What does it take to be a good e-learning designer?

With the Serious eLearning Manifesto drawing attention to a current lack of e-learning design skills, as evidenced by more than a little tedious and ineffective content out there, it got me thinking about what it takes to be a good designer. Or rather, it was actually Stephen Walsh at City & Guilds Kineo  who started this train of thought as he sought out my help in tracking down a great Lead Designer.

Stephen felt, as I do, that the best place to start is with someone who already has a strong grounding in one of the component disciplines of e-learning, perhaps a journalist, a web designer or someone similar. Here is what I would look for in someone who would have the potential to be really special and help us to do some 'serious e-learning':

• Someone who is a clear and confident communicator, especially in writing: this skill is particularly important and sadly rare.
• An ability to empathise with their audience: this is a critical 'teaching' quality and sometimes lacking in those who view e-learning as an engineering discipline.
• Someone who is enthusiastic about technology and certainly not afraid of it: this is not the same as being seriously technical.
• They are appreciative of good visual design (you could call this 'good taste'): it's surprising how many people just don't care what anything looks like.
• They are capable of concentrating for prolonged periods when necessary: extroverts who can only function in the company of others will not enjoy sitting down for hours at a time writing a proposal, a design document or a script.
• But not a loner: the e-learning designer is part of a team and must enjoy working with others; they should thrive on making sense of a whole range of contrasting perspectives and opinions.
• They are well organised: working with hundreds of files, multiple formats, languages and versions provides lots of opportunity for error and confusion: anyone who tries to wing it will soon get found out. 

These qualities are more likely to get you there than strong technical IT or graphical skills, although if you're a Leonardo and have these as well then you're flying.

So, is this list realistic or is it pie in the sky. Are there other qualities that matter?

A day is a long time for learners

I know this blog is primarily about learning technologies, but you'd be amazed (or would you?) how often I get called upon to run face-to-face workshops on this subject, whether public courses or on an in-company basis. I must admit I quite enjoy these events and I try my best to justify the fact that we're all together a s group, live and face-to-face.

You definitely would not be surprised to hear that these events are usually measured in whole days, each of which is usually something approximate to normal working hours, say 9 to 5. Now I'm not sure whether these hours are suitable for our everyday work, but that's a convention I'm not going to change. But I would like to challenge whether working hours should be used as the basis for calculating learning hours.

Here are my reasons why classroom courses should have shorter days:

• Regardless of whether you're delivering instructional sessions or genuine workshops, everyone is worn out by mid-afternoon. The only time I've seen learners with lots of energy all day is when they're engaged in an activity that involves 'making stuff'. 
• Too much synchronous dialogue and not enough asynchronous reflection time is unbalanced and unproductive - it's like being at an 8-hour party (OK, perhaps when I was 20, but not now).
• The days when a classroom event was genuinely off-job and learners were protected from interruptions is gone for good. Now they (and I of course) bring their work with them in their pocket. Every single learner will expect to spend at least one or two hours handling emails after the class has ended. Don't make them do that in the evening - finish early enough that they can still get a proper break.

While we're at it, the idea that everyone should be sitting around a table all day is equally unproductive. Why shouldn't people wander around as they please? Why not have couches they can stretch out on? Why not hold discussions in the gardens or while taking a walk? Time for a change I think.

Getting serious about e-learning

Today at 7pm, Michael Allen, Julie Dirksen, Clark Quinn and Will Thalheimer, backed by a raft of other well-respected thinkers and practitioners in the field of workplace learning technologies will be launching the Serious eLearning Manifesto. This campaign is the result of many years of discussions, lamentations and grumblings about the state of e-learning. It's time to do something about the problem before e-learning is discarded as a good idea that, in spite of 30 years of our best efforts, somehow never got to fulfil its potential.

As usual, because this terminology means such different things to different people, I must clarify what sort of e-learning we're talking about here: the problem is with interactive, self-study materials accessed on a computer. We're not talking webinars, virtual classrooms, online video, social learning and all those other good things.

So what is the problem with self-study e-learning? Well, if you go to the awards ceremonies and you read the case studies, you'd think the medium was flourishing. That's because there is some wonderful e-learning being produced which achieves fantastic results, not just in terms of efficiencies but meaningful, engaging learning experiences. From my base here in the UK, I have been especially pleased with what we have been able to produce on this small island, at least now and again.

The problem is that, although there are gems, there is just too much dross. You won't find this out by talking to learning managers or producers, but lower level learning professionals and learners themselves will tell you all too readily. They hate that stuff which makes you feel like you are drinking from a fire hose, with it's endless abstractions, irrelevant graphics and patronisingly simple interactions. And, be honest, you'd think that too, if you had to use it yourself (I bet you don't).

Unfortunately, throwing money at the problem is not enough. You get dross with bling, pigs wearing lipstick. Good e-learning requires great communication skills, empathy with your audience, a really good understanding of how people learn, an appreciation of the opportunities that technology can afford and, above all, an ability to stand up to clients and subject experts who want you to stick with the fire hose.

So, I'm with Michael, Julie, Clark and Will. I share their values:

• Real impact over unexamined effort
• Meaningful learning over knowledge delivery
• Spaced practice over one-time events
• Realistic decisions over knowledge tests
• Emotional engagement over passive content
• Authentic contexts over abstract principles
• Real-world consequences over didactic feedback
• Conceptual models over isolated information
• Learning effectiveness over authoring efficiency
• Individualized challenges over static content

I hope there is a positive reaction to the Serious eLearning Manifesto and that we find ways to cure the malaise. If not, it's only a matter of time before our users will lose patience and look to other media for solutions - and that will be a real opportunity missed. Seriously.

Oppia - just like the good old days

Oppia is an open-source tool from Google which allows anyone to create interactive learning dialogues. Here's Google's explainer:



There's also a useful review at TechCrunch.

I've had a look at several examples of Oppia dialogues and, to be honest, they are still pretty primitive. However, I like the idea.

One reason why I'm so positive is because I'm so old I've seen this all before back in the 1980s. Early authoring tools, such as Plato, Tencore and Microtext, used to specialise in 'answer judging' - parsing students' textual input so that the system could make intelligent responses. It was possible to create convincing, engaging and often highly amusing conversations between the system (actually the teacher who authored the course) and the student.

Modern tools all work on the assumption that students will respond to questions by clicking on an option, which makes the tools easier to develop and the courses easier to design. However, multi-choice questions are a blunt instrument when it comes to interacting with a student and certainly don't give the feel of a tutorial relationship.

I hope developers get behind Oppia and build it into a sophisticated tool for creating learning conversations that can then be embedded just about anywhere like YouTube videos. We then need some great examples to inspire writers and designers to leave behind the multi-choice question and start to really relate to their students.