Rapid Innovative Design Notes

Editor's Notes

• #3: Hi, I’m Joe Fournier. Thanks for spending this part of your morning with me as we explore one of the most fascinating topics I can think of. Innovative design. We’re going to cover some concepts that will hopefully help you quickly come up with innovation. In this session we’re not going to dive right into the tools, although we’ll touch on a couple of them. Instead, we’re going to hopefully spark your thinking in ways you can apply across all of the tools.But first, let’s talk about me. Orange is my favorite color. Always has been. When I was a child, I had orange hair. Now, well, let’s just say that I don’t have to pay full price for haircuts. I’ve been in the learning field for almost 25 years now, since I was 9. I’ve worked with some of the top training organizations in the world and learned a lot from a lot of people, so I really enjoy sharing what I know through webinars and training sessions.I’m a little ADD, and have been known to get distracted by a bird flying by my window…so I appreciate interesting content designs; they help keep me focused.I’m the president and founder of Rapid e-Learning, LLC, and while we’ve done a ton of learning design and development, we’re focused on helping other people learn to become e-learning experts. Part of our mission is to help non-training professions like subject matter experts become competent collaborators with the training function. The idea is that there’s more work out there than the training function can possibly address on it’s own. We need them, and they need us, and besides, most training is already created by people who aren’t part of the training organization. When SMEs and others become competent collaborators, training people get freed up to focus on quality and tough problems.But I assume that all of you are either part of the training organization or you’re at least responsible for some training, so before we really get started, I want you all to write down one topic for which you’re either responsible to design the training, or a topic for which you’re interested in developing some training. That’s you’re mental target. As we go through this session, I want you to occasionally think back on that topic and see how you can apply what we’re discussing to that. And to the extent possible, I’d encourage you to do that for the other sessions as well. Learning is always deeper when you can apply it to something real. That’s your something real.
• #4: In this session, we’ll explore some rapid design strategies that can help you create more interesting and engaging learning designs. We’re going to look at six key aspects of learning design—from a simplified perspective. By applying these principles, hopefully, you’ll be able to RID your designs of boredom and create more engaging experiences for your learners.
• #5: Aside from having orange hair when I was a kid, I used to love these candy bars called “Chunky’s”. Over the years, I realized that they deserved that name, because if you ate enough of these things, you would become what might kindly be called “chunky.”But that’s not what we’re interested in. It’s just a cheap memory device I threw in here to get your attention. We want to know about chunks in the context of memory.The question in that context is: What is a chunk anyway?
• #6: Since the concept of a “chunk” of information was introduced by George A Miller in his 1956 paper "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information" to describe the information processing capacity of a person’s short-term memory, the term has intrigued people producing learning. The idea was that a “chunk” represented a complete idea or concept, but even Miller himself admitted that "we are not very definite about what constitutes a chunk of information.“Miller and others have theorized that by manipulating the grouping of information into different sized chunks, it should be possible to improve overall short-term memory capacity. Let’s look at simple example.Suppose I give you a nine-digit number to memorize, but you only get to look at it quickly.
• #7: Like just about long enough to read it.Most of you will rely on the strategy of repetition to memorize the number, stating each digit you can recall in sequence. Since it’s 9 digits, it’s easy for some of those digits to get crowded out by new information, and you might recall only five digits; you might recall all nine, or in some cases, you might recall only two or three .The point is, that unless there’s a pattern, you find yourself trying to recall nine discreet pieces of information. In this case, digits.But what if I group the numbers and give you a way to think of them in sets, as in
• #8: A bunch of crazy eights. So now, five and three are a group; then there’s an eight; another eight; Two fours, and a one-six-one combo. Each group is revealed to add up to the number eight, and the text is color coded to make those groupings apparent.So now, we’ve leveraged our ability to group the numbers to drop the number of chunks from nine to five .
• #9: This approach works with telephone numbers. Instead of remembering 10 discreet digits, you only have to remember three numbers to recall a phone number. You still have to memorize, but there are fewer chunks.Pnuemonics allow you to transform numbers even further:
• #10: This is actually my Google Voice number, which forwards to whichever phone I send it to. You still have to remember the eight, and who you want to call, but as you can see, we’ve reduced the number of chunks to two from three, and simplified the recall through relevant association.Another point is that this was by design. From the moment I realized I could choose my own Google Voice number, I set out to find something memorable. This is where creativity comes into play in learning design, because in order to reduce the number of chunks, you have to come up with meaningful associations, groupings, or other memory devices.
