Last month I focused on detailed developer’s guidelines for course and screen design. This month I will back up to a more macro view and explain some instructional design and project management guidelines as they pertain to the development of e-Learning.
Recall that the focus of these two articles is internal-courseware developers, that is, those who develop courses for the organization’s own employees. There may be some differences in approach, rigor, and consequences between those developing internal courses and those developing them on contract.
To recap, my company has a rather young and very small e-Learning development shop. We’re a little over one year old, with two designated course developers and one SME in our Risk and Safety department who develop OSHA-type courses. Feedback we receive on courses that we designed for our employees’ “world” is much more positive than what we receive on third party, off-the-shelf courses. In addition to obvious elements such as using our employees’ vernacular, our courses convey our friendly, family-style corporate culture.
I’d like to share with you some of the macro-level guidelines that our Developers Guide addresses.
Instructional design guidelines
The vision for our online learning program is to be our company’s Web-site-of-choice for current and relevant online training and performance support tools, created in a style that fits our corporate culture and that is easy to use. As a means to that vision, we intend to follow certain principles.
First, we intend to provide valuable and timely knowledge and skill-building activities that help employees enhance their job skills and self-confidence. Second, we strive to choose topics for online learning based on the need for interactivity and/or advantages of online delivery. Finally — and this is a big element of our corporate culture — we strive to put fun and a spirit of adventure into our online and blended learning products.
Development phases and process
We develop our e-Learning courseware by using the Instructional Systems Design (ISD) process, specifically the ADDIE model: Analyze, Design, Develop, Implement, and Evaluate. (If ADDIE is not familiar to you, see the article by A. W. Strickland listed in the references at the end of this article.) One could choose other instructional design models, including rapid prototyping. We like ADDIE because it is intuitive and rather universal. We often have to adapt the ADDIE process because of short notice or incomplete requests prompted by changing business needs. All developers deal with this reality, each in their own way. We use ADDIE as the underlying frame of reference, using as much rigor as the conditions of each project permit.
Our department has also created a “Toolkit” for course development in all media. We use elements of the Toolkit for e-Learning projects when they’re applicable.
Development team
Our guide mentions the multiple disciplines that our small team must cover. Although not many people outside our department read our guide, we wanted to set the stage for future growth by documenting the breadth of skills needed for this segment of training. Looking ahead, this could set the stage for recruiting future hires as well as for staff development. At the same time, we must be careful not to intimidate key sponsors by making it sound overly complex and thus, costly. Some of the skills we mention are subject matter expertise (via SMEs — more on this in a minute), instructional design, graphic arts, Web development, audio and video production, and quality assurance.
Adult learning principles
Certain principles of adult learning and performance guide our instructional design, regardless of which methodology we use — therefore, we state them at the beginning of our guide. In a way, these principles represent the “what,” and the detailed guidelines and standards represent the “how.”
Our training is designed for adult learners — working adult learners. Thus, as described by adult learning pioneer Malcolm Knowles, the training must accommodate the needs that characterize adult learners.
Adults are self-directed and expect to take responsibility for decisions. They need to know how the material is relevant to their job — why should they learn it. The learning should occur within the context of tasks that learners will perform on the job, not just rote memorization.
Adult learners may have a wide range of backgrounds and experience with the subject at hand; the learning should appeal to learners across this spectrum.
Instruction should allow learners to discover things for themselves, with help and other aids to provide direction and explanation and recovery from mistakes. Although this is what the literature frequently says, my own experience does not completely corroborate it. I find that time-pressed adult workers often just want someone to tell them what to do. They have neither the time nor inclination to explore. They want to know one reliable way to get a task done and that’s it. Sure, they want help at the moment of need, and they want it under their control, but that’s not to say they prefer “discovering things for themselves.” The art comes in balancing what adult learners know they don’t know, with what they don’t yet know they don’t know.
General instructional strategy
Our Developers Guide helps us put the adult learning principles above into practical application by describing certain general guidelines before it gets into the specifics that we covered last month. For example, we try to maximize meaningful interactivity to hold learners’ interest. We don’t want to just keep them busy, we want to keep them engaged in job-relevant decisions and applications. By using realistic situations and acknowledging real-world dilemmas along with pros and cons of each choice in the feedback, we feel we address some of the “gray area” that a traditional “right or wrong” approach can’t do. This combination of job context and real-world feedback enables us to reach Bloom’s levels 2 and 3 (comprehension and application) with multiple choice and drag and drop questions — keeping development cost modest.
We try a variety of instructional approaches. Recall that our shop is relatively young. Our company is among America’s favorite companies to work for and we have been among the 100 fastest growing private companies. Things change quickly, and we have fun — our courses need to reflect this dynamic environment. Therefore we identify guidelines and not rigid standards so we can capture best practices while still allowing ourselves room to experiment.
We try to design screens that look crisp and inviting, and we stick to one concept or idea per screen. Note: The research is mixed as to whether it is more effective to reduce page turning by having learners scroll down longer pages, or to limit the content on each screen so no scrolling is necessary. We will leave the option open until we know what our learners prefer. A whole body of usability research exists, from which you can draw your own conclusions about overall screen design. Here is one helpful source for such information: http://psychology.wichita.edu/surl/
We design courses that are no more than 30 minutes in duration, with 20 minutes preferred. This equates to about 30-40 screens in an interactivity Level II lesson (see our definition of interactivity levels in Table 1).
| The level of interactivity the courseware provides is agreed upon with the sponsor, documented in the work plan, and further described in the analysis/design docu-ments. For our purposes, we describe four levels of interactivity. | ||
| Level | Type | Description |
| Level I | Passive | The learner acts solely as a receiver of information and progresses linearly through the course, reading text from the screen, viewing video, or listening to audio. We discourage this level. |
| Level II | Limited interaction | The learner makes simple responses to instructional cues such as multiple choice or true/false questions. |
| Level III | Moderate participation | The learners may drag-and-drop objects or respons-es, or answer multiple-choice questions about realistic scenarios. This is our preferred level of interaction because it optimizes the trade-off between active learning and course development time. |
| Level IV | Real-time participation | This includes highly realistic interaction such as simu-lations of software interactions or role-plays of inter-personal situations. |
A very important guideline involves establishing the mindset in which we attempt to place the learner. Each course must have a theme or paradigm. Modules within a given course will be consistent with the overall course theme. We try to place the learner as close as feasible to the role of action agent or decision-maker in the context of the job or task.
We start by considering themes such as lecture (yawn); game; scenario, job-realistic or imaginary (one, not both); boss; or explorer (encouraged to discover information rather than merely repeating the correct rote answer). Sometimes we gather colleagues to brainstorm other ideas. For example, we learned from one colleague that a company up the highway in Austin, Texas, hires fledgling scriptwriters to brainstorm scenarios.
An interesting example of the learner’s role was the course we developed last year for sexual harassment prevention training. The main character in the lesson was a weekly columnist preparing her answers to several letters in her in box. The learners played the role of “assisting” the columnist to prepare her answers. This manifested by having the learner answer the same three questions in each scenario:
- What is making the person feel uncomfortable? (We took a behavioral approach vs. one of legal interpretation.)
- What should the person do now?
- What can the person expect to happen next? (That is, what is the other individual’s obligation or the company’s obligation, now that that particular issue was raised?)
Decisions on the degree of interactivity in any e-Learning product rest upon relative importance of the content, budget, timeline, shelf life, and audience size. Translation: time and money tend to be directly proportional to the level and quality of interactivity, so be prudent about that investment. This leads to the next topic, project management.
