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Dirksen, Julie. Design For How People Learn (Voices That Matter). New Riders, . Kindle file.

1. Old information and procedures get in the way of new information and procedures.
2. If people are going to change the way they do things, then they are going to stumble over those old habits.
3. Communication issues can sometimes masquerade as learning issues.

Who Are Your Learners?
1. The more you can consider your learners’ attitudes and motivations, the better you can tailor the learning experience.
2. Think about why they are there, what they want to get out of the experience, what they don’t want, and what they like (which may be different from what they want).
3. Ultimately, we are all the “What can I get from this?” learner. We want to know why a learning experience is useful or interesting to us.
4. You may have some standard activities or challenges that everyone needs to do, but you will get a lot better mileage if learners are working on problems that are meaningful to them.
5. Scour their situation for intrinsic motivators.
6. Try to tie it back to relevant, real- world tasks.
7. Avoiding extensive theory and background.
8. Stick with specific examples and challenges that directly relate to real- life scenarios.
9. Use interesting (to them) hypothetical problems to awaken their intrinsic motivation.
10. puzzle- solving or winning.
11. Your job is to make your learners feel smart and, even more important, they should feel capable.
12. It’s fine to challenge your learners— this isn’t about making it easy for them.
13. you don’t want to have your learners feel shame about what they do and don’t know.
14. A more beginner audience needs a lot of structure and guidance, and a more advanced audience needs more autonomy and resources that they can choose to access as needed.
15. Unfortunately, a single learning design is frequently expected to accommodate many different levels of learners.
16. slowly helping them build their mental model before adding in content) are pretty much guaranteed to make the expert absolutely nuts.
17. don’t make people sit through classroom training they don’t need — optional or take- home.
18. Consider pull vs. push.
19. You can generally trust experts to get the information they need if you make sure that it’s easily available and applicable.
20. Use walkthroughs. Have the learner go through the whole process with a simplified case.
21. I was seriously ashamed of myself— I had been subconsciously assuming that my experience was the norm.
22. What learning experiences were effective for you? How do you like to learn?
23. Consider your learner’s context for the material.
24. They were able to understand and retain the information specifically because they already had a mental picture
25. you have a picture in your mind, and your learners may not.
26. Use a high- level organizer, road map, categories, overview, basic principles, acronym or a mnemonic device.
27. Ask them how they would present it if they had to teach it to others.
28. All learners, both novice and expert, filter their new learning through their past experience.
29. the scientific evidence of effective use of learning styles is pretty weak
30. learning styles are pretty popular, but haven’t proven to be very effective.
31. Why are you learning this? How will learning this help you (how are they motivated)?
32. job shadowing, and in the user experience community it’s often referred to as contextual inquiry,
33. You want your learning to create contextual triggers that will allow learners to remember things later.
34. Try stuff out with your learners along the way.
35. Create prototypes, do user testing, have pilot tests.
36. You think you are being clear, but you know how it’s supposed to work.
37. Don’t just hand your learners information, but instead help them construct and organize their framework for that information.

What’S The Goal?
1. Before you start designing a learning experience, you need to know what problem you are trying to solve.
2. identify the problem:
3. “What bad thing will happen if they don’t know this?”
4. “What are they actually going to do with this information?”• “How will you know if they are doing it right?”• “What does it look like if they get it wrong?”• “So why is it important they know that? Uh huh, and why is that important?” (repeat as needed)
5. After you’ve defined the problem, you need to define your goal( s).
6. The student will be able to create
7. when you are creating learning objectives, ask yourself:• Is this something the learner would actually do in the real world?• Can I tell when they’ve done it?
8. There may be times when it’s not feasible to have real- world tasks.
9. learning objectives are more for you as the designer than they are for the learner.

