“In quantum gravity, as we shall see, the space-time manifold ceases to exist as an objective physical reality. Geometry becomes relational and contextual; and the foundational conceptual categories of prior science – among them existence itself – become problematized and relativized.”
This is an excerpt from an article on quantum gravity written by Alan Sokal, professor of physics at New York University. Mr. Sokal submitted this article to a leading academic journal, which published it quickly, without much scrutiny. Because the information appeared sophisticated and intelligent, the editors failed to notice that the article was in fact a parody meant to test and trick them. You can imagine the controversy. If you Google “Sokal hoax,” you can learn more about lack of intellectual rigor and the “anything goes” approach to information distribution.
In an era of excessive information, you have to wonder: how much of it is real or matters? The Sokal affair, as labeled by Google, prompted me to reflect on the concept of superficiality and how it relates to e-Learning. How often do we create courses that look and sound good but are in fact cognitively opaque? How often do we design learning by staying near the surface? How often do we sacrifice depth and rigor for the sake of expediency? If you took down 80% of your e-Learning courses for one day, how many people in your organization would complain?
After creating and completing hundreds of e-Learning products, I am noticing a trend towards substance abuse: we sometimes provide too little information, thinking we are doing users a favor, or we provide too much… thinking we are doing users a favor; or content is not really that important as long as it looks good. And most of this superficiality happens because we are often in a rush to deliver and don’t have the time or the energy to devote to thorough analysis.
Substance abuse in training can have serious consequences: on-the-job performance suffers, Help Desks get busier, and e-Learning gets a bad rep. How do we stop providing the mirage of e-Learning? What are some practical cures for superficiality? Read on.
The reality of less
Sometimes we oversimplify e-Learning content for the sake of brevity. And who is to blame us? We are addressing a culture of students with increasingly shorter attention spans; a generation of learners who wish to avoid inconveniences of prolonged training periods … learners who are after pleasant, instant stimulations, shortcuts, and quick fixes. As designers, you might be thinking: why clog output with unnecessary argument? Thorough treatment is for the academics.
Media and advertising, with their melodramatic sound-bites and slogans, are not helping our cause. You see ads that persuade people to believe they can get high gains with minimum effort. Look at slogans that promise a complete meal in three minutes, tax submission in two steps, and better abs in one move or less. If people are convinced they can get results without effort in most areas of their lives (family, fitness, entertainment), why not expect the same from e-Learning? Why engage in effortful pursuits when instant, comfortable chunks are so much easier to handle? Superficiality has become attractive to many corporate students who seek instant gratification and effortless training. How often have we seen e-Learning along the lines of Figure 1?
We’ve become too gentle with our students. We spare them the feeling that a training package may be too long or too difficult. In attempting to protect frail psyches, we often produce attenuated e-Learning. We fear that users, who are so stimulus-hungry and hurried, might close the browser and reach for the Wii. So we encourage learning by casual grazing. If we keep going at this pace, trapped and provoked by the 140-character culture, the future of e-Learning will be the blurb.
Do this exercise. Go to any of your e-Learning courses in your LMS (Learners Made to Suffer?) and count the number of screens where detail is sacrificed for the easily digestible. How many did you find? If the ratio is alarming, reflect on this: forced brevity breeds superficiality. You can’t simplify something by applying a few quick formulas. In some fields, you have to admit the frustrating complexity. Students might tell you that they are looking for are a “few simple rules” for a procedure. In some areas, there are no simple rules. Many topics are complicated and situational. Don’t oversimplify them.
Think of it this way: if everything in a training program was simple, users would not get much out of it. If everything was complex, users would not get much out of it. But if you balanced simplicity and complexity, users would learn better and appreciate your efforts to simplify. Simplicity and complexity need each other. It’s the contrast between them that shows your skills and provides students with substance and ease of learning. Just as we need the dark sky to appreciate the moon, we need complexity to appreciate simplicity. Consider Figure 2.
Including complexity in e-Learning screens assumes that you organize it well (any Edward Tufte book would help with that) and you distinguish between complex and complicated.
If you tend to oversimplify because you’re worried about the length of an e-Learning product, keep this number in mind: empirical research shows that adult learners’ attention span starts fading after 30 minutes. The key word is adult learner; for adults in other circumstances, attention span may be longer. The movie industry can keep our attention for more than two hours, and so can a good stand-up comedian. Learning situations are more cognitively taxing, especially if you’re asking students to retain and apply information rather than simply browse.
You may hear casual anecdotes proclaiming that e-Learning modules offered in chunks of 15 minutes, 7 to 8 minutes, or even 2 to 3 minutes are optimal. If you abide by these untested standards, know that you’re doing it not because adult learners cannot handle something longer, but because you recognize they are tied to digital leashes and are easily distracted. To create e-Learning for people with fickle attention but yet provide them with enough substance, we need to ask a different question. The question should not be: can students handle this 30-minute module? The question should to be: how can I create my e-Learning program so it competes with an engaging iPhone app that typically tempts my students or with a rewarding chat they have with a co-worker via IM? You will enjoy the challenges but also the rewards of the answer.
