the work in order to try new methods of training? It might, depending on what you are experimenting with! But I would recommend keeping your experiments simple. Restrict your experimental training to just a few activities. Split your groups up so some receive the new activities and some not.

Measure Outcomes

We wouldn’t learn much about our training strategies if we didn’t measure any of the possible outcomes. Most eLearning should already come with common tools to measure learning: quizzes and surveys. You should also have tools to track time spent in the training and the big picture impact on performance.

Luckily measurement between your two groups can be exactly the same, no new measuring tools are needed. But you will want to make sure you have these measures in the first place.

Do you have two independent experimental groups? Did you collect relevant data from each group? Excellent! This is a good situation to use a T wo Sample t-Test to check if your results are significant.

Repeat: including experimentation in your training workflows

If you’ve come this far, don’t stop! Each experiment informs all your further experiments and greatly increases your chance of finding that gold nugget. Training and development is not about doing the same thing every year, every project. We want to keep trying new approaches but we also want to ensure we only keep the approaches that work.

One way to accomplish this is by including experimentation into your training workflows. That is, continually trying new ideas, creating these ideas as small pieces of content, targeting content towards an experimental group while maintaining a control group, and comparing measurements between these groups.

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5 Stages of Employee Training

Leave a Comment / Employee Onboarding, Instructional Design / Seth Tee

When we consider training over the life cycle of an employee, it is clear that not all training is the same. A new employee doesn’t receive the same training as someone who has been around for 1 year or 5 years. The difference is more than just the content that changes, but how the training is done. We’ll take a look a how training might look across 5 successive stages of employee training. We’ll start at onboarding a new team member, all the way until they become community leaders.

5 Stages of Employee Training

Onboarding

No business can succeed without onboarding training. At this stage we are giving learners the basic information to competently (and legally) start work such as workplace policies and safety training. Training now is just like checking things off of a list– one and done.

The focus in this stage is on friendly guidance for the learner and ensuring compliance. We want to keep the content ordered to prevent the learner from getting lost. Managers can use reminders and check-ins to keep the learner on track.

Practice

At this point, we have the basics out of the way and are now training things that are unique to the business. These skills can’t be mastered in one sitting, they will require repetition. Memorizing 50 recipes and being able to execute them on the spot isn’t the same as remembering a descriptive fact.

Practice is ongoing and relatively unstructured; consistent engagement is important. As a result, training content must be bite-sized and easily searched. We might incorporate more interactivity, gamification, and scheduled activities that encourage the learner to stick with it over time.

Change

Businesses don’t stay the same and inevitably we’ll need training that supports change. This might look like promotions, new products, or updated operational procedures. Change for a business usually comes with a timeline. Consequently, training is required to meet this timeline as well.

At this stage communication is critical. Your training department needs reliable avenues to send notifications, reminders, or otherwise grab attention. Tools to specifically report on new content and segment previously complete versus new learners can be a great help.

Career Development

Employees want to boost their skills and advance their careers. In this stage, training is focused on deeper learning topics such as leadership and management. Advanced courses should be available but not required.

We want to provide learning paths that go beyond “normal” required training; either manager or self initiated. These paths should be specialized and rewarding without punishing those who aren’t looking to advance their career yet.

Community Leadership

Veteran employees are valuable parts of every business. Outside of receiving change-related training or advancing their careers, they also have an important role in training. Experienced employees are the drivers of informal learning in a community.

Here, we can focus on providing shared spaces to help newer employees connect with the rest of the team. Initiatives such as mentorship programs or knowledge bases are areas where experienced employees can have a big impact.

Conclusion

It’s easy to feel like training is all about one aspect (onboarding, or career development, or practice) and miss the big picture. However, a mature training program should continually improve all aspects across the 5 stages of employee training.

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Designing Instructional Workflows

Leave a Comment / Instructional Design / Seth Tee

When creating a corporate training program today, we can no longer just dump a pile of manuals on the learner. If members of Gen Z entering the workforce are known to hate micromanaging managers, we need to use technology to help guide them by designing instructional workflows, not just providing stacks of readings.

Content and Experience

Many of us are used to thinking about training programs in a content-first way. If there is a training problem, the first question you might ask yourself is “what can a learner read or watch that will address this problem?” From there we might create content until we’ve built up a sizable library of materials to address our many documented problems. But does this help a new employee who is just learning the ropes?

In addition to producing lots of content, we need to think in terms of workflows. By workflows, I mean planning the experiences that make up your training program; whether it’s a new employee, a new role, or a change of operations.