How Do We Remember?
1. Memory is the foundation of learning,
2. example, if you use the same basic format for each chapter of a technical manual, your learners get used to the format and don’t have to expend mental energy repeatedly orienting themselves to the format; instead, they can focus on the content of the chapters.
3. Variation good, inconsistency bad
4. Variation can be a useful tool for maintaining attention, but it should be used in a deliberate and meaningful way.
5. primacy and recency effects, which suggest we are more likely to remember something at the beginning of a sequence or list (primacy) and also more likely to remember the most recent things, as at the end of a list (recency).
6. Chunking can be based on things that are similar, sequential, or items that are in your long- term memory.
7. The more ways you have to find a piece of information, the easier it is to retrieve,
8. Whenever lives are at stake, training almost always involves in- context learning.
9. The difference between knowing and doing can be a huge gap when the context of encoding and the context of retrieval are significantly different.
10. heightened circumstances can cause us to rely less on our intellectual knowledge and more on our automatic responses.
11. Use role- playing.
12. Create pressure.
13. You want the information encoding to align with assessment and use.
14. Recognizing the right answer from a set of options almost always involves less effort than recalling the answer.
15. Recognition activities are easier to grade— computers can do it for us. Recall activities usually require a person to evaluate.
16. Job aids change the task from “recall the steps” to “follow these steps,” reducing the need to rely on memory.
17. the practice needs to match the eventual use.
18. memories are processed in different ways, and that people are not consciously aware of all their memories.
19. Declarative memory is mostly the stuff you know you know, and can state explicitly, like facts, principles, or ideas.
20. Episodic memory refers specifically to our memory for things that have happened to us in our lives, but even when a particular story didn’t happen to us personally, we seem to have a singular ability to remember stories.
21. There are a few reasons why stories seem to stick in our memories:
    We have a framework for stories.
    There’s a beginning, middle, and end. There’s the setup, the introduction of the players, and the environment.
    Stories are sequential.
    Stories have characters.
22. Procedural memory is our memory for how to do things.
    step- by- step process.
23. Automated procedural memory is related to the idea of muscle memory which, despite the name, is still really a brain function. Muscle memory refers to your procedural memory for certain tasks where you have learned something through practice so well that you don’t have to put any noticeable conscious effort toward the task.
24. It’s frequently difficult to talk to others about these kinds of tasks, because you didn’t learn them in a verbal, explicit way.
25. vivid memory for emotionally charged events is call flashbulb memory.
26. One theory about why time seems to slow in an emergency is that you just remember so much more from those harrowing seconds than you do from the same amount of time in a normal circumstance. (Stetson )
27. emotion seems to have an impact on how much we remember.
28. it’s important for a learning designer to figure out how to have reinforcement without resorting to monotonous repetition.
29. multiple exposures
30. habituation tells us that people also tune out repetitive, unchanging things.
31. The biggest problem with memorization through repetition is that it frequently puts the information on just one shelf:
32. When you learn something by using it in context, you put it on multiple shelves, and learn how to use that information in multiple contexts.

.How Do You Get Their Attention?
1. Asking your learners to rely entirely on willpower and concentration is like asking the rider to drag the elephant uphill.
2. Whenever somebody starts telling you a story, there’s an implied puzzle that you start trying to solve. What’s the point of the story? Is it supposed to be funny? Is it going to be surprising?
3. The elephant likes puzzles
4. our responsibility is to make the learner feel capable.
5. Show them the before and after. Your learner should be able to see how they will be different if they master the skills.
6. Creating a sense of urgency is one of the biggest benefits you can get from using scenarios or stories in learning design.
7. You can’t capture the elephant’s attention by just asserting that a topic is important.
8. A compelling story— Use classic storytelling elements to create a compelling scenario. Have a protagonist who is trying to accomplish a goal. Have an antagonist who is preventing the protagonist from accomplishing that goal. Have obstacles along the way that the protagonist must overcome.
9. SEE and FEEL the importance.
10. Give people time constraints or resource constraints and set them at a problem.
11. Things that are going to happen in the future, regardless of how dire they are, are less compelling to the elephant than things that are happening RIGHT NOW.
12. Interesting dilemmas— Give your learners interesting choices to make.
13. Better options include choices between:– A good option and a very good option– Two bad options– Good, better, and best options
14. Two options that are each a mixture of good and bad, but in different ways.
15. • Consequences, not feedback— This goes back to the notion of show, don’t tell, but use actual consequences rather than feedback when people make choices in a learning scenario.
16. Facts are frequently meaningless to us until we see them in some kind of broader context that allows us to begin to make judgments or sense about them.
17. We believe that there are “objective facts,” but all valuable information has meaning only in a bigger context, and part of that context is emotional.
    Surprise
    Unexpected Rewards
    Basically, people have a much stronger response to unexpected rewards than they do to ones they know are coming.
    variable reward schedule,
    Unexpectedness is also part of our enjoyment of other entertainments, like sports or comedy.
    Dissonance
    Another form of surprise happens when we bump into something that doesn’t match our view of the world.
18. curiosity as “arising when attention becomes focused on a gap in one’s knowledge. Such information gaps produce the feeling of deprivation labeled curiosity. The curious individual is motivated to obtain the missing information to reduce or eliminate the feeling of deprivation.”
    1. Ask interesting questions.
    2. Be mysterious.
    3. Leave stuff out.
    4. Be less helpful. We do our learners a disservice by making the problem too complete.
    5. Framing and clarifying the problem becomes part of the learning experience.
    6. learners can see that other learners are engaged with the material, or if a group of students know that previous classes performed well, they are more likely to engage and perform better themselves.
    7. Competition -- There’s no question that competition can be a useful way to get the elephant’s attention, but there are a number of problems with it as a learning strategy:
    8. Not everyone is competitive.
    9. Competition teaches learners how to win.
    10. Competition as motivation isn’t a good long- term strategy.
    11. There are a number of visual or tactile ways to attract the elephant’s attention, including visual aids, humor, and rewards.
19. Creating the visual association between the trigger and the action is an important part of encouraging the memory and the behavior.
20. If what you are teaching has a hands- on component, then the learning should, too.
21. At the most basic level, the idea is that if you reward a behavior, you increase the likelihood that behavior will occur, and if you punish a behavior, you decrease the likelihood that behavior will occur.
22. Extrinisic rewards can demotivate people.
23. Once you start paying people, it becomes work, and can have a negative effect on performance and motivation.
24. Rewards can be great motivators if they are intrinsic.
25. There’s one catch to designing for intrinsic rewards: You don’t get to decide what’s intrinsic to the learner.