• #11: Another way chunking helps is through the organization of content in a course. By grouping content into complete ideas and concepts, you let the learner complete the movement of content from short-term memory into working memory, where it can undergo integration with what the learner already knows. While we won’t go into the details here, it appears that learners are able to transform a set of items, for example, into a single chunk, and then move on to work with and process other items, which also can be integrated into working memory.The net effect and conclusion is that logical grouping of chunks aids memory. But before you can logically group chunks, you need to understand what they are.
• #12: Let’s think of a traditional approach to creating content. Regardless of the steps you follow to get there, let’s presume that you wind up with a lesson outline that includes the goal of the lesson and four objectives to help you reach the goal.
• #13: You might also think of these as a terminal objective and five supporting objectives. If you’re not familiar with that terminology, a terminal objective is the thing you want learners to be able to do when they finish the lesson. In the corporate training world, this usually maps to job performance, but it doesn’t necessarily.The supporting objectives are essentially subtasks that must be performed in order to accomplish the main task.Usually, you can break each supporting objective into additional subtasks
• #15: So, maybe your outline looks something like this.Given the assumption that each lower-level SO represents a task-level item, they would all be “chunks.”But remember the trick of grouping chunks to create logical groups?
• #16: Well, that’s exactly what we do with our chunks…and these groupings come together to create a logical segment; a short, sharp shot, as Pink Floyd might call it.I call these groupings learning spots, and this approach to learning is something I call “spot learning,” but others will have other names for it. I heard Tatiana Chapira of Allen Interactions call this “pill-sized learning.”Whatever you call it, the goal is to make the learning units smaller and more brain-digestible.You do this at the planning stage, before you start building content. And once you’ve identified all of the groupings, you can consider things such as whether these should be independent or if they should be interdependent.
• #17: Independent groupings make sense when the learner is going to choose what to learn, or if you’re going to want to reuse the learning in other contexts.
• #18: Dependent groupings make sense when you’re dealing with content that isn’t likely to get re-used and also when you want to require the learner to go through all the content in sequence.You might do this when you’re scaffolding knowledge and skills; in other words, building upon earlier learning. You might also do this for regulatory courses, such as sexual harassment training, or training for CPE credentialing where the CPE requirements require a more rigid approach to learning.
• #19: Generally, the groupings upon which you would base your learning spots are the second level in your outline, or the first layer of supporting objectives. This is the level at which there is a discrete task that is supported by a few subtasks. At this level, the learner is capable of learning a handful of things and then conceptualizing them as a single chunk.
• #20: Of course, the example we’ve been using here is skills-based by nature. In my experience, it’s a little easier to do the grouping for skills-based learning than for pure content learning, which is typically semantic in nature. I tell you something; you recall what I told you; you apply what I’ve told you; you build connections between this new information and some other information or insights.For the learner, semantic learning requires learners to memorize, often outside the context of experience. But it doesn’t have to be that way. For semantic learning, you compress the number of chunks by creating relevance and flattening the recall curve.
• #21: Consider this definition of ADDIE. If you were to try to memorize this definition, you would have to recall each of the words in order.However, you can learn the definition by relating to key points to things you already know.
• #22: You might, for example, already know that ADDIE is the basis of many instructional design models, and not specifically a model itself…so you can infer that it is a generic process.You can count the phases if you memorize them; and they’re more easily recalled when associated with the acronym: A-D-D-I-E.
• #23: Typically, you have your presentation of content, which should be engaging enough to get the learner’s attention and allow them to focus on the learning…
• #24: And, when appropriate, you have activities to reinforce the learning or performance.By the way, this is not actually a very good example, unless I want learners to recall this visual representation of the ADDIE framework. The ADDIE framework isn’t actually a linear process, so this activity focuses, probably, on the wrong idea.Either way, whether we’re talking about procedural knowledge, semantic learning, or some other type of learning, creating engaging learning content takes creativity.
