The Importance of Educational Theories on Instructional Design: a practical guide

CAUTION! This blog may will take you about 5 minutes to read and lifetime to complete. You have been warned.

For us, as 21^st century instructional designers (ID) in the digital space, the subject of educational theory should be integral to our work. This is because the effectiveness of training now falls squarely on our shoulders; there is no instructor who can turn a turkey of a course into a sumptuous Christmas dinner.

This being the case, it is always a bit of a disappointment to read the abstracts on those ID webinars that appear in my inbox on a daily basis. I have never seen one that even loosely references any educational theory. They regularly boast that if I follow their five/seven/ten (delete as non-applicable) rules for <insert topic> then I will have wonderful and engaging elearning or mlearning or whatever. I am sorry to admit that I seldom bother reading these pearls anymore, because they have yet to provide me with anything more than the rehashed opinion of someone who may or may not be an industry guru. 

An admission

I have never read Vygotsky Mind and Society in Russian. There you go; I am outed.

One of the problems for most of us who work in the digital learning ID sector is that there is barely time to keep up with technological advances, without wading through 300 pages of the Piaget’s The Language and Thought of the Child. And where do you start? The psychology of learning, the physiology of memory, the philosophy of education? How about the educational theories; behaviourism and Skinner, cognitivism and Bloom, constructivism and Piaget, Social Development Theory and Vygotsky, Dewey, Bruner, and on and on.

It’s a big field and there are plenty of theories, quasi-theories and paradigms to go round.

So where do we start?

The road to…

Like most of the world, start with Wikipedia to get the basics. The Educational Psychology page gives a fair breakdown of the runners and riders in the world of educational theorising. From there you just follow the hyperlinks or do new searches based on what you have just read: listen to people talking about educational theories on YouTube; start to pick up some TedTalks on the subject. Give yourself an afternoon and you will soon realise that you will need a few years.

But then, think about what you have just been doing.

I have set you a problem, without a ready-made solution. I may have told you about one Wikipedia web page, but from there you were on your own. This is what real education is about. This is Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development in action. You know some stuff (even if it is just that you don’t know lots of other stuff) and you have used a series of Internet-based More Knowledgeable Others (Vygotsky again) to help you learn something more. And all of this knowledge, these theories, anti-theories, musings and comments, are coalescing in your head in a very constructivist manner. Try going the whole hog and getting some colleagues to do the same thing, then meet up over coffee and discuss what you have discovered. Social constructivism in the office; it’s a heart-warming thought.

An apology

So you have taken the first steps to becoming a substance-based ID, rather than one who is just chasing the next fad (complete with some handy acronym). But I am afraid that that is not the end.

What you have done (or will do) is now going to inform your digital learning development from here on in. The next time that you start designing a course you will be thinking about how the content is going exploit one or more of the educational theories that you have been investigating. You will no longer be happy to design some click-through rote-learning sheep-dip. Your assessments will no longer just ask students to regurgitate the piece of information from bullet 3 on page 6 of your course. You are going to want to set them challenges where they take control of their learning. You are going to want to develop active learning content.

Sorry about this, but you are never going to be satisfied with an MCQ again. 

A reality check

But don’t think that you will never be limited in your ambitions again. Resources (skills, time and money) will still constrain what you can create. You may feel that your learners should be taking your training out into the workplace with a series of situated learning assignments, while your stakeholder says that they just want 10 True/False questions with a pass mark of 80%, and you will do what the budget allows.

Another admission: I do.

However, when you next talk to a customer about what they could do to make their digital learning successful it is going to be different. You are going to blow them away by your knowledge and understanding of what makes a good course and why. You probably won’t name-drop Jerome Bruner or any of the others, but you will be able explain that sound educational theories will make the training that you design effective.

Enjoy!

Motivation and the risk of the "next badge" syndrome

Take some time and watch the Dan Pink TED Talk; it is an interesting one, if only because it challenges preconceptions. (http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation?language=en). 

Assuming you have watched it, I will continue. I have worked in the private sector for about 25 years and the common belief is that this sector is broadly (even primarily) driven by financial reward.I am about to start a sentence with, "In my experience", which normally means, "Without a shred of evidence", but here goes...