Design For Knowledge
1. give learners an inventory of the content, and have them rate their level of comfort with each topic.
2. If something isn’t signficant, important, or unusual, why would we want to remember it?
3. Creating opportunities to interact with the material can make a lesson even more engaging for your motivated learners.
4. You need to give your readers stuff to do. Give them a way to be an active participant, and by allowing them to draw conclusions based on little clues that you leave, you engage them in the story and they become part of it.
5. if people have to make the connections themselves, it’s likely they’ll remember more later.
6. If someone is new to baking, stick with one way to do things.
7. matching an example with a non- or counter- example.
8. If it’s too easy to follow the individual directions, then the learner won’t learn.
9. Examples Followed By Concepts
10. There’s a lot of benefit to letting learners drive themselves whenever possible.
11. validate / diffuse / assist

Design for Skills
1. Keeping people on that edge between challenge and ability is one of the fundamental principles of flow. Ideally, learning practice would allow learners a balance of challenge and satisfaction:
2. In order for practice to be effective, learners need to be able to tell how they are doing.
3. The incorrect skill can become ingrained, and then correcting that skill later will require unlearning behaviors that have become automatic.
4. Increasing the frequency of feedback is great, but if you do that, you also want to have various ways to provide feedback.
5. character reactions, scores, and visual cues.
6. you don’t get lectured about poor business choices— you lose money,
7. encourage learners to report back on their experiences.
8. Have virtual critique sessions
9. You want the course to help develop skills, not just deliver information.
10. cycles of extended practice, tests of mastery of that practice, then a new challenge, and then new extended practice.

Design For Motivation
1. we don’t always learn the right thing when we learn from experience,
2. If you want someone to use something, they need to believe that it’s actually useful, and that it won’t be a major pain in the ass to use.
3. Sometimes it’s not useful for the learner, but it is useful for the organization, or it’s a compliance necessity. In those cases, it can be a good idea to acknowledge it and make sure the learner understands why the change is being made—
4. If it is useful, how will the learner know that?
5. Show Don’t Tell becomes particularly important here.
6. positive endorsements from trusted peers.
7. Is the new behavior easy to use?
8. Everett Rogers’ classic book Diffusion of Innovations.
9. The degree to which an innovation is perceived as being better than the idea it supersedes
10. The degree to which an innovation is perceived to be consistent with the existing values, past experiences,
11. The degree to which an innovation is perceived as difficult to use
12. The degree to which the results of an innovation are visible to others
13. The opportunity to experiment with the innovation on a limited basis
14. Everett’s attributes (relative advantage, compatibility, complexity, observability and trialability),
15. Self- efficacy can be described as someone’s belief in their own ability to succeed.
16. In addition to feeling capable, it helps if learners also feel that the necessary task or skill is within their control.
17. have your learners prepare themselves to employ the knowledge or skill by actively figuring out how they will use it to address their own specific challenges or tasks—
18. People have a strong reluctance to discard something that they’ve already invested in.
19. Make progress visible.
20. Change is a process, not an event.