Documenting and Designing Instructional Workflows

The series of experiences that make up a training program should flow together smoothly in the most logical way. Likewise, the knowledge learned (or assessed) should match the medium used to teach. We want to optimize synchronous training time (time spent with an instructor) vs asynchronous (time spent learning alone) and get the best of both worlds.

Documenting your workflow is the important first step. Draw a flowchart that describes each of the learner’s steps. Here are a few ideas on how to structure your flow chart to capture the critical aspects of your design.

Learning content: This is the media or activity learners must experience such as e-learning modules or instructor-led training.
Interactions: an interaction often is needed to be able to say the required training was completed. This might mean passing an automated test, signing a form, or having an instructor mark a submission.
Conditions: these conditions must be met before the learner can move on to the next step. Some examples of conditions might include: completing prerequisites, having a manager schedule the next learning content, or waiting for time released content.

A Quick Example

When using the pieces above to create a flow chart, we can indicate the experience that the learner in a particular role will go through.

In this example, learners must complete the orientation e-learning prerequisite before they can move on. As a part of the compliance training, we’ll collect their e-signatures. Next, they must schedule an on-site training with their manager. 1 week later, we’ll assign them product knowledge training.

By laying our plan out as a workflow, we can see when key tasks should be done and know who is responsible for moving the process forward. We can also step back and check that our learning goals are being met by our design.

Tracking Workflows

After a workflow has been implemented, we want to be able to track learners as they progress through it. Ideally, tracking completions and conditions is integrated into your LMS but simple tools (such as a spreadsheet) can help. Documenting and tracking workflows also helps you analyze the effectiveness of your training program and make improvements.

Conclusion

Thinking in terms of training workflows helps us lay out the path learners should take, identify areas of complexity, and discover ways to improve the program. It’s only after you have a well-planned workflow that you should start putting pen to paper. As learners demand more self-paced and guided training programs, instructional designers are going to have to adapt our approaches and tools to create solutions that work.

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How to Assess Instructional Design Skills

Leave a Comment / Instructional Design / Seth Tee

Hiring the right person for the job is critical to running your business well. We know that if you are hiring a programmer, you’d ask them to show you that they can code. But what can you do when hiring an instructional designer to help develop your training programs? In this article, we’ll look at strategies on how to assess instructional design skills either internally or externally.

Instructional design is a relatively new field and it can be difficult assessing skills for an area that is constantly changing. I hope these points are helpful to both hiring managers and job applicants who, together, help grow the profession.

What skills to look for?

First of all, what are the skills you should be looking for when hiring for an instructional design role? Depending on the specific work you need done, start by defining a criteria on which to assess your applicants. Here are some ideas related to instructional design roles:

Application of best practices: does the applicant understand best practices in the industry and know how to apply them?
Instructional design skills: can the applicant create effective plans and materials for training according to the latest standards?
Communication and comprehension skills: can the applicant understand and integrate your core business ideas that need to be trained, and generate new content out of them?
Analytical skills: given relevant data, can the applicant identify problems and areas for improvement for your organization’s training program?
Technical skills: can the applicant use or learn to use the tools required for the role?
- Web development (e.g. WordPress, Joomla, HTML, CSS, Javascript)
- Graphics editing (e.g. Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop)
- eLearning authoring (e.g. Articulate RISE, Storyline, Captivate)
- LMS administration (e.g. Fabric, Moodle, Absorb)

Tips on How to Assess Instructional Design Skills

When you know what you are looking for, you can request materials from your applicants that show what they are capable of. Here are some ways you can assess applicant materials for an instructional design role.

Resume + Cover Letter

The classic resume and cover letter combo is always a great place to start considering an applicant’s skills. Education and past experience are always good indicators of ability. However, you shouldn’t be too narrowly focused on the “instructional designer” label—the field is relatively new and not every capable applicant might have this exact degree or role. That’s why it’s important to look beyond resumes and cover letters when assessing applicants.

