The article addresses a diverse set of user experience guidelines and standards and consists of some really practical and useful tips which can and ought to be implemented right away.

Here’s a quick summary of the points which I found to be relevant to eLearning and Instructional Design.

• It is better to show people a little bit of information and let them choose if they want more details. (Progressive Disclosure)
• Instead of just describing things, show an example.
• If something is clickable make sure it looks like it is clickable.
• If a task is error-prone, break it up into smaller chunks.
• Don’t make people remember things from one task to another or one page to another.
• People can only remember about 3-4 items at a time. The “7 plus or minus 2″ rule is an urban legend. Research shows the real number is 3-4.
• People need feedback. The computer doesn’t need to tell the human that it is loading the file. The human needs to know what is going on.
• If pages are cluttered people can’t find information. Use grouping to help focus where the eye should look.
• Things that are close together are believed to “go” together.
• The hardest colors to look at together are red and blue. Try to avoid red text on a blue background or vice versa.

The original blog-post has a wealth of information and practical tips that come from years of hands on experience and not just theoretical knowledge. You can check out the original blog-post here.

As I’ve mentioned before , storytelling is integral to human culture and part of the human experience. Storytelling and making are engaging, interactive and social behaviors, we can participate in such by elaborating and refining the characters, narrative, and event time-line as we go along. While we do this, we make sense out of the social, cultural and interpersonal contexts that make up the story. Truly engaging and illustrative storytelling requires the use of metaphor – a form of thinking and the use of language that allows us to experience one thing in terms of the other. Metaphor isn’t just descriptive or flowery use of language, its more than that – it actually allows the generation of new ways to understand things.

The use of stories and metaphor definitely play an active role in human cognition and learning. What’d make a really cool learning tool is a collaborative story-making and telling tool that works in both synchronous and asynchronous modes. What do you think?

Recently I put up a graphic on our website that condenses our philosophy into a simple representation. Take a look, it’s quite self-explanatory. You can find out more about Upside’s learning design here.

However, as Instructional Design beginners, we are so overawed by these theories that we fail to understand the simple principles behind them.

The objective of this blog-post is to demystify one such theory which every beginner Instructional Designer should know – John Keller’s ARCS model of Motivational Design.

What is Motivational Design?
Motivational design refers to the process of arranging resources and procedures to bring about changes in motivation. It can be applied to:

• Improving students’ motivation to learn
• Improving employees’ motivation to work
• The development of specific motivational characteristics in individuals
• Improving peoples’ skills in self-motivation

Motivational design is concerned with how to make instruction appealing without becoming purely entertaining. You can read more about Motivational Design here.

What is the ARCS Model?
The ARCS model is a problem solving approach to designing the motivational aspects of learning environments to stimulate and sustain students’ motivation to learn (Keller, 1983, 1984, 1987).  ARCS is a useful checklist, which draws upon some well established research. It provides a good summary of the issues to be considered when designing learning material. The ARCS model consists of four steps for promoting and sustaining motivation in the learning process:

1. Attention
2. Relevance
3. Confidence
4. Satisfaction

You can read more about the ARCS model here

ARCS Categories

Applying the ARCS model in Instructional Design

1. Attention – Attention can be gained in two ways: (1) Perceptual arousal – uses surprise or uncertainly to gain interest. Uses novel, surprising, incongruous, and uncertain events; or (2) Inquiry arousal – stimulates curiosity by posing challenging questions or problems to be solved.
Methods for grabbing the learners’ attention:

• ✓ Adopt strategies such as games or role-play to get learners involved with the material or subject matter
• ✓ Use a variety of methods to present material
• ✓ Maintain interest by using a small amount of humor ,but not too much to be distracting
• ✓ Use visual stimuli or a story
• ✓ Pose questions or problems for the learners to solve

Example Showcase – EyeWitness

Eyewitness is an Interactive Situation Simulation Software (ISSS). It aims to educate people about one of the most tragic events in Chinese history — The Nanjing Massacre, when, over the course of 6 weeks, over 300,000 civilians were killed by Japanese troops invading the city.

EyeWitness is designed to immerse the player in a virtual Nanjing, 65 years ago, and to allow the player to take the role of a cameraman assigned to the Japanese Invasion. Unlike most “First Person Shooters”, the genre on which EyeWitness is modeled, the player uses no guns or explosives. Instead, the objective is to take photographs, and to act as a witness to a well-known historical event.