Design For Environment
1. Changing the design of the environment can make knowledge or skills gaps disappear.
2. Improving the environment is about clearing out as much of the stuff that learners don’t really need to carry around in their heads, and instead letting them focus on the things that only they are able to do.
3. The closer you can get the knowledge to the place the user is going to use it, the more likely they’ll actually do so.
4. a few other types of job aids:
   1. Decision trees
   2. Reference information
   3. Augmented reality
   4. “layer” over the real world,
   5. Supply Caching -- cache some of that information and provide it later
5. A common, easy job aid in the training world is a card that has the keyboard shortcuts on it -- this information is placed as close to the actual behavior as possible—
6. if you are trying to quit smoking, you need more than the goal (“ I’m going to stop smoking”)— you need the implementation intention of how to actually do it. The specificity is crucial to success.
7. This handy guide is built right into the countertop.
8. soda machine -- The employee can put in the cup and just press a single button for small, medium, or large. the behavior has been embedded in the machine, rather than in the learner.
9. shift the burden from a recall problem to a recognition one.
10. environment is a very powerful regulator of behavior, and if people aren’t doing the right thing, it’s important to look at ways to improve the environment.
11. What’s everything else we could do (besides training) that will allow learners to succeed?
12. “what could we do beforehand to make people more ready?” and “what could we do afterwards to reinforce?”

Conclusion
1. We can’t make anybody learn, but we can make much better learning environments for them.

Amir Shevat

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Part I. How the Mind Works (Chapter 1-4)

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Companies leverage two basic pulleys of human behavior to increase the likelihood of an action occurring: the ease of performing an action and the psychological motivation to do

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Author thinks you need to learn HTML/CSS/ and some basic database functions.

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CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION

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First stage [list everything you already know about the problem that you are trying to solve.]

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Chapter 1 – What is instructional design?

Instructional Design as a Discipline:

Instructional Design is that branch of knowledge concerned with research and theory about instructional strategies and the process for developing and implementing those strategies.

Instructional Design as a Science:

Instructional design is the science of creating detailed specifications for the development, implementation, evaluation, and maintenance of situations that facilitate the learning of both large and small units of subject matter at all levels of complexity.

Instructional Design as Reality:

Instructional design can start at any point in the design process. Often a glimmer of an idea is developed to give the core of an instruction situation. By the time the entire process is done the designer looks back and she or he checks to see that all parts of the "science" have been taken into account. Then the entire process is written up as if it occurred in a systematic fashion.

Models:

• Merrill's First Principle of Instruction
• Dick & Carey System's Approach Model
• Kemp Model
• Merrill's Pebble-in-the-Pond Model
• Successive Approximation Model
• ADDIE
• Postmodern
  • Society is past the point where there are a limited number of authorities available to a classroom student. The modern classroom had two authoritative sources: the teacher and the textbook. This situation no longer exists because students have access to many other sources, including the internet, television, and, in some cases, friends and family who are more educated than the teacher is (Hlynka, 1995).
  • No longer can there be an agreed-upon, single type of well-educated individual. Determining a curriculum and including all important artistic and scientific works that would be appropriate for all individuals is impossible.
  • The currently popular cognitive paradigm—constructivism—does not recognize or advocate a traditional, linear educational sequence. With information available from a variety of sources outside the classroom, learners will inevitably deviate from a linear instructional model by observing and reacting to other examples, non-examples, and divergent examples of the concepts they study in school.
  • No single, objective truth exists. Truth is a construct that is based on an individual's personal interpretation or on the consensus of a group of people for their purposes. The truth—also known as "the right answer"—may change depending on the context and the individuals involved.

Chapter 2 – Understanding how people think and learn

Cognition is the mental process of knowing, including aspects such as awareness, perception, reasoning, and judgment. In essence, cognition includes all of the brain's mental input and output. Cognition encompasses basic activities, from using language and math functions during a trip to the hardware store, to making complex decisions such as selecting between two job offers, to writing a creative story, to being able to understand another person's perspective.

