The Death of the Page Turner: Deal With the Application First

A page-turning Web-based training (WBT) is a tired vehicle for formal learning. Let’s face it, most learners view the typical design that consists of knowledge- and comprehension-based content, strung together with the “Next” buttons, with the same enthusiasm they would have for dry cornflakes for breakfast. And with so little learner enthusiasm, do we even dare to measure the impact of the learning on performance?

As instructional designers, we have many reasons for producing these page turners: Lack of time to create something better, lack of technical knowledge, a mandate to reach as many learners as possible at their convenience, and so on. But are we really doing the best that we can? Shouldn’t we demand more?

In the past, one common recommendation to improve the WBT experience was to make it more interactive. Of course, adding certain types of interactions, such as knowledge check questions, did nothing much to improve either learner enthusiasm or job performance. Another recommendation was to include more higher-order learning in the WBTs, as opposed to delegating this type of learning to facilitator-led sessions — or excluding it altogether. In some cases, you could add a simulation to a WBT and call it application. In other cases, you could add a game and call it application and, depending on how you designed the game, call it synthesis as well. Most learners would certainly welcome the change of pace from reading to actually doing, but did it improve learner performance much?

In a recent project involving training for associates (employees) in the bank, we had a rare opportunity to create something other than a page turner, something that generated genuine learner interest and is improving performance on the job. Since then we have tweaked the design, and we think the result is different from traditional e-Learning in two ways:

• Business impact and performance metrics are “hardwired” in the learning solution
• Hardwiring business impact and performance metrics in the learning resulted in a radical restructuring of how the learning is delivered

(We gratefully acknowledge our co-worker Garrett Pack’s contribution to this article. From Garrett, we derived the idea of hardwiring performance objectives into the learning solution.)

We would like to share the journey that led to the design and the resulting “new” type of learning experience. Examples in this article are from an Automated Teller Machine (ATM) learning solution named “ATM: Fix, Maintain, or Meltdown,” designed to enable associates to fix ATM faults more efficiently, and to save the expenses of unnecessary onsite service calls.

Include business impact and performance metrics in the learning solution

Before we discuss how we integrated business impact and performance metrics into a learning solution, let’s first discuss why anyone would want to do this.

The first point is that learning is not an end in itself. The whole purpose of learning in the corporate world is to improve associate job performance, which in turn will save money and also make money. As a result, shouldn’t the learner know what the targets are? Isn’t an informed learner a better learner?

Another point involves learner experience — and the realistic nature of that experience. Integrating business impact and performance metrics into the learning can provide a context from which learners can understand how their actions impact the business directly. Talk about appeasing the Adult Learning Gods!

The final point concerns the needs of the business partner, the customer who sponsors the learning effort. What this person really cares about is improvement of job performance and business impact. Shouldn’t we design the learning in such a way that business partners can easily discern how their most important concern is central to the learning experience?

We think the answer is “Yes.”

If your learning design process is anything like the ones we have experienced, it does seem clear how the information about business needs and performance objectives disappears from the learning solution:

1. . Business needs initiate the whole learning process.
2. . From the business needs, designers identify performance gaps and eventually derive performance objectives (or goals).
3. . Designers develop learning objectives from the performance objectives.
4. . Instructional designers create the learning topics, practice exercises, and post-test questions from the learning objectives.
5. . Learning objectives and topics ultimately mention nothing of the original business need or performance objectives.

To illustrate these steps, here is an abbreviated example of how one actual business need maps all the way to the learning topic titles of our ATM learning solution:

1. (Business Need) Decrease cost of ATM service calls by $450,000
2. (Performance Objective) Fix ATM faults with 90% accuracy
3. (Learning Objective) Identify Common ATM Faults
• (a) (Topic Title) Receipt Paper Faults
• (b) (Topic Title) Cash Cassette Faults

Notice in the example how weak the connection is between the learning objective and the topic titles, and between the learning objective and the business need and the performance objective, if you read them as discrete entities.

Feel free to disagree with this approach to designing learning and insert your own approach here, but we are guessing the end result is the same: When learners encounter the completed course, they only interact with learning driven by what appear to be free-floating learning objectives. In many cases, mention of business needs and performance objectives are absent — erased even — from the learner’s experience. Ask the learner what the business needs or the performance objectives are, and the learners won’t know. Shouldn’t they? Is there a problem here?

We think there is.