Portfolio

Today, every instructional designer needs to have a portfolio ready that is a high-level record of what they can do. Portfolios can include:

eLearning Content: this can be any digital content used for training, often mixing media as needed. Pretty content is great, but also consider the design that went into the content such as utilizing interactivity or multimedia to convey the concept.
Curriculums: these are big picture training plans that target every role within an organization. Curriculums often require a deep understanding of the business and communication with every department and specialization within it. Don’t underestimate the amount of work (potentially weeks or months) to produce well-made curriculums.
Reports and analysis: analysis is half the job for instructional designers; most projects should start with an analysis of the current state of the business, their goals, and recommendations that inform the rest of the project.
Lesson Plans: a lesson plan is a set of materials used by instructors to teach individual lessons. It would be smaller in scale than a curriculum but would include fine details on a single topic.
Job Aids: job aids are often reference material that are printed or easily accessed while on the job to help workers while they do the work.
System Designs: Some instructional designers might work on large projects such as a whole Learning Management System deployment. Often such a project involves designing and documenting how the system should look and function.

Assignments

Assignments can be a helpful part of the hiring process as long as you keep assignments short and deliberate. Don’t expect to have real work done for free and don’t create assignments that would scare away valuable candidates. Try to ask for assignments that can be done in a short period of time (e.g. under 30 minutes) and demonstrate just the specific skills you are looking for. While using the expected tools is a bonus, don’t expect all applicants to have current access to the same tools you provide—try to focus on skills (such as the ones mentioned above) instead of specific tools and processes.

Here are some assignment ideas that may be useful:

Designing: provide business-relevant resources and ask the applicant to mockup and describe how they would turn your information into eLearning content.
Summarizing: provide a business-relevant resource and ask the applicant to write a brief summary of the content that could be used for training purposes.
Structuring and Organizing: provide a general list of resources and ask the applicant to organize the resources into courses and modules.
Assessment: provide a business-relevant resource and ask the applicant to write 2-3 questions that would test a learner’s understanding of the content.
Planning: describe your current training goals and request a proposal for the next steps for your project.

Conclusion

Instructional design is a relatively new field that is constantly changing so it can be hard to tell if a candidate is a right fit. I hope some of the strategies above are useful to employers or job seekers who need help on how to assess instructional design skills. An instructional designer with the right skills can be a great boost to any organization, you just need to know how to identify the right person for the job.

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A Doctor Patient Model of eLearning

Leave a Comment / Instructional Design / Seth Tee

As instructional designers, it can be easy to feel like our jobs boil down to creating content and passing it on down the factory line. Sometimes, our work schedules can make it seem like that is all there is. However, our end goal isn’t to publish content endlessly, it’s to help our audience learn what they need to know. That’s why I suggest a doctor patient model of eLearning.

We can think of the relationship between instructional designers and their audience as a doctor patient relationship. Obviously, doctors are responsible for their patients’ health. They know how to tell if a person is “healthy”. If a person is not healthy, they have ways to identify what is wrong and recommend treatments to help the patient get better.

Diagnosis and Treatment

Instructional designers are responsible for our learners’ education. We need to know what a “healthy” learner looks like. We need measurable indicators that we can compare against each learner. Instead of blood pressure, body temperature, and vitamin levels, we use workplace performance and knowledge levels as indicators. Instead of stethoscopes and thermometers, we use quizzes and checklists.

To oversimplify, a doctor is responsible for diagnosing a patient that has a problem and prescribing treatment to help with that problem. Doctors specialize in knowing what “healthy” means, identifying the causes of unhealthy problems, and suggesting treatment that will help bring the patient up to and beyond healthy levels.

Tools For a Doctor Patient Model of Elearning

What tools do instructional designers use? For diagnosis, we might use quizzes and reviews to see if our patient meets the baselines. These tools can further help identify the precise things a learner struggles with.

For treatment, we might assign eLearning content such as videos, readings, and exercises. And after treatment, we need to keep following up to ensure it worked.

A Different Paradigm for Instructional Design

If we see instructional design as a patient doctor relationship, how might that change how we do our job? I think we need to get past the idea that instructional designers are just there to constantly roll out treatments. Here are some ways I think we can apply a doctor patient approach to eLearning:

Better identify baselines: do you know how to tell if somebody can do their job?
Develop a personalized plan to help new learners reach their baseline
Use the right tools to diagnose problems: do you have adequate ways to tell if a user is ready to do their job? Can you accurately identify problems?
Use the right tools to treat problems: does your content achieve its goals? do you have tools that address specific problems?
Follow up with your treatment: do you have ways to follow up to ensure the tools worked once they’ve been used?

Modern training programs must deal with increasingly specialized knowledge and as a result our eLearning models need to be more deliberate about how we interact with learners. A doctor patient model of eLearning helps us with this very problem. You wouldn’t want a doctor that gives all their patients the same advice without any tests; likewise, an instructional designer needs to do more than publish generic eLearning content.