• Memory - Memory is a set of active processes that encode information. Memory places information into "packages" or "packets," making information easier to recall and allowing it to be associated with related items already in memory. Memory also involves storing information. Part of this process is the constant rearranging of what has been stored in order for that new knowledge to be integrated with what has already been stored. Additionally, it allows for locating and retrieving information as it is needed.
• Mental Power - is the basic energy that supports mental activity. It refers to how much mental work can be performed during a specific period of time. 
• Executive abilities - Executive abilities include such higher-order thinking skills as being able to anticipate future needs and planning accordingly, the ability to set priorities, and being able to self-correct and regulate actions
• Metacognition - is the ability to control one's own cognitive processes. It is often referred to as the practice of "thinking about thinking." In using metacognition, an individual takes an introspective look at the thought process that she has gone through. It allows her to critically consider how she arrived at certain ideas, concepts, and thoughts.

Instructional designers tend to look at thinking from a pragmatic point of view, asking themselves, What do we need to know about thinking and the studies done on thinking that will help develop efficient and effective instructional interventions? It is no surprise that the majority of instructional designers are considered to be eclectic—borrowing from different perspectives and using what works for a given situation to produce desired results. Instructional designers tend to take a systems theory approach when it comes to looking at thinking (and learning) by exploring it from several different perspectives, rather than focusing narrowly on one aspect of what thinking is or is not.

In examining the definition of learning we propose, two very different types of changes can take place when learning occurs. The first is a change in behavior; the other is a change in mental representations or associations.

One of the most useful ways that the learning domains can be used is to consider them when learning objectives are being developed for instruction. Learning objectives are descriptions of what an individual should know or be able to do once he or she has completed an instructional intervention. In addition to the development of learning objectives, the domains can be useful in planning assessments

Chapter 3 – Needs Analysis

...instructional design is carried out for a purpose: to bring about a particular change. Typically, the change is a need to improve performance of some kind. Attitudes, knowledge, and skills are all areas in which improvement might be needed. Therefore, the need to improve performance can take on different forms, such as increasing a student's knowledge of a particular content area, increasing the productivity of a factory worker, or increasing consumer ease in using a new product.

Need's Analysis Questions:

• What is the change being requested (including who is being asked to change and what is currently taking place)?
• Who is requesting this change?
• Where will this change need to take place?
• Is instruction the most appropriate means for bringing about the desired change?

Models for performance/needs analysis (Human Performance Technology)

• Mager & Pipe's Performance Analysis
• Morrison, Ross, & Kemp Need's Assessment
• Rossett Needs Assessment
  • Determine purpose on either performance problems, new stuff, and mandates
  • Identify who has the information that is needed and where it is located
  • Gather various types of data using the proper research tool
  • Conduct needs assessment by analyzing the data and determine if additional information is necessary
  • Use findings for decision making
• Discrepancy-Based Needs Assessment Model

Needs Analysis Procedure

• Determining the desired change
  • What problem exists or what change is being requested?
  • Who is being asked to change?
  • What is currently taking place in this environment with this individual or individuals?
• The request for desired change
  • After developing a clear understanding of the existing problem or the change being requested, it is important to understand who is asking for the change. This is an extremely important element to understand because it will help you determine the type of intervention that may need to take place, the emotional and political climate of the situation, and the level of support that is present and that will most likely be needed for a change to take place.
  • Once you have the appropriate data that allows you to understand the entire context—the desired change, who is requesting the change, who is being asked to change, and where the change needs to take place—it is time to determine if instruction is the most appropriate intervention. You will need to answer the following question: Is instruction the most appropriate means for solving the problem or bringing about the desired change?

Chapter 4 – Task Analysis

What task analysis solves for the ID:

• It defines the content required to solve the performance problem or alleviate a performance need. This step is crucial because most designers work with unfamiliar content.
• Because the process forces the subject matter expert (SME) to work through each individual step, subtle steps are more easily identified.
• During this process, the designer has the opportunity to view the content from the learner's perspective. Using this perspective, the designer can often gain insight into appropriate teaching strategies.

What a task analysis identifies:

1. the goals and objectives of learning;
2. the operational components of jobs, skills, learning goals, or objectives—that is, it describes what task performers do, how they perform a task or apply a skill, and how they think before, during, and after learning;
3. what knowledge states (declarative, structural, and procedural knowledge) characterize a job or task;
4. which tasks, skills, or goals should be taught—that is, how to select learning outcomes that are appropriate for instructional development;
5. which tasks are most important—which have priority for a commitment of training resources;
6. the sequence in which tasks are performed and should be learned and taught;
7. how to select or design instructional activities, strategies, and techniques to foster learning;
8. how to select appropriate media and learning environments;
9. how to construct performance assessments and evaluation.