• #25: And that means right-brain thinking.Although brain functions are typically distributed throughout the brain, we typically refer to the analytical <thinking> as left-brain thinking, and the creative processes as right-brain thinking.It’s a handy way to conceptualize these processes, but it creates some common misperceptions.
• #26: One of the most damaging misconceptions this thinking has spurred is the concept that only people who are dominantly right-brained are creative. That’s simply not true. We’re all creative, and it takes both sides of our brains to be creative.Rather, the way I like to conceptualize these two halves of the brain are ordered, and random. This, I think, better describes the creative process in each side of the brain.In this context, I’m personally, more dominantly right-brained, simply because I have a knack for coming up with random ideas and thoughts, but they’re not really random. In truth, I think my brain just makes a lot of connections that some other peoples’ brains don’t make. Part of this is semantic acuity. I associate words and sounds with other words and sounds, and I make connections there. Part of it is that I can make up a fit between concepts by filling in the blanks, so presented with two ideas, either by circumstances, or in my own brain, I can make up stuff to fill in the space between these two ideas. And while this ability to “make stuff up” is considered a right-brain activity, as we look at the characteristics of right-brain and left-brain thinking, part of what I’m doing is clearly a left brain activity. The process of filling the gap between two spaces requires analysis, doesn’t it?In our line of work, most people don’t have a major challenge with the left-brain activities. These are things we do every day as we design learning; things like mapping out tasks, identifying what’s really important in learning, and chunking content into discrete parts.On the right side of the screen, though, are some activities that don’t come naturally to all instructional designers. So let’s explore some ideas to spark that right-brain thinking.
• #27: If random thoughts consistently evade you, you always can turn to the random thought generator at http://randomthoughts.ws.I’ll warn you on the front end that the tool is heavily saturated with ads, but you will get a number of random thoughts, such as:“Why is this duck looking at me cross?”“Know thyself”and “At the end of the day, like, it’s tomorrow.”But if you’re trying to spark the creative juices, you might rather start off with random nouns from the random noun generator at http://www.desiquintans.com/noungenerator.php. Depending upon the instructional challenge, you can use these random nouns to come up with ideas for themes, characters, or storylines. Given two or three nouns, you can use your analytical prowess to come up with a plausible connection or two among the nouns, so that, for example, the nouns “egg,” “watchmaker,” and “page” can be leveraged for a leadership lesson by crafting a story about a watchmaker who set out to teach an egg to read, or a watchmaker who found a page of instructions describing how to build an eggshell watch. But this approach of stitching a handful of words together for a plausible outcome may result in a silly scenario, design, or story. If you are an absolutely visual person, you also might try the inkblot generator at http://math.berkeley.edu/~hthall/ink.blots/
• #28: So, what do you see when you look at this inkblot? This one speaks to me, because it’s what I get when I enter my own name into the random inkblot generator. Groovy, huh?The point I’m trying to make is that there really are plenty of ways to get random ideas to emerge. We do it all of the time.And in my opinion, purely random thought is not the goal anyway. Instead, what we’re really seeking is relative thought. Instead of looking at an inkblot, I’m more apt to be looking at something like this…
• #29: …and trying to come up with an instructional approach.So, let’s think together; if these are our high-level objectives, what are we going to do to convey the learning in a meaningful way that the learner can apply?Go ahead and type your ideas in chat right now. If our terminal objective is for the learner to be able to record narration for an e-learning course, what kind of instructional approaches might we use for helping the learner acquire these skills?Feel free to type more than one idea, even if it’s a take-off or add-on to one of the other ideas you see streaming by in chat.
