When the first session of the day is the session you are most excited for, you know it’s going to be a good day! “Creating Better e-Learning,” a simple title, yet ultimately it’s my goal for the conference! In this session, the speaker provided three main concepts crucial to serious, effective e-Learning. The first is the 3 “M’s of e-Learning: learners must have motivation, learning must be meaningful, and it must be memorable. So often instructional designers lose sight of these M’s and focus on “C,” or content, building dry, ineffective learning events.
The speaker continued and explained the four components of every learning experience: Context, Challenge, Activity, and Feedback. E-learning often lacks context, and students find it difficult to relate to the material or find it meaningful. It must also include challenges, or events that get their brains working. Activity must also be involved; there’s a big difference between interactions that work the device and interactions that work the brain. And feedback keeps students moving in the right direction. Together, these three components help us achieve the 3 M’s.
Finally, the speaker left us with a graph that explained our desired approach to e-Learning. Instead of the traditional “provide information” approach within every learning outcome, we must engage in different strategies, such as practice, challenge and simulation. The graphic below summarizes this portion of the presentation.
The next session I attended was titled “Context Counts: Increasing Learning Engagement with Meaningful Design.” I believe it was provided by the same design company as the first, as it outlined the same principles of e-Learning (context, challenge, activity, and feedback). However, this speaker dug deeper into the quadrant of context, which should be used to provide meaning purpose, and relevance. They provided us 5 principles of context (and provided amazing eLearning examples of each!):
- Create a specific meaningful environment
- Tell a story
- Insert the learner into the action
- Embrace purpose (appeal to emotions and affect)
- Foster a sense of adventure
The final session I attended for the day was titled “The Challenge of Scale: Designing Learning Experiences for a Growing Global Audience.” The speakers provided this presentation in the context of Google. I loved their concept of a “moonshot,” meaning that within their department, it’s not enough to think incrementally, but you must think big. With this framework, we consider a challenge, and for that challenge we come up with a “moonshot,” or ultimate state we would like to be in, then incrementally work towards it. Throughout the presentation, the speakers presented their challenges they’ve faced when dealing with scaled learning, then a moonshot describing their approach to solving it. Below is an outline:
- Challenge #1: Providing an interactive, social learning experience at scale
Moonshot #1: How might we design classrooms without teachers? - Challenge #2: Onboarding all sales new hires effectively
Moonshot #2: How might we personalize new hire onboarding? - Challenge #3: Every team and organization wants to design their own training programs
Moonshot #3: How might we turn every employee into an instructional designer?