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A Practical Approach to Designing Interactive eLearning

Leave a Comment / Instructional Design / Seth Tee

eLearning and interactivity complement each other naturally. eLearning is all about teaching with the help of electronic tools. Meanwhile, interactivity encourages learners to apply their knowledge in a safe and educational environment that gives them immediate feedback and speeds up learning. Together, this increases the effectiveness of training. But it can be hard for instructional designers to keep up with the demand for interactivity. What’s missing is a practical approach to designing interactive eLearning.

In this article we’ll take a look at why interactivity works so well with eLearning. We’ll also look at some practical ways to include interactivity using interactive elements embedded in the training content. This means presenting our eLearning in the usual way (through text and multimedia), but finding opportunities to embed interactive elements into the material to keep learners engaged.

Why Interactivity

There are many reasons to include interactivity to enhance your content; looking good and being fun may be the most popular goals but there are also benefits that improve learning. Here are a few outcomes of interactivity used well:

Communicate complex ideas quickly: Condense complex ideas and concepts into a quick activity that illustrates the information by having the learners do them.
Provide instant feedback: Show the learner the outcomes of their decisions or guess right away. Knowing that you’re wrong makes you much more likely to remember when you are corrected.
Make your learners curious and motivated: Use your learner’s curiosity to encourage them to find the answers themselves.
Use heuristics and garden path visualization for memory: How you receive knowledge can determine how to retrieve it again later. Create interactions that associate the new knowledge with other concepts or details that are easier to remember together.
Simulate real situations: Create interactions that ask the learner to apply their knowledge in a realistic situation.
Encourage repetition: Repetition is a useful tool for learning and memory. Use interactivity to encourage users to try multiple times to find out more or achieve a higher score. Each time they try it helps build their memory of it.

Things to watch out for when adding interactivity:

Incorrect representations: One of the worst things you can do as an educator is spread incorrect information. Make sure the interactivity you create is accurate to the knowledge you are teaching. This can be tricky if you are not the subject matter expert and must extrapolate your activity from other content. In this case, review it with your subject matter expert to ensure you’ve interpreted the information correctly.
Unrelated or distracting content: You are already asking your learner to sit through all your learning content—make sure every minute of it will be useful to them! Interactivity just for the sake of fun might actually slow down the learning process.
Adding confusion: Interactive elements often mean introducing new interface controls. Keep these simple and consistent. You don’t want learners getting stuck because they can’t figure out how to navigate your content.
Time and cost: Lastly, it’s important to plan and keep track of budgets and schedules

How Interactivity

The more interactive and engaging you can design your experiences, the better. However, now comes the hard work of creating these interactions. I’ve met lots of instructional designers who, when they felt interactivity was needed, fell into one of two extremes. They would either become over ambitious and try to create a whole “game”, or they would fall back on just displaying the bare content.

Purchasing: Go out and buy pre-made content.
Programming and development: You and your team create your own from scratch.
Creating with tools: software such as Articulate Storyline, Adobe Captivate, or LMS authoring tools (such as Fabric LMS) allow you to create interactivity within coding.

As you might guess, time and cost become major factors when designing eLearning with interactivity in mind. Each interaction could end up like a mini app or game; and the more you want, the more you have to build.

Interactive Elements: A practical approach

For most of us, we have limited time and resources to create effective eLearning. That’s why the best approach I have seen to creating interactive online content is also the most practical. Interactivity is not an all-or-nothing situation, think of each interaction (whether purchased, programmed, or authored) as an element that you can integrate into the rest of your content.

Mix media: Use a combination of media to present your training. Text and images are easy and effective ways to deliver training. Videos require more resources but are best suited for certain content. Pick just the key points that would benefit the most with interactivity and turn those into interactive elements.
Plan consistent interactions throughout the content: Try to space interactivity apart and build on each interaction by adding another layer of complexity each time.
Reuse templates, patterns, and art: The best way to keep resources in check is to reuse content. Whether it’s background, characters, icons, or checkmarks, reusing assets saves you time while keeping a consistent look and feel to your product.
Keep it simple: In the early stages of your design, identify which parts of your content should be interactive and implement a design that gives you the benefits you need. There are many benefits to interactivity but you can’t squeeze them all into one element!

Conclusion

Interactivity boosts your eLearning content but it is hard to get right and resource intensive. A practical approach to designing interactive eLearning means to be deliberate about the interactivity you apply to your content to get the biggest impact.

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