2. Relevance – Establish relevance in order to increase a learner’s motivation. To do this, use concrete language and examples with which the learners are familiar.
Some major strategies described by Keller include:

• ✓ Explain purpose of content
• ✓Present goals for learner to select
• ✓Ask learner to select own goals

Example Showcase – Launch It!
‘Launch It!’ is an interactive educational feature created by NASA. It allows learners to choose which Rocket, Mission, Gear and Crew they want to learn about.






3. Confidence –

• ✓Help students understand their likelihood for success. If they feel they cannot meet the objectives or that the cost (time or effort) is too high, their motivation will decrease.
• ✓Help learners estimate the probability of success by presenting performance requirements and evaluation criteria. Ensure the learners are aware of performance requirements and evaluative criteria.
• ✓Allow for small steps of growth during the learning process.
• ✓Provide feedback and support internal attributions for success.
• ✓Learners should feel some degree of control over their learning and assessment. They should believe that their success is a direct result of the amount of effort they have put forth.

Example Showcase – The Crimescene Game

The Crimescene Game teaches interviewing skills in the context of a police investigation. Learners are assigned the task of interviewing a witness to a bank robbery to elicit clues to the identity of the robber. The game provides the learner with choices that affect the course of the game. At any point learners can try to solve the mystery.

Most feedback is provided by events in the game because the events reveal whether the learner’s previous action was appropriate.

After identifying a suspect as the bank robber, learners receive a score based on the efficiency with which they solved the mystery as well as a critique that recaps their actions.

4. Satisfaction -

• ✓Learning must be rewarding or satisfying in some way.
• ✓Make the learner feel as though the skill is useful or beneficial by providing opportunities to use newly acquired knowledge in a real setting.
• ✓Provide feedback and reinforcement. When learners appreciate the results, they will be motivated to learn. Satisfaction is based upon motivation, which can be intrinsic or extrinsic.
• ✓Do not patronize the learner by over-rewarding easy tasks.

Example Showcase – Free Rice

Freerice is the world’s only online game that allows you to raise rice for the hungry, while you learn. For every correct answer you choose, 10 grains of rice are donated to the World Food Programme to help in their fight against hunger worldwide.

Feel free to drop a comment and let me know what you think.

Many of my friends and ex-colleagues usually dislike training. They dread entering the training room, the way they would dread entering a torture chamber. In most cases, Training is reduced to an exercise in futility and the prevailing emotion is “Let’s just get this over with!”

There are numerous reasons as to why this happens. In my previous job as an Insurance Sales trainer, I realized that one of the main reasons for people to hate training is that they think that it is simply not worth their time. Amidst today’s hectic schedules and tight deadlines, who has the time for training anyway?

Another very important reason is that most people have been through some very boring training, be it instructor-led or computer based. They have had to sit for long hours at a computer or in a training room and have been subjected to tons of information being dished out at them. No wonder they gradually start hating it.

Microlearning – Learning, not Training

I was reading a blog-post by Amit Garg on the Upside Learning blog which led me to agree that Microlearning is the future of workplace learning. This blog post was published way back in 2009, so I’ll include a quick summary.

Microlearning is best used as a part of a blended learning solution and is suitable for:

• Activating knowledge before a classroom (or virtual classroom or even and eLearning session);

• Summarizing (after one of those sessions – delivered soon after the session);

• Recall (or reactivating knowledge – probably a week or two after the session. This ensures key concepts are revisited and helps in transferring the new knowledge to long term memory – especially for learners who may not get a chance to apply new knowledge immediately after the sessions);

• Providing application opportunities (through pop quizzes or learning games on mobile);

• Just-in-time search support by letting employees search in company’s knowledge databases (wikis, blogs, forums) using their mobiles.

By creating microlearning courses compatible with mobile devices, we can bring about a paradigm shift in the way we learn at the workplace.

Afterall, learning ain’t training.

The Challenge

Learning about Instructional Design basics was easier said than done. I found it very difficult to pick-up concepts from our team training sessions, and I needed to learn at my own pace.

The Lifesavers

I decided to try my luck online. In my quest for awareness, I came across quite a few resources that helped me learn about the basic concepts of Instructional Design and ELearning. I have listed some of them below for my fellow rookie Instructional Designers.