• #30: Brainstorming is one of the best approaches to sparking right-brained creativity. In its most simple form, brainstorming is no more and no less than just asking people to share their ideas. And ideas are infectious. That is, one idea may spark another and the idea you wind up using may or may not be related to the idea you started out with.Most of us have heard of the common rules of brainstorming, which tell you things like “all ideas make the list” and “no criticizing,” and these are good rules, but how do you catalyze new ideas. The thing that helps people generates new ideas more than anything is challenge.Time is a good challenge. If I tell you that you have only 60 seconds to come up with all of your ideas, you may generate ideas more quickly than if I don’t give you a time limit.Autonomy: The ability to set your own direction in brainstorming, including coming up with crazy ideas opens people up to more creative thinking. Also, the “crazy” ideas are often the very ideas that lead to fresh, original, innovative solutions.Safety: Knowing that you have free rein and that no idea will be criticized does in fact generate new ideas. Independence: Actually, working alone, people tend to generate more, and better ideas than they do working in a group. The most likely explanation for this is that in a group setting, people are paying attention to others ideas and are not generating their own ideas, or they’re forgetting their ideas while waiting for their turn to speak. One way to approach this is to focus initially on independent ideation followed by group discussion and expansion of ideas. While group brainstorming may not generate the most ideas, it is important to flesh them out and to inject diversity of thought, so if you have the opportunity to brainstorm with a group, don’t discount it offhand.
• #31: Right-brained thinking is associated with “box twisting” or getting out of the normal box. It’s kind of like looking through colored lenses, or better yet, a kaleidoscope, or viewing things from a different angle.To think creatively, do something different than you usually do, or look at the things from a different angle.Set yourself in a different viewing angle, for example, that of performer, the customer, a child, or your boss. Ask yourself how they might see the problem.Are there parallel or similar roles that could be leveraged to create an overarching theme or story? Construction or architecture, movies, theatre, community, school or college, the library, hospital, healthcare, are just some ideas. You’re looking for lenses and things you can compare your topic to.
• #32: People have spent their entire professional careers studying creativity and trying to come up with the magic formula to help anyone become creative at any time. I’m not going to pretend to have the answers, but I will encourage you to share your best tips with each other. You may have just the tip that someone else needs.
• #33: Another right-brained approach is to use characters to drive your design. An approach I often leverage is to start with the assets. So, for example, if I’m thinking of a dialog among three characters, I look images that will fit with the kinds of things I’m trying to do.For many projects, I’ll just use the Microsoft clipart library.
• #34: The challenge, of course, is to get enough poses of the same characters to create a story or scenario. Even if you have a simple design idea, you usually need a few different poses.One trick to get to that grouping is to use the Edit Keywords in PowerPoint to see how the clip art author described the images; chances are, they described other images in the set similarly. This one is referred to as “Screen Beans,” and a search on that phrase brings up a bunch of different examples that I can then break apart and use with other clip art images in various poses to create a story.
• #35: But if you’ve got a complex scenario, or if you use a lot of characters, there are a number of sources for image libraries that may be helpful. These characters are from eLearning Brothers. For about a hundred bucks a person you can buy 75 different poses of a business person to use in your projects. That gives you enough relevant poses to do pretty much what you need with dialog, but even with 75 poses, I tend to start with the assets and then consider the dialog, or I work with both of them concurrently.There also are some smaller sets that available from Adobe’s Captivate Exchange.
• #36: The idea is that you start with your assets. Look at what you have and build a story around those. If you need poses you don’t have, consider alternatives.The learners’ mind has an uncanny ability to fill in the gaps.An ear alone can effectively signify attentive listening.A handshake indicates agreement.Or a fist alone indicates either triumph, determination, or anger.These images, by the way, are from the Adobe Captivate Exchange, samples posted by Matt Lobel, of NarratorFiles.com, another potential source of images
• #37: Launch MedSemExample.swfthrough interface.
• #39: So, characters are one way to drive vicarious experience into your courses. By creating a story and using a character, you can start interacting with the learner, which concerns our business manager Ed.
• #40: <click to show Ed’s dialog><click to show Candy’s dialog>
• #41: <poll>Is using characters for scenarios a good idea?YesNo</poll>
• #45: You can come up with scenarios in a number of ways. You might start by looking at the terminal performance and focusing on that the learner needs to do. In that case, the scenario may test their ability to apply higher-order thinking skills. For example, you might present all the facts of a problem and ask them to solve the problem.You also might use a scenario to present the content either in dialog or by telling a story about certain circumstances, as in the example shown here. When the learner selects the answer, you can branch them to a page showing the consequences of that answer.