Another danger of offering a superficial e-Learning in simple chunks is that students may miss the overall context of the information. Learning objects – discrete and focused pieces of content– empower students to establish their own path by allowing them to draw from a knowledge repository only the information they need at a given time. That’s all good. Let’s assume the best case: students know what their path is. Even in this optimal situation, chunked and overly simplified learning objects may prevent students from seeing the bigger context. Incomplete schemas may cause trainees to have only a partial frame of reference related to a particular topic, which may lead to misunderstanding and inadequate performance.
Learning objects may be the modern bible of instructional design, but they ignore relationships and holism. I read an old Sufi teaching once about the importance of understanding the whole, not just the parts: "You think because you understand one you must understand two, because one and one makes two. But you must also understand and.” Superficiality often occurs because we fail to understand or bring importance to “and”. Being able to see connections between what is typically thought of as separate parts is the sign of the designer who thinks critically, not superficially.
To avoid the traps of cursory e-Learning, start with small steps. For topics that are extremely salient to your business, find three to five areas where it is important that your students gain in-depth knowledge. Inform students that accumulation of real skills and knowledge requires effort. Include enough substance that can keep them engaged for 30 minutes at a time, and show them how those different areas are interconnected. Don’t spoil the idea of depth with words such as “complete” or “everything you need to know.” Substance does not necessarily mean exhaustive information. It just means having enough to feel intellectually satiated. If you want students to return to your content repository, leave them on high notes, with the promise of more substance during their next trip.
In the areas where knowledge is meant to be brief, use words such as “overview” or “general information” or “getting started” or “outline” or “synopsis”; inform users of the type of depth they should expect and where to go if they would like more. Don’t compensate for lack of content by providing links to a lot of additional information. An e-Learning screen that has 15 additional links to more information can feel disheartening. A small amount of references, displayed in an organized and moderate fashion works.
And avoid going to the other extreme. Don't turn something into a deep topic when the content is not that critical. If you had to teach how to insert pictures into Microsoft Word, the instruction is better served with a .pdf document that lists a few steps vs. a full-blown e-Learning course with terminal and enabling objectives, interactions, and summary.
The reality of more
A German philosopher once described boredom as the hot breath of nothingness on your neck. I have a similar image in mind when a student looks at an overwhelming e-Learning screen. I can almost see that hot breath on their necks. Does Figure 3 look familiar in terms of content volume in an e-Learning screen? Have you seen or created screens that look like this?
The typical excuse I hear from designers when asked, “Why the information tsunami?” is, “The client wanted it that way.” I am amazed at how little accountability we assume. Are you noticing that we live in times where individual accountability is eroding? Someone else is always to blame. This is such an easy technique to adopt because if we believe it’s just the environment that needs fixing, then we are absolved of any personal responsibility.
It’s so easy to blame an institution, isn’t it? We speak about e-Learning programs failing, but how often do we speak of designers failing? The problem with this victim mentality is that the more we believe we don't have control over our environment and the substance we provide in e-Learning, the more undisciplined we become. I strongly urge you: do not join the generation of "whatever” designers. Those are people who spin away incompetence by blaming a system.
Take responsibility for information overload and educate clients on what constitutes manageable training. Any modern field you craft training about (finance, health, or technology), rests on petabytes of information (and that’s just for the overviews). The first step towards avoiding information overload, but still providing substance, is to impose some constraints on you and the client. It may sound counterintuitive, but hear me out.
It is tempting and fairly easy to add everything you have access to in an e-Learning program. Users can’t complain they don’t have access to all the information, and the development process is faster. But learning is hindered. To manage excessive information, decide which areas are worthwhile to address and complete these steps:
- Review decisions you've made recently when including content in an e-Learning course (how you collected information, how many people you interviewed, how much documentation you reviewed).
- List the steps you took, along with the amount of time and anxiety that went into each step.
- Reflect on how it felt to do that work, how much the final course benefited from your effort, and how your students received it.
This exercise will help you realize the costs associated with the volume of information you decide to include in your courses, and may prompt you to have some rules in the future. I am certain you currently have rules for different areas in your life (e.g., no more than two glasses of wine at dinner or no more than three bites of chocolate at a time). Imagine creating similar rules for your training design habits, such as talking to no more than three SMEs for a course, or interviewing no more than four end-users, or creating no more than 25 screens per lesson. When you start having such rules, you save time. You can devote this time to other areas where rules don't apply but are substance opportunities, such as how to create a meaningful interaction for a challenging instructional objective. Restricting your options, even though it implies fewer choices, benefits everyone.
I remember a cartoon by Peter Steiner, in which he showed the father fish in a fish bowl telling his son: "You can be anything you want to be — no limits." Even though the fish bowl is so constrictive, the advice was sound because it invited the little fish to explore and grow without being concerned with dangers of other larger environments that may not even have water.
Look at constraints not as restrictive but as liberating – a way to take the time reserved for volume and transfer it to building substance.