• www.elearninglearning.com – eLearning Learning is a collection of blog posts and articles all around eLearning.  It uses the Browse My Stuff technology to create this topic hub.  Topic Hubs are sites that aggregate content from a variety of sources, organizes that content around keywords in the topic domain.
• www.jarche.com – Harold Jarche’s blog is a great place to get introduced to ‘Informal Learning’.
• www.c4lpt.co.uk/blog/ – Jane Hart provides news, resources, ideas and new thinking about social media for working and learning, from the Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies (C4LPT). She also aggregates postings from her other blogs: Jane’s Pick of the Day and Social Media for Working and Learning.
• www.kaplaneduneering.com/kappnotes – Karl Kapp’s blog discusses issues concerning learning, e-learning and transferring knowledge from retiring baby boomers to incoming gamers. The goal is to share information and knowledge to create a better understanding of learning design.
• www.elearningtech.blogspot.com – Tony Karrer’s blog is a great place to learn about emerging trends in eLearning technology.

A Wonderful New World

The internet is a treasure trove of learning resources. Keep exploring, and you never know what you’ll stumble upon.

I spent most of my free time over the last few weeks reading Edward de Bono’s book, Six Thinking Hats, and thinking about how this thinking process can be applied to Instructional Design. Before I get to that, I’d like to give a brief overview of what the Six Thinking Hats are all about.

Six Thinking Hats is a flexible and easy-to-use thinking process that leads to amazing results with innovative thinking, improved communication, and reduced meeting time. The Six Thinking Hats method encourages Parallel Thinking, where everyone explores all sides of an issue at the same time.

In parallel thinking, confrontation is replaced by a cooperative exploration of the subject. It encourages the sharing of information, reduces argument, and allows talkers to think and thinkers to talk. Using a Six Thinking Hats sequence ensures that all aspects of an issue are considered.

The Hats

Each of the Six Thinking Hats represents a different direction or type of thinking, which is identified by a color:

Instructional Design and the Six Thinking Hats

Applying The Process

The Challenge - One of our clients wanted to convert some of their existing content into an eLearning course. Their input content was a dry 80 page PDF document.

Wearing the White Hat – Our project team first went through all the content and cross referenced it with the course outline that the client had in mind. We realized that a sizeable chunk of the information that would be required for storyboarding – was missing. We raised a flag right away and asked the client for additional information.

Wearing the Black Hat – We then did a thorough risk assessment considering project timelines, budgets, scope of development and documented our observations. That helped us realize that the approach that we had in mind was not feasible.

Wearing the Red Hat – Since most of the content consisted of ‘best practices’, we felt that a game-based learning approach would be ideal.

Wearing the Green Hat – We then bounced off our ideas for the game approach, found potential flaws in our approach, went back to the drawing board and came back with alternatives.

Wearing the Yellow Hat – We finalized a blended approach consisting of content presentation along with interactivities using ‘gamey’ elements. This allowed the learners to apply the principles that they learned, without compromising on project constraints.

Wearing the Blue Hat – We then created a project plan, allocating the most suitable resources, setting project milestones and clearly assigning centers of responsibility.

I certainly believe that this process can provide us with excellent results, especially in situations when we are working in groups.

While the post addresses issues pertaining to game design, I realized that a lot of what Dave says applies to Learning Design and Interaction Design as well. Here’s a brief summary of what I learnt.

• As learning designers, we often fail to engage the learners due to some very basic assumptions that we make about the audience versus the actual thought processes of that audience.
• We tend to take it for granted that a cursor appearing and disappearing is sufficient to let the learner know when they can or should interact with the content.
• Sometimes, learners want us to tell them what they should try.
• Most learners will investigate on-screen objects if they can think of a specific reason to do so, ignoring anything that is not obviously relevant to the problem at hand. The fact that clickable objects on the screen attempt to portray themselves as interesting by displaying text whenever you mouse over them probably won’t work as a lure.
• It is not uncommon in learning design to assume that the player will eventually explore all of the clickable items in an environment. Clearly, this is not a safe assumption. It is also not uncommon to attach vital information to these explorations. We do this at our own risk.

All the reasons above make it all the more important for us to communicate very clearly to the learner about what is it that the learner can do within the learning environment, and also what he should do. The clearer our instructions, the better learning experience we create. After all, we want the learners who take our courses to feel comfortable about exploring the learning environment that we present them with.

You may also want to read another blog-post on The Design Of Interaction.