• #46: Thereare a number of ways to approach scenario-based learning, as I’m sure you’ll see in some of the other sessions. Ultimately, simulations are used to put the learners into situations that come close to real situations, or at least lead to the kinds of thinking and actions that will be required of learners in real situations. Simulations are also used to put learners into situations that are not real in order to expand their thinking. For example, before the first deep water oil well was drilled, it is plausible that a scenario-based learning experience could have been delivered that described a worse-case situation and prompted learners to explore response options. And if that didn’t happen, maybe it should have.Because ultimately, scenario-based learning supports vicarious experience and leads to deeper, more meaningful learning.
• #47: The word autonomy means “self-governing” or “self-directed.” It is the capacity to make informed, uncoerced decisions. Malcolm Knowles wrote the book “The Adult Learner: a neglected species” and since that book hit the shelves in 1973, there’s been wide agreement that adult learners are naturally self-directed learners and that they function best in the learning context when afforded the opportunity to direct their own learning.In fact, the field of psychology tells us that autonomy in general is one of the six key needs humans must have in order to thrive (the others are: respect, recognition, belonging, personal growth, and meaning).The evidence further points to autonomy as having a direct effect on engagement. The more the learner is comfortable with their ability to control and influence the learning, the more likely they appear to engage in the learning.Listed here are some characteristics of autonomous learners. These characteristics are indicative of engagement in the learning process and both reflect and reinforce a commitment to learning. As learning designers, we can enable autonomy simply by giving learners choices. Looking at this list, what are some of the specific things we can do to enable autonomy in learning? I’ll start it out in chat with the obvious answer “Let learners choose the path through the learning.” What else? Feel free to be general or specific.
• #49: So, how do you develop opportunities for autonomous learning? One of the first things you need to consider is to get off the grid. Autonomy means learner choice, so you can’t control it. What you can do is influence, without coercing the learner in terms of how they’re going to pursue the learning. You can suggest, for example, that they use a particular tool or set of tools to search for information, or that they consider the implications or the outcomes.This idea of getting off the grid makes some designers very uncomfortable…not to mention the organizations they support. But it’s important to remember that higher order learning requires the kind of synthesis that usually happens off the grid.
• #50: So, to be certain that your autonomous designs are working, you need to validate learning is occurring. You can do this in a number of ways, including requiring success as a re-entry to structured learning. This may mean that when the learner returns they’re asked to validate that they’ve completed the autonomous assignment, or it may mean that they must answer a specific question to validate successful learning.These types of assessments are not autonomous. While the learner was sent on a self-directed quest and returned to the course, presumably successful, this type of assessment strategy is more traditional than not.
• #51: Autonomous Assessments ask learners to check their understanding and progress, but typically, they leave out accountability…except to self.So, you might think of a reflection question as an autonomous assessment.If you’re using questions as a learning device, which is often the whole point of autonomous assessments, you want to remember that direct questions get answered directly, and then the learner is mentally ready to move on.An autonomous assessment doesn’t have to be direct, though. It can be triggered by implication.A statement like this one can spark a form of assessment. When you read this statement, doesn’t it make you try to connect the dots. Do you ask yourself “why does this guy think these trends are important?”Do you translate “ubiquitous knowledge search?”
• #52: In Chat, go ahead and share your ideas for ways to provide learners with autonomous learning opportunities from your e-learning. Also, you might take this time to think about the topic you identified at the beginning of this session.
• #53: Rapid e-learning as a concept surfaced somewhere around 2004, but we were practicing rapid e-learning principles long before that. Things like:Designing content and assets for reuseUsing templates as a baseline for learning and interaction designsAbbreviated design and development approaches
• #54: One of the early concepts to speed development was this idea of reusing content and assets. In addition to organizing image and asset libraries, we started playing with this idea of content objects…with varying degrees of success.The idea is that each content object represents a complete unit of instruction, and that it plugs into different learning activities. For structured learning, the challenge was always to maintain continuity among interesting content. It was difficult to construct learning objects that would fit into a course that had a consistent theme, for example. So, a lot of the learning content constructed under this paradigm resulted in rather dull courses, or some disparity in terms of flow as the learners went through the course. There were exceptions, though, and a few design teams managed to create some very engaging courses leveraging the learning object paradigm.But just like we discussed the challenge of defining a chunk, we encountered the same type of challenge with learning objects. How big should a learning object be? Let’s see what each of you think…and by the way, there’s no wrong answer:<poll>In terms of time, how big should a learning object be?3-5 minutes5-10 minutes10-20 minutes20+ minutesThe answer to the question depends upon who you asked and that learning challenges that they face, as well as the environment in which they work.
