When it comes to building online learning, we all know that including media makes learning more enjoyable, and not using media results in bored learners – right? This seems to be the conventional wisdom, if the use of badly chosen Flash games (“Bop Bosco The Clown each time he says something harassing!”) and other gratuitous media is any gauge of agreement.
Whether, and how, to use media for learning is a complex issue. Good media can be extremely powerful, helping learners make critical connections and gain essential practice. Media use typically adds cost and time to online course development, though, and online course developers rarely have enough of either. Therefore, choosing media wisely is more than just a good idea; it’s a necessity.
Let’s say your training group is developing self-paced, online versions of the most critical face-to-face training courses, in order to improve timeliness of, and access to, training for those employees who are not located at the home office. The first few courses developed were for telephone representatives, a job category that encompasses a whopping 32% of the company’s staff. The online version of the Customer Service Skills course includes modules on listening skills, handling customer orders, handling difficult customers, and others.
One of the biggest challenges was to make the online versions of these courses interesting and meaningful. When you searched for example courses for ideas, you weren’t too enthusiastic about what you found. Listening skills without practice listening? Not too meaningful. Handling orders as a bunch of sequential pages with clip art? Ugh.
What’s so great about media?
Digital media, such as text, illustrations, charts, photographs, audio clips, video clips, animations, and other programmed interactions can be used individually or together in learning materials to improve effectiveness and meaningfulness, if the media is chosen carefully and implemented well (big ifs, to be sure). Although you can deliver most online instruction without media, you might as well deliver online courses that are strictly text (with or without a few graphics) in print. (Moreover, in some cases, that is exactly how they should be delivered.)
Consider, for example, a textual explanation of the travel reimbursement process versus an explanation that maps the process visually, and allows the learner to drill-down into the component pieces of the process (for example, who needs to approve different expense types and levels) and get forms and explanations useful for completing this complex process.
Studies have shown that media can provide important benefits for learners and learning, including the ability to see alternative perspectives, improve engagement and retention, focus on key elements, enhance problem-solving skills, and more. Media may seem the answer but when used poorly or for no real reason, media can lead to frustration (“I’m clicking on the play button but nothing is happening!”) and overload (“Holy cow, am I really supposed to read all of this?”).
Which media? Start with the DOs
One of the primary reasons that so many online courses are dull is because they don’t provide enough (or any, in some of the examples I’ve seen) meaningful activities. People learn (almost anything) best by being engaged in real or realistic practice activities. Good instruction allows learners to practice doing what they need to be able to do in real life, in a safe environment, with meaningful feedback and help, until they are able to do what they need to be able to do effectively.
As an example of analyzing what learners need to be able to do, Table 1 shows the most typical “DO” types and examples of each for one lesson of the customer skills course for telephone sales representatives.
| Course: Customer Services Skills Module 2: Customer Orders Lesson 3: Handling Out-of-Stock Situations |
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| DO Types | DOs |
| 1. Recall facts | When new shipments arrive How long it takes for new shipments to be checked into database What the database codes are for “in stock,” “out of stock coming in on [date],” “out of stock [no date],” and “out of stock discontinued” |
| 2. Find and make sense of information, often with the aid of tools, resources, etc. | Determine stock status of desired item
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| 3. Understand underlying concepts | Differences between out-of-stock types |
| 4. Understand how a process works | The stock check-in process |
| 5. Complete needed steps | Create waiting list Place hold on future stock |
| 6. Determine which course of action is needed | Help customer decide whether to be wait-listed Help customer select a similar item |
| 7. Create a product or produce a specific result | Acquisition of desired item for customer Customer satisfaction |
| 8. Troubleshoot and fix problems | Reconcile database availability and on shelf availability |
What’s the point of analyzing and listing these DOs? They reveal which activities are needed for effective instruction. Moreover, this is where media can be especially valuable. The most effective media are those that create learning experiences that allow learners to practice in the contexts in which they will apply the content in the real world. So a telephone listening skills course will most certainly benefit from a variety of scenarios using audio clips (or video clips if body language is important). And a lesson on setting up an e-mail account will most certainly benefit from software demos or simulations.
Are you up for a challenge? Let’s see if you can use a small portion of the DOs in the example lesson in Table 1 to determine which activities and media would be most beneficial. For the DOs listed in Table 2, determine which activities are needed, and which media would be useful to support those activities. (My answer is in Table 4 at the end of this article … no peeking.)
| DO Types | DOs | Activity | Media |
| Find and make sense of information, often with the aid of tools, resources, etc. | Find item in database | ||
Determine stock status of desired item
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