According to Jonassen et al. (1999), task analysis is a "process of analyzing and articulating the kind of learning that you expect the learners to know how to perform" (p. 3). They assert that the task analysis process consists of five discrete functions: (1) inventorying tasks; (2) describing tasks; (3) selecting tasks; (4) sequencing tasks and task components; and (5) analyzing tasks and content level. These functions consist of the following activities:

• Inventorying tasks: identifying tasks that need to be developed for instruction.
• Describing tasks: the process of elaborating the tasks identified in the inventory.
• Selecting tasks: prioritizing tasks and choosing those that are more feasible and appropriate if there is a large quantity of tasks.

• Sequencing tasks and task components: defining the sequence in which instruction should occur in order to successfully facilitate learning.

• Analyzing tasks and content level: describing the type of cognitive behavior, physical performance, or affective response required by the tasks

A task analysis should help you answer the following questions, regardless of the approach taken:

1. What is the task that individuals need to be able to accomplish or perform?
2. What are the key components of this task (that is, the skills and knowledge an individual needs in order to successfully complete or perform the task)?
3. What is the sequence in which a task is accomplished or performed and should be learned and taught?
4. How can you determine whether an individual is able to complete the task?

Chapter 5 – Analyzing Learners

There is no single, correct method of learner analysis that every instructional designer uses. However, the goal of every type of learner analysis is the same: to understand and interpret learner characteristics in a way that helps in the design of effective instruction.

While it is important to carefully consider the cultural and psychological aspects of the target audience, the numbers of variables involved in determining in advance precisely what will be "culturally appropriate" or "psychologically optimal" instruction are beyond our current control. The most thorough learner analysis is still a matter of taking a "best guess" at how the instruction should be designed to work efficiently and effectively for the target audience.

Motivation is a complicated subject that deserves continued study; here, we will discuss only its basic elements. Motivation can be essentially divided into two classes: intrinsic and extrinsic. If learners enjoy the instruction for its own sake and take pleasure in the activity, the motivation is said to be intrinsic. If learners participate in the instruction because they anticipate some reward beyond the instruction itself (for example, they are paid or completing the instruction allows them to do something they truly enjoy), the motivation is said to be extrinsic

Robert F. Mager is an author of instructional design texts that have been popular for decades. His approach to learner analysis is a good place to start. Mager (1988) recommends the following procedure:

1. Begin with the realization that a learner analysis is a working document that will not be published or seen by anyone other than yourself and perhaps other members of the instructional design team. It is not necessary to organize the content into specific categories.
2. Write down everything you think you know about the target audience. If it seems challenging to get started, begin with trigger questions, such as: Why are they taking this course? Do they want to be in this course? What training and experience do they have in relation to the subject matter?
3. Describe the range of characteristics whenever possible.

Mager also recommends analyzing and articulating the following about the target audience:

1. Age range.
2. Sex distribution.
3. Nature and range of educational background.
4. Reason(s) for attending the course.
5. Attitude(s) about course attendance.
6. Biases, prejudices, and beliefs.
7. Typical hobbies and other spare time activities.
8. Interests in life other than hobbies.
9. Need-gratifiers (rewards that would work).
10. Physical characteristics.
11. Reading ability.
12. Terminology or topics to be avoided.
13. Organizational membership.
14. Specific prerequisite and entry-level skills already learned.

Other Learner needs models:

• Smaldino, Lowther, and Russell
  • General characteristics
  • Specific entry competencies
  • Learning styles
• Dick, Carey, and Carey
  • Entry skills (similar to Smaldino et al.'s (2012) entry competencies).
  • Prior knowledge of topic area.
  • Attitudes toward content and potential delivery system.
  • Academic motivation.
  • Educational and ability levels.
  • General learning preferences.
  • Attitudes toward the training organization.
  • Group characteristics.
• Smith and Ragan
  • Stable similarities
  • Stable differences
  • Changing similarities
  • Changing differences

Chapter 6 – Instructional Goal and Objectives

Instructional goals and instructional objectives are different from each other. An instructional goal can be a general statement about the intention of the instruction…However, an instructional objective is usually much more specific about how and to what degree the instruction will affect the learners.

