AMERiCA LEARNiNG MEDiA

How important is the integration of social learning, mobile learning and game-based learning? Premises that instructional designers should consider today. Recommendations to increase students engagement levels.

(@americalearning) Interview with Julie Dirksen (www.usablelearning.com), a consultant and instructional designer with more than 20 years’ experience creating interactive e-learning experiences for clients ranging from Fortune 500 companies to technology startups to grant-funded research initiatives. She loves brains, and games and evidence-based practice. Her MS degree is in Instructional Systems Technology from Indiana University and she’s been an adjunct faculty member at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. She wrote the book ‘Design For How People Learn and she’s happiest whenever she gets to learn something new’.

Julie will participate in the ATD 2015 Science of Learning session with David Rock (Director at NeuroLeadership Institute) and Karl Kapp (Professor at Bloomsburg University).

Which premises should consider an instructional designer to do his/her job effectively today?

Julie Dirksen: I think the biggest challenge facing our field is that a lot of our current work is content delivery. Much of what we do in L&D is to collect and package up content in an easily digestable format for learners, but in the long term that work is going to be replaced by content strategy and intelligent content that resides in content management systems. L&D will still have value, but it will be in areas like performance support, behavior change and social learning environments. Those are the areas Learning & Development should be focusing on.

What are the main keys to improve the user experience in e-learning projects?

The simplest tool is basic user testing. I frequently ask groups of elearning people about how many of them are doing user testing of their courses and digital tools. It's always less than half the people in the room, and often just one or two people. With remote meeting tools, user testing has gotten incredibly easy too! You can just have your user share their screen and watch them go through the course. It's amazing what you learn that way. Besides that, I would say Contextual Inquiry (otherwise known as job shadowing) and prototyping are the other key skills. UX practitioners are also doing some interesting work in visually mapping the users’ experience as well.

What recommendations can you do to increase students’ engagement levels in instances of online learning?

Usually the best tool is to give them an interesting problem to solve or a challenge scenario to respond. Then people have a reason to learn your content -- it's in service of solving the problem. There's a curriculum designer who creates whole math lessons for kids (around single questions like "Should people with bigger feet pay more for shoes?" Basically, as long as there's a immediate question or need for the learner, then it's much easier for them to pay attention.

How important is the integration of social learning, mobile learning and  game-based learning in e-learning projects?

I'm really interested in game-based learning, but not for the obvious reasons. I love good learning games, but I'm also interested in game design because game designers know an incredible amount about developing the skills of their players. I think game designers approach skill development at an incredibly sophisticated level, and there's a lot we could learn from that as instructional designers.

Social learning, and growing good learning communities is going to become a critical skill for instructional designers, because the speed of change is too fast for any single individual to keep up. Frequently, SOPs and Manuals are out of date before we can even finish the proofreading.  There will still be a place for formal documentation, but if people need up-to-the-minute answers on how to get work done, they are going to need access to a strong community.

Could you share some characteristics of the most significant projects developed from your company: Usable Learning?

I'm really interested in the hard questions -- I don't really do a lot of procedural training any more. Instead I'm interested in difficult topics like tacit skills, skills that are hard to acquire or projects where there is a lot of resistance from the users. Those are the really interesting problems to solve. -

May 2015