Most importantly, “Assume nothing. Nothing!”

Mr. Kipling was spot on when he said that. For thousands of years, the human race has relied on stories to pass on facts, concepts, information and wisdom from one generation to the next. You can see examples of this everywhere — from cave paintings, Aesop’s fables, Jataka Tales to the works of fifth-century Chinese philosophers. They have all made use of parables/stories and their pictorial representations to pass on whatever they had learnt.

Many people retain some of their work-related knowledge as stories. They use stories to understand what is happening around them. Remember this – Stories are not always works of fiction.

Many technicians and mechanics remember ‘stories’ of previous repairs as they diagnose and repair malfunctioning machinery. Doctors recall and discuss case studies and their experience with other patients to get better at diagnosis and treatment.

How does it work?

1. When you listen to a story, both sides of the brain are working. The left brain is processing the words while the right brain is actively filling in the gaps.

2. The information in the story is captured as the brain searches for a deeper meaning.

3. The brain processes the information unconsciously and develops relationships and patterns.

4. The story is then reformulated to have personal relevance. At this stage, it can cause an unconscious change in behavior or even result in an “A-ha, that explains it” reaction.

Researchers working with brain scans suggest that people build vivid mental simulations of narrative situations. You can read more about it here.

Stories are about sharing knowledge, not simply about entertainment. It is their ability to share ideas that make them so critical. They can be one of the most powerful learning tools available, yet we seem to have missed out on that opportunity. Storytelling can help us transform almost every aspect of the business environment, from strategic planning to driving change in the organization.

Every good trainer or teacher knows the value of putting key messages in a context that learners can understand. We need to apply the technique of framing a message in an understandable and concrete context for learners. A familiar context gives meaning to the story and allows conclusions to be drawn for real-life application. With proper questions, learners can imagine how the lessons learned from the stories can be applied on a day-to-day basis.

In my previous job as an Insurance Sales Trainer, the toughest challenge that I faced was to convince my trainees about the importance of the ethical selling of life insurance. Over the course of time I realized that, telling my trainees about real-life stories of people whose lives had been impacted by unethical selling was far more effective than sermonizing or talking about company policies.

Scenario-based courses and Simulation-based learning can help the learners apply knowledge in the context of the story and consequently to real life situations at hand. Stories are an important part of our past and will be an important part of our future. They will help us generate ideas, share them and learn from those ideas.

Perhaps it’s time for us to take stories a little more seriously. After all, it’s easier to recall stories than facts!

The school has been founded by the Institute of Play, a New York City-based nonprofit organization that researches the connections between games and learning, and New Visions for Public Schools , a New York City-based educational reform organization that works to improve academics in the city.

Quest to Learn facilitates learning by encouraging its students to collaborate, solve problems and innovate by using various kinds of games. However, Quest is not a school whose curriculum is made up of the play of commercial videogames, but rather a school that uses the underlying design principles of games to create learning experiences.

Students also regularly use digital media like blogs, Skype and a custom-made social networking site to create projects and share their ideas with their classmates.

Children and adults all around the world now use digital media as part of their everyday interactions, be it in school, at home or at the workplace — perhaps their learning should too.

“Thanks to Aneesh Bhat, a member of my instructional design team for the heads-up on Quest to Learn.”

That’s a pertinent question that we need to ask ourselves. We take immense pride in meeting project deadlines and delivering courses within budgets; however, somewhere in our quest to showcase our potential, we may have forgotten about the core objective — Delivering Knowledge.

So, what differentiates knowledge from information?

A learner gains knowledge when he/she uses the provided information to actually do things and receives feedback about what he/she has done. The courses that we create provide the learners with tons of information. However, it is not knowledge until the learner does something with that information. Apply it, criticize it, organize it, or manipulate it if you must, but do something with that information.

Let’s reflect on what we actually do when we learn something. There are numerous models of the learning process that have been created over the years; let’s look at a fairly simple model developed by Hughes, Toohey and Hatherley (Hughes, C., Toohey, S., & Hatherley, S. 1992, “Developing learning-centred trainers and tutors”, Studies in Continuing Education, vol. 14, no. 1, pp. 14-27.)

If we really want the people who take our courses to learn, we need to provide them with a platform where they can make mistakes and then provide them with meaningful feedback.

That brings me back to my original question. Are we really delivering knowledge or just dishing out information?

Think about it.