How to integrate business impact and performance metrics into the learning solution

If we accept the argument that we should integrate these metrics into the learning solution, the next logical question is how?

In the page-turner world, a WIIFM (What’s In It For Me) page could suffice. Such a page might list business impact and performance metrics (knowledge based content). But this is a rather reductive approach. After all, condensing the business case to one page in a WBT really does not do justice to the mission at hand. This information is far too important to relegate to the margins. Besides, telling is not training, let alone learning.

Rather, hardwiring business impact and performance metrics into the learning means using this information to structure the learning experience — not just supplement it. There are different ways to do this.

First, there is the “bookend” approach: Business impact and performance metrics display at the beginning and end of the learning solution. In between the bookends, learner performance of simulated job tasks affects the display of metrics at the end of the solution. We chose this approach in our learning solution as you will see shortly. Then there is the “fully integrated” approach in which on-page business impact and performance metrics update as the learner completes job tasks in the simulated environment.

In both cases, the performance objectives (rather than knowledge- and comprehension-based learning objectives) in the context of the business need structure the actual job tasks the learner performs during training. This is a big difference from the way most e-Learning works today.

Let’s compare the order in which topics drive the learning-centric paradigm espoused by page turners, against the business-driven performance-centric learning model. (See Table 1.) Notice the learning-centric model starts on the ground floor of learning (knowledge) versus application (fixing ATM faults) and synthesis (how fixing ATM faults can save money) on the part of the business-driven performance-centric model.

Should this type of structuring be so atypical? After all, when you buy a bike, do you read about the history of bikes first (knowledge), attempt to distinguish between the rear derailleur and sprocket (comprehension), or do you just try to ride it (application)?

The real deal: Restructuring the learning experience

So what we are proposing is a paradigm shift of sorts: We are flipping Bloom’s Taxonomy (Cognitive Domain) on its ear to a certain extent. Remember Bloom with his Knowledge through Evaluation categories to step the learner through the learning experience gently? In this case, we are not starting with Knowledge, the first rung of the Taxonomy.

Imagine an e-Learning course that that deals with application first, such as a simulation or game that begins a lesson by mirroring tasks on the job. We won’t forget about knowledge- and comprehension based topics (if they are needed), of course. They just won’t appear at the beginning. Learners encounter the simulation or game without knowing that it is a pre-test of sorts, unaware that it will define the content they will encounter later.

If you look at the Bloom-based learning-centric model (see Figure 1), learning in terms of knowledge and comprehension always comes before “doing” an application. The business-driven or performance-centric model (see Figure 2), however, elicits doing before learning. In addition, since we immerse this “doing” in a business context, the learners have a range of tasks they can begin with as opposed to the learning centric models that are more linear in nature.

Figure 1 Learning-centric models (Task-only Focus)

Figure 2 Business-driven performance-centric model (Job Focus)

At this point, of course, one could argue that the business-driven or performance-centric model approach advocates the “guess (and likely fail)” approach to learning. To some extent this is true. Just as learners must guess in current true/false and multiple choice questions on a more traditional pre-test, learners must guess what actions to take. Unlike a traditional pre-test, however, the feedback when they fail is immediate and very specific (like crashing a bike) — not in a module or lesson served to you in an order determined by how you answered other pre-test questions.

Another argument could be that the learner may have guessed the right action for the wrong reason. To some extent, this argument is also true. But if the learning experience contains rounds of play, then the learner must guess with consistency — a paraphrase for discovery-based learning.

There is another way to explain the business-driven or performance-centric model. If learners don’t have the knowledge- and comprehension-based information needed to perform the task, they will receive it in the context of the task, so they can complete the task. And, by the way, there will be no post-test or practice questions (learning checks) that typically target bite size morsels of knowledge so granular they seem disconnected from the performance objective. This is real change.

In addition, there will be no page that lists the lesson’s learning objectives; the learning objectives are erased from the learner experience this time; they are now subservient to performance objectives. Last of all, there will be no Next button — there will be no opportunity for learners to practice their manual dexterity by pressing this button as fast as the page can refresh to advance to the end of the course.

One last obvious advantage of this approach is that any form of cheating is now coaching — and we encourage coaching: pure and simple. Unlike traditional post tests, there is no cheat sheet that associates can use to help other associates in the banking center — the only way to pass is to play the game, or in this case, the “New WBT.”

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