A simple fundamental shift in approach can have a huge impact on the accessibility, inclusiveness, and efficacy of e-learning. That’s my opinion, born of personal experience, and the premise of this article.
The shift that I am proposing is from page (or screen) to space (or environment). If the e-learning designer will stop thinking in terms of a page, and start thinking in terms of a virtual space, then many beneficial things will start to fall into place automagically.
Photo: John Scott under CC
Every now and again something comes along that really excites you. For me that’s usually the discovery of a new connection. It’s like life is a jigsaw puzzle, and you push the pieces around on the table, and then, suddenly, about seven pieces go together all at once. That’s what happened for me this week.
You know, e-learning has its own design protocols: keep it short and to the point; make it work well on mobile devices; hook it into social media; be sure to tell a story; and, always create links to further reading. There are more, depending who you talk to.
But there are higher-level questions I always ask up front:
Almost by default, e-learning creates better access to learning. Assuming the learner has a smartphone (by 2018, New Zealand will have 90% smartphone ownership, Frost & Sullivan) then you are putting the learning materials into the learner’s hand; whether they are sitting in the classroom, riding on the bus, or lying on their bed bored on a wet Sunday.
The added value comes when you can also make it better learning.
The pre-conference theme at this year's uLearn was titled "Permission to Play". As the day unfolded, and during my own session in the afternoon, I noted how apt that title was. We were giving delegates permission to get out of their chairs and have fun. The learning, and for the meta cognitives, the learning about learning, was sneaked in under the radar.
I had smashed four books together. Two were about learning design, and two were about games design. Essentially, we set up a learning environment based on well-established principles of constructivism, and then we overlaid a symbolic games language. These sources came from recognised authors listed at the bottom of this article. Then we created and played a sample game within this framework, and at the end, asked each other how it went. For me, it was a way to get peer feedback about my incubator project, and for the delegates, it was an introduction to how easy it is to make games that can be played out in an environment wider than the classroom and augmented using near zero cost tech. All you need, really, is the light scaffold of ARGEF (Alternate Reality Games in Education Framework) that I have just described, and a free mind.
In an earlier blog post, I wrote about the spectacular failure of my first analog mission. It was a puzzle game in which a wooden puzzle called the Locked Cross was disassembled, and each piece was packed into a luscious and mysterious blue purse with a gold cord for hanging it around a player's neck. Then the purses were hidden around the venue, which served as the game environment. The first mission failed because we were playing in a sprawling venue and relying on Twitter for communication, but there was a no-Tweeting policy in place. Oops. This time, we played the game in one room, and I facilitated by good old-fashioned unmediated voice and gesture. Success! Serious fun was had, and the players cooperated to solve the puzzle. Step up you geeks, you Meta Cognitives!
What were we doing here? We were playing a teeny, tiny pretotype of a cooperative pervasive game — the very type of game I believe is a tight fit with learning. While an air of healthy competition exists at one level, it is only when the players start to cooperate that they will beat the game. Pervasive, because it can be played over an hour, for the duration of a lesson, over a day, a week, or a whole school year. It scales. It can scale from the six players in one room that we had, to thirty players in the school grounds, and potentially beyond to national champs.
Applying radical new thinking to learning design
I have been working on a technique to bring about innovation in learning design. It's not entirely my own idea, and the most powerful influence probably comes from an article written by Seymour Papert in the 1998 June Edition of Game Developer magazine and titled, Does Easy Do It? Children, Games, and Learning.
Anyway, I have been experimenting with the idea of designing learning using the language of game designers. I base the idea on the premise that the language in which you say something shapes, or at least colours, the reality. For example: English people say, "Life is what you make it". For my Mancunian grandparents that meant walking to the cotton mill in the dark, clocking in, clocking out, staying sober, clothing and feeding the family, and once each year taking them on holiday to the seaside. Contrast this with the French expression, "La vie, c'est bricolage." Now this suggests to me that you can craft your life, that it's a creative process, that it's sensitive, and may even be fun.
As a learning designer, I've still got a lot to learn. Not about learning, but about the business of learning.
Back in the day, when teachers wore gowns and boys had short haircuts, the teacher was a superior being who dictated what the lesson would be, and how the outcomes would be judged.
Learning was like school dinners: there it is, if you don't like it, go hungry. Or, in the tougher establishments like the ones I attended: there it is, eat every last bit of it, even if it is disgusting, it's good for you, and you can't leave the dining room until you've made a clean plate. Homework and detention were very much the same thing but went by a different name. But now the student and her parents are the customer and the learning spaces, methods, and materials are our product.
Now we've swung our thinking around and most people subscribe to the environments and principles of modern learning. The expectation in this new learning environment is for continuous pedagogical and technical innovation. Unchanged for hundreds of years, the rate of change of learning is now a power curve. Consequently, we find ourselves in need of some professional development in the area of innovation and business start-up. I say start-up because the change from old school to new school is so radical it's an entirely different world.
The learning designers on the Instructional Design team at CORE Education are totally committed to taking a learner focus, as opposed to a curriculum focus, or worse, a teacher focus. However, old habits die hard. As the oldest member of the team I sometimes need to be reminded to focus on the learner, their motivations, and their needs. That may be a narrow profile that we can target with pinpoint accuracy, more often the learners fit into a broad spectrum of people and then the task is harder.
The principles of Universal Design for Learning and the tenets of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines act as our guide and underpin our work, but really it boils down to giving the learner ownership and offering them choice. Especially with adult learners, but with younger learners too, it's like asking: what do you want to be able to do; what do you need to learn to do that; how do you want to learn it; and how do you want to demonstrate that you can now do that thing you identified at the start? So, what we really design and build these days is not learning, but a framework for learning.
CORE Education is not for profit, but we still need to make money just to survive. To this end, we have established an internal incubator, not unlike Google Labs, but on a more modest scale. Our learning designers are among those who have put forward project ideas. It's burned into our psyche to think: How can my idea improve the quality of our learning designs and implementations? But now we need to think: How can my idea improve the quality of our learning designs and implementations, and be productised, and be monetised?
Productise and monetise are not words that come easily to our lips. We don't like to dirty our hands with the filthy lucre. So it's a challenge, and show me a learning designer who does not rise to a challenge! One popular innovation process that we take to like ducks to water is Design Thinking. We workshop the learning problem. The workshop unfolds in stages: empathise, define, ideate, prototype, and test. At its best Design Thinking is high-energy fun, iterative, productive, and ultimately points to one or more candidate solutions. While you can do it at four tables pushed together in your nearest cafe, ideally it takes place in a specially designed collaborative space with aids like portable whiteboards, projection screens, configurable furniture, and soundproof pods. Either way, that's face-to-face. So, here's the Challenge for our team, because we are a virtual team, and we rarely meet face-to-face. How do we innovate effectively in a virtual incubator?
I don't have the answer, but I'm looking for it. For years, I sat on a domain name, virtualincubator.co.nz, but recently I let it go. I keep having ideas for learning frameworks, most recently, an alternate reality games in education framework (ARGEF). But I continue to stare at the wall, racking my brains for how to productize and monetize it. Such is the life of the budding entrepreneur. What gives me hope are the experiences of most start-ups today: the business model is elusive; there is usually a long freeware phase; the freeware phase often morphs into a freemium model; and, the sun has set on the boxed product. Risk taking and failure are wholly acceptable in this brave new world. Success stories usually reference several preceding failed attempts. Perseverance seems to be the key.