• #55: Using templates as a baseline for learning and interaction designs. In fact, a number of products emerged in the rapid e-learning marketplace around this idea of templatized content, but they took it a step further and moved from simply templated presentation to templated interaction.I showed you images from e-Learning Brothers earlier, but they also produce some simple interaction templates that you can modify for your courses. Also, Raptivity, which will be the focus of one of our later sessions does this.
• #56: Here’s a basic content interaction from Raptivity. I’m sure you’ll see more of these in the Raptivity session. The trick with any of these is being familiar with the interaction types so that you can determine when to use them. Raptivity actually has a built-in tool that will help you choose the interaction based on your learning framework and goals, but you’ll still really need to become familiar with the interaction types, regardless of the toolset or resources you use.
• #57: Here’s an example from Articulate Engage. The basic idea of reusable interactions is that you either edit the object or a template to fit your content needs. The interactivity is built in.
• #58: These interactive solutions provide an important element for learners; while many of them are geared toward assessment of some sort, they enhance engagement through visual appeal and reward.
• #59: Note how the simple feedback mechanisms indicate success to learners.
• #60: Basic feedback is a reward, and learners respond to reward. The greatest reward, though, is learning success.
• #61: The human brain is a fascinating organism…and that may be the understatement of my life.The brain has it’s own internal reward system that is a highly sophisticated electro-chemically charged system. When the brain experiences something it wants us to continue doing, it rewards its pleasure centers through the release of dopamine. Dopamine does two important things for learning: it makes us feel good, and it increases our memory ability for the event that caused the dopamine release.And dopamine, interestingly enough, is released at that “aha moment,” when a learner “gets” a new concept or acquires a new skill. So, on the one hand, the learning makes us feel good; and on the other hand, the brain makes it easier for us to recall what we have learned.Now while this isn’t proven, I infer that the release of dopamine probably cause our brain to consolidate learning chunks in to a single chunk. This idea is this…we learn a few interesting things, and we’ve got the chunk meter running…1, 2, 3, 4, 5, until we approach our capacity; then we seek to consolidate learning. As we succeed in consolidating learning, the brain rewards us with a quick dopamine fix; and we take those five objects, conceptually, and fold them into one.This, again, is Joe’s concept of what’s happening, not necessarily pure scientific fact.
• #62: So, to create simple games, all you really need are a few elements:An objective,A challenge, A rewardAnd some basic rules.You can use characters, and your learners will likely associate with them.
• #63: The Path game is a challenge where learners travel down a path to an end goal.In PowerPoint, you can create this game with a series of slide movements by creating buttons that move to new slides and then populating those slides with animations.So, for this game, I’ve simply marked the correct answer with a movement to another slide.
• #64: When they get to the incorrect slide, nothing happens except the visual feedback.
• #65: But when they get to the correct slide, they get visual feedback because I applied motion through the Custom Animation feature.
• #66: So, because I had two choices, I now need two more sets, so we can continue the game. This is set of slides the learner gets to if they got the answer correct in first instance. The other set still has six balls.All of this is done with PowerPoint, but when I run this out through Articulate, the links still work.Simple enough to construct, but the more possibilities you have, the more slides you have to build.If you only have a few choices, this approach works really well and it’s pretty quick to construct just by using the slide duplicate and the copy and paste commands. But if you have a lot of choices, use one of the rapid e-learning tools, or leverage a pre-built game. There are a number of them available on the Adobe Captivate Exchange site, as well as in Raptivity and Articulate Studio.
• #72: Learning is hard work, and hard work deserves a reward.Dopamine release is the reward for learning, but we only get it if we reach that “aha” moment…so be sure to take everything you learn here and in the other sessions, and create really engaging, interesting learning so that the people you’re training will get their rewards.Thank you for spending your morning with me. I hope you enjoy the rest of the sessions. I’m going to put my contact information up. Please don’t hesitate to reach out to me via any of these channels. I’m always open to talking training and happy to help wherever I can.