In my experience, Pink is fairly accurate. Most of my colleagues and co-workers are university educated and adequately paid. Don't get me wrong, I would love to get a pay rise, but I am not poorly paid. Being able to put food on the table is not a nagging worry ever hour of the day. And that is the key. It comes down to the Douglas Adams questions of existential sophistication..."How can we eat?", "Why do we eat?" and "Where shall we have lunch?"

If you don't have enough money to be able to eat, then eating (or working out how get the food to eat) becomes all consuming (pardon the dodgy pun).

I believe that it is the same with working and earning money. If money is tight, it becomes the overwhelming driver. Linked to that is the fact that low paid work is more often dull and repetitive (needs limited cognitive effort [see Pink again]) and you have an inverted golden spiral, with everything going down the plughole.

OK, it's not just my opinion (I have learned better than to simply pontificate in these blogs). The Institute of Leadership and Management report Beyond the Bonus (2013) demonstrates that while an adequate salary and pension is important to staff there are other facets of working that are more important:

"Employees were asked to select three factors that influence their level of motivation to work as hard as they can. Intrinsic factors dominate four of the top five spots. Enjoying the role, getting on with workmates, how well they are treated by their manager and how much control they have over their work are all placed in the top five motivational factors."

I also found the report in a CIPD blog (Job satisfaction beats bonuses in staff motivation stakes) and one of the most interesting parts of the articles was one of the comments it received:

"I was talking to a group of entrepreneurs at a gathering. They found disbursement of bonuses a much easier task than to play into the emotions and the minds of employees, because it requires persistence and painstaking efforts to build empathy." Dhruva Trivedy

Working out effective, motivational rewards is difficult. It is easier to just open one's wallet and pay a bonus, working on the premise that everyone likes a bit more money. There is a real danger of papering over the cracks with bank notes.

All very interesting, but what does it mean for training designers; and specifically those of us who work with games and gamification?

Handing out badges can be motivating, but does it motivate students to learn, or just to collect badges? In World of Warcraft, for example, a gamer can get new powers, weapons, money etc., etc. But does that start to become the point of the game; I level up, therefore I am?

While WoW, and such like, may engender flow (for more on this, take a look at Mihály Csíkszentmihályi’s Thinking Allowed interview at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dSzKnf5WWg), is it the type of flow that we want. The player may become engrossed in gaining some arbitrary award rather than in the learning. Fine for WoW, but not so good for educational games. Perhaps the focus on badges and other extrinsic motivators makes it all too easy to lose sight of the true goals of an educational game.

Back to Pink.

He holds that Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose are key to effective motivation. Most games designed for entertainment cover the latter two (if levelling up or getting the Sword of Azeroth is purpose enough for you :¬) )

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=OEkmO3gQQAs

But autonomy? It is a real challenge to put autonomy into a game. OK, you can choose not to play or not to take on a quest, but where does that leave the player? Back on their desktop or wandering around a virtual woodland? Autonomy is all about making decisions that affect our lives (even our virtual lives) not just working out how to get the next badge by slaughtering the next battalion of orcs.

Seriously Challenging eLearning?

I spent an informative hour in the company of Michael Allen (Allen Interactions) the other day. To add some context (and to show that I am not name dropping a man who doesn’t know me from Adam) we were in the company of around 500 others who were listening to his presentation e-Learning: Are You Serious? (I was John 3, in case you were looking out for me on the webinar). Let me extend the context of our meeting. I had previously (well five days earlier) come across the Serious e-Learning Manifesto, which is a set of principles defined and proposed by Michael Allen, Julie Dirksen, Clark Quinn and Will Thalheimer “to elevate elearning to the height of its promise.”

Having read through the 22 principles, I quickly (they are quite short) came to the conclusion that they were pretty much common-sense comments on designing learning content. Have a look yourself and flip them, turning negatives to positives and positives to negatives, and you will see what I mean. It called to mind the almost ludicrous obviousness of that part of the Hippocratic Oath that says doctors should “do no harm”. Of course a doctor should do no harm and clearly an instructional designer should target improved performance (#4). Why would doctors make people more poorly on purpose or IDs make people worse at their jobs? Ridiculous…but…there is considerable virtue to be had from making us think about whether we are doing what we set out to do (sorry about the tongue-twister there).