Models for objectives:

• Mager
  • Action: Identify the action the learner will take when he or she has achieved the objective
  • Condition: Describe the relevant conditions under which the learner will act
  • Criterion: Specify how well the learner must perform the action
• Dick et al – ABDCs of well-stated objectives
  • Audience: Identify and describe the learners
  • Behavior: Describe what is expected of the learner after receiving instruction
  • Conditions: Describe the setting and circumstances in which the learners' performance will occur
  • Degree: Explain the standard for acceptable performance
• Smaldino et al
  • Cognitive
  • Affective
  • Psychomotor
  • Interpersonal
• Gagne's Hierarchy of Intellectual Skills

Chapter 7 – Organizing Instruction

The eminent instructional designer and scholar Robert Gagne (1916–2002) theorized that there are nine events of instruction (1985):

1. Gain the learners' attention.
2. Inform learners of the objective.
3. Stimulate recall of prior learning.
4. Present the stimulus.
5. Provide guidance for the learners.
6. Elicit learner performance.
7. Provide feedback.
8. Assess learner performance.
9. Enhance retention and transfer (varied practice and reviews).

Distance education has a number of appealing features for education and training. Students do not have to travel to a classroom and, in asynchronous situations, they may participate at a time that works best for them. However, there is an interesting opposition of forces at work with distance education.

• Providing immediate feedback to both students and the instructor(s): In instructional settings such as a traditional classroom or distance education, the students and instructors communicate with each other in a way that allows them to adjust their activities according to feedback received. For example, the teacher in a traditional classroom may notice his or her students are looking drowsy and decide it is time for a short break, or the instructor of an online course may receive a number of messages asking for clarification of a particular concept and decide that he or she needs to offer a mini-lesson covering that concept in greater detail.

• Providing immediate feedback to the student alone: Education conducted through programmed instruction does not have an instructor making adjustments to the experience based on learner feedback. The instruction may be programmed to respond to a student's responses, but all possible responses are determined in advance of the student's participation.

Understanding the organization of instruction helps an instructional designer with the following tasks:

• Choosing activities that support remediation and extension by using scope and sequence organization to identify appropriate content for students who need either extra support or an extra challenge.
• Choosing activities that support the needs of a variety of learning styles, selecting a variety of different types of enactive, iconic, and symbolic experiences, and using Dale's Cone as an organizer.
• Selecting activities most appropriate to each instructional event in order to create an effective series of activities for a given lesson or instructional intervention.
• Making available job aids that support the student and allow him or her to focus on the concepts to be learned instead of the steps involved in completing a specific task.
• Choosing activities that are best suited to the delivery method or choosing the best delivery method to meet an individual's or an organization's needs.

Chapter 8 - Learning Environments & Instructional Activities

4 Types of learning environments

• Learner-centered environments: Focus on the attitudes, skills, knowledge, and beliefs that students bring to an instructional setting. In this environment, the instructor uses information about how the learners relate to the content as well as the learners' preconceived ideas or misconceptions to create situations where the learners generate new (and hopefully improved) perceptions of the content.
• Knowledge-centered environments: Focus on the information and activities that help learners develop an understanding of disciplines. In this environment, learners are exposed to well-organized knowledge in order to facilitate planning and strategic thinking.

• Assessment-centered environments: Focus on providing opportunities for feedback and revision. In this environment, testing and critique are used to provide learners with opportunities to rethink and revise their ideas.

• Community-centered environments: Focus on people learning from one another and contributing to the larger societies of people who share common interests and/or goals. In this environment, the connections between the instructional setting and world outside that setting are used to give the content greater meaning and place it in a more global context.

A directed learning environment is one in which the instructional designer has determined specific learning objectives and prescribes structured activities in which participants demonstrate that they have learned by meeting the objectives. Most people are familiar with directed learning environments through personal experience.

An open-ended learning environment differs from a directed learning environment in that the learning goals and/or the method of pursuing those goals are determined in one of three ways:

1.     presenting the learner with a complex problem along with a specific task to complete;

2.     presenting the learner with a complex problem to explore (with no specific task to complete);

3.     helping the learner articulate a personalized problem to be solved or explored.

any open-ended learning environment should include four components to support the learners:

1.     Enabling contexts: articulated perspectives that influence how the approaches are planned and resources are interpreted.

2.     Resources: a range of sources (print, electronic, human) that provide information about the problem.

3.     Tools: the means for engaging and manipulating resources and ideas.

4.     Scaffolding: scaffolding processes support individual learning efforts.

Chapter 9 – Evaluating Learner Achievement

Determining if a learner has reached a high level of success is accomplished through learner evaluation. Learner evaluation helps determine the level of performance or achievement that an individual has attained as a result of instruction. This is established by the extent to which a learner is able to meet instructional goals and objectives.

Most learner evaluations you will help develop will be criterion-referenced (also referred to as minimum-competency or mastery). A learner evaluation that is criterion-referenced indicates that a learner is being judged based on his or her level of competence. Competence is determined by specific criteria, such as being able to answer a specified number of questions or the ability to demonstrate certain skills in a specific amount of time

Millman and Greene (1993) state that answers to several questions need to be obtained before a test is developed. The combination of these answers will help an instructional designer create a test development plan. This plan will help guide the development and eventual implementation of the test:

 What is the purpose of the test?

 Who will be taking the test?

 How much time will be used for testing?

 How will the test be administered?

 What will the test cover?

 What sources of content will be used?

 What are the dimensions of the content?

 Which types of item formats are to be used?

 How many items are available in the item pool, and how many need to be constructed?

 What is the appropriate difficulty and taxonomy level for the items?

 How will the items be grouped and sequenced?

 How will the items/test be scored?

 How will the test be evaluated?

 Will an item analysis be performed?

 Will the reliability and measurement error of the test be assessed?

Guidelines for essay items:

• They should be carefully focused.
• Several shorter questions—rather than fewer longer questions—tend to provide a better assessment of a learner.
• Do not give students a choice of questions to answer; have all learners answer the same questions.
• Inform learners of how the questions will be graded; if spelling is important, inform the learners. Understanding how a question will be graded will help learners focus on what is important. This can be accomplished by providing students with a rubric prior to completing the essay questions.
• The length of time needed to answer essay questions can vary greatly among learners.
• Learners need preparation for taking essay questions.
• Before grading, review the major points that should or could be discussed in each answer.
• When grading, read through and grade the same question for each learner before moving on to the next question.
• When grading, it is always desirable to have more than one grader.
• When grading, read through the entire answer once and then check it over for factual information.

Guidelines for evaluating a skill:

• When evaluating a skill, both process and the product can be evaluated. Determine whether both or just one will be evaluated; generally, both are evaluated. The product is the end result or outcome of the skill (for example, a filled vial of blood correctly labeled and stored).

• When evaluating the process, the following elements can be included: following a proper series of steps, using tools or instruments properly, or completing the skill in a certain timeframe.

Chapter 10 – Determining the Success of the Instructional Design Product and Process

Formative evaluation is used throughout the instructional design process to gather data that can be used to provide feedback on how the process is going. It is especially useful during the early stages of the instructional design process. The feedback allows an instructional designer to make improvements to the instruction before it is completely developed.

Design reviews are conducted after various phases of the instructional design process, such as the needs analysis, task analysis, goals and objective analysis, and learner analysis. Design reviews help to verify the accuracy of information at each stage of the instructional design process before instruction is developed.

Expert reviews are conducted to gather information about the instruction to determine if it is accurate and current. Various experts—such as content experts, instructional design experts, pedagogical experts, and experts on the learners—can be used to provide various perspectives on the instruction.

Morrison, Ross, and Kemp (2007) advocate a basic model for formative evaluation based on the work of Gooler (1980). Gooler’s approach follows these eight steps:

1. purpose
2. audience
3. issues
4. resources
5. evidence
6. data gathering techniques
7. analysis
8. reporting

There are three main phases to this approach: planning, conducting, and reporting. Phase one includes steps one through five, while phase two includes steps six and seven. Phase three is the eighth and final step, reporting the results

The first step—determining the purpose or purposes of the evaluation—is done in consultation with the client. The two most common purposes are to improve the instruction that is being developed and to satisfy administration requirements of the client you are working for.

The audience of the evaluation is important to determine because it will establish the types of information that need to be collected and reported. The client will be able to help determine who the intended audience will be. Conducting an evaluation for multiple audiences should be avoided because it will be difficult to satisfy varying needs within a single report. It is best to try to narrow the audience down as much as possible.

Phase two—conducting the evaluation—includes determining the data collection techniques that will be used, gathering the data, and analyzing the data.

Step seven—analyzing the data—should reflect the purpose of a formative evaluation: to provide usable and useful information that helps the instructional designer improve instruction.

The final phase—step eight—is reporting the results of the evaluation to the primary audience. This is typically done as an evaluation report, with the format of the report tailored to the audience the report will be disseminated to.

Summative evaluation takes place after an instructional intervention has been implemented. The major goal of a summative evaluation is to gather data that allow for its effectiveness to be determined. Did the instruction bring about the desired changes? Were the goals of the client met? These are two major questions that summative evaluations help to answer.

Kirkpatrick’s Four