What's in my head today?

I was chatting to a colleague from the U.K. yesterday about learning in general and, at one point, the benefits of online learning (synchronous and asynchronous). When talking about the effectiveness of elearning, this person kept coming back to the mantra, “Yes, but it has to be engaging and interactive.” As we talked, it dawned on me that, although they used the terms separately, they effectively saw them as one and the same thing. To “engage” someone, an elearning program (and especially a self-paced online piece of content) must provide a swag of opportunities for “interaction.” Interaction was, to them, clicking a button, hovering the cursor over a roll-over area, answering questions - “that kind of thing”, as they concisely summed it up. This interaction, by providing a person with the opportunity to have input, created the level of engagement required for them to persist through to the end of the course - interaction as engagement, effectively.

I won’t bore you with the detail of our conversation, but the point here is not just that interactivity and engagement are different things, and that one does not necessarily lead to the other. A learning professional also needs to recognise how to use them to encourage an environment where learning can occur.

Active vs passive engagement

Think of the best book you’ve ever read. I’m sure it was extremely engaging - I know I’ve lost hours seemingly in the blink of an eye when engrossed in a really good, well-told story. This is passive engagement, where the content captures the attention of the user without any real physical interaction at all.

Active engagement, on the other hand, can be seen in an online course (we’ll stick to single elearning units for this example) where the user needs to manipulate the interface of the unit in order to progress through the content. For example, in an online program designed to help someone learn how to use the calculation functions of MS Excel, the user might view a demonstration and explanation of how to use the SUM() formula, then be presented with an activity where they have to enter it correctly themselves. How well they do then may decide what they view next. Here, the interactivity is relevant to the task at hand, and so can enhance the learning process.

Picture an alternative, though, where a user has to navigate their way through a game interface in order to get to the next piece of information in the learning sequence. Done well, this can work, but I’ve seen a few (well, more than a few, to be honest) where the game and it’s interactive components are completely unrelated to the learning content. Imagine having to explore a strange new planet in an effort to reveal information about double-entry accounting. See the relevance? I certainly didn’t, and although, in this case, the bells and whistles of the game environment were impressive, they were an unnecessary distraction that harmed the learning effort. This is a case where interactivity is added for its own sake, usually because someone involved in the development of the content believes that it serves some grand purpose all its own.

Interactivity alone doesn’t lead to engagement, and even if it did, that would not necessarily lead to learning in any case. So how can we go about setting up an environment (online, offline or anything in between) where adults can best be supported to learn?

Supporting adult learning processes

There are many parts of an environment to consider when we talk about providing people with the best opportunity to learn and grow - things like the value placed on learning, innovation and creativity within an organisation, the organisation’s view of the inherent value of collaboration and communication, and more - many more than we can hope to address here. For now, let’s look at the small picture - how we can set up, say, some content designed to support learning something in particular (like learning the SUM function in Excel).

1. Capturing and maintaining attention

Each second, we’re bombarded by stimuli. Our brains protect us from most of it, and we pay attention to only a select few. Many of the processes that govern select attention are evolutionary (try not to pay attention to running footsteps coming closer from behind on a dark night), but beyond these our more intentional selection cues are generally based on relevance - “What’s in it for me?” (WIIFM).

For learning, our ability to articulate WIIFM to the user is critical. If we hope for some kind of meaningful learning, rather than simple compliance because my manager told me I had to do this course, we need to be very clear about how this opportunity can benefit our participant. For adults, a sound method is to show them that the outcome in some way helps them do something that is important to them (to be better at their job, to better communicate with people who are important to them, any other improvement in some area they value). Hopefully, you’ve already been able to identify your selling points during your planning.

2. Provide users with the opportunity to relate new knowledge to what they already know.

The days of the old “learner as empty vessel”, where an all-knowing expert would fill them with knowledge and the wisdom to use it, are long gone. Your learning audience have a wealth of knowledge they have developed through their lives to this point, and one of your most important jobs as a learning professional is to help them see how this relates to the new content or information you want them to understand. Incorporating new information into existing mental models is a key for people to begin to see how it can be put into practice, and in seeing the ultimate benefit of learning it.

3. Support the transfer of new knowledge to long-term memory.

A couple of posts ago, we looked at Ebbinghaus’ famous Forgetting Curve (go back and take a peek if you need a reminder). New knowledge has a very short half-lfe, even when we agree that it’s important for us to know it. A critical part of supporting any new learning is the how we plan to facilitate putting it into practice. This should begin as soon as possible (preferably immediately after initial exposure) and needs to continue in the following days and weeks until the information is firmly encoded into long-term memory (when it effectively becomes part of a new mental model of whatever knowledge we’re dealing with). There’s no point in designing the world’s greatest course, job aid, support system, if users never put the information into practice.

Sometimes, workers go back to their job and find they are not only not supported in putting new knowledge to work, but they are either punished for attempting to do so, or are rewarded for not doing so. The perceptions and intentions of the managers and supervisors of our audience members must be taken into account when we are designing any learning opportunity (course or otherwise). Take care to ensure they’re identified as stakeholders in the effort, and that you deal with their concerns or feedback as part of the preparation for your program. Ultimately, you’ll find they have as much say in the success of your learning efforts as the quality of your design and implementation.