The talk was interesting and Mr Allen made a number of compelling points. He was, of course, right when he said that everybody like demos and hands-on exercises best in any course. He proved this by demonstrating one of his own company’s e-learning courses. The course content is unimportant to this blog. The two points that he made are critical. Firstly, he prefixed the demo by apologising that he was using an old course and commenting that his team felt that the graphics were rather dated and newer courses were more attractive. (That is not a quote but the gist of what was said). Secondly, he showed that asking people to make challenging decisions based on the information available in the course makes for far more memorable learning; the character in the course was faced with some managerial decisions on staff absence.

(Was that it? Two points in an hour? Of course, not. He made lots of other points, but these are the two that stuck with me. Like all courses or lectures that you attend, there are always a couple of things that really leap out at you, and these are mine).

Let’s look at them in reverse order. We all put assessments or knowledge checks or quizzes in our courses. If we don’t there is normally a really good reason why not, because we, the student and the person commissioning the course expect them to be there. But how often are these simply memory tests to see if the student has bothered to actually read or listen to the content, or true/false, yes/no answers where the student is either right or wrong? These represent the type of questioning that makes our learning didactic; we have a lesson or a point and our course ensures people learn that lesson. But does remembering a magic, “right” answer for a few minutes mean that the lesson is really learnt? I am afraid not. 

However, the demonstrated course fed the student some information in the form of a scenario, gave opportunities to research options, and even let them phone a friend (or at least ask an expert avatar for some advice), so that they could decide on the best answers that they could give. A lot of people would describe it as a sort of game; it had animated graphics, bright colours, and lots of buttons to press, so it looked like a computer game. I call it play. There was a challenge but no rules, just some basic guidance on how to navigate the screens. You could make bad choices and the ramifications of these could have a compound effect, but you could always start again, learning from past choices and maybe making more informed ones second or third time around. There were still right (or at least righter) answers, but there were degrees of rightness; solutions came in shades of grey rather than black and white. The effort it took to come up with an answer that the student was happy with could make it a real, rather than a rote, learning event.

That brings me to the second point. The aesthetic beauty of the course. If these were old-fashioned graphics then the new stuff must be Pixar-esque. And there is the problem. For most of us, the budget to develop potentially an hour of complex, branching graphical scenarios is a pipedream. Even if we have the money and time, we may not have the necessary skills. We have to buy in graphical design experts or farm it out to companies who have the skills to do this sort of thing; not educationalists, but graphic artists.

But that is where Michael Allen is right to be demonstrating a course that has less sophisticated graphics. In fact, I would prefer that he demonstrated one with no animated graphics, avatars or whatnot at all. The story is the key to engagement. The course set a challenge and then said to the student, “Go and develop your solution.” I didn’t need faces. I didn’t need avatars. I didn’t need bright colours. I do all of that better I my head. I had a challenge and some resources to help me work out a solution…my solution…and then I am told the consequences of my choices. They may be bad, they may be good. My bad may be your good. Now that is real learning.

If you want to see what minimalist graphics can do, have a look at SPENT from the Urban Ministries of Durham. No avatars, no collaboration, four colours (with black being predominant) but a compelling challenge; can you survive? (No you don’t have to kill anything. If you have read my other blog you will know that I don’t get much motivation out of slaying orcs). This is, arguably, a highly didactic game or play scenario; there is a moral lesson to learn and you have any number of ways of learning it. The key point is that you choose your way to learn their lesson. A neat piece of design if ever I saw one.

You could, at a stretch, do most of it in PowerPoint; lots of branching and I would not be keen on trying to make changes later, but it could be done. Or, as is done in Spent, you could use Flash. I don’t really care; use HTML5 or anything else. The important thing is that you don’t have to be Michelangelo to create the images it uses. In fact, you could have any shape or symbol to replace the graphics; they are not important. The story and the fact that you have to make choices and eat or starve based on these choices is the point.

Michael Allen was very keen on the whole idea of consequences. You don’t just give an answer that has a binary value; right or wrong. You give an answer that reflects the nuances of real situations. The choices themselves become actors on the story. Just as in real life, the choices that we make have implications for the next set of choices we will have to make. 

All of this sounds wildly complex. Well, it is certainly more challenging to design, but isn’t that the point. We are all learning to develop learning and if we don’t challenge ourselves, how can we expect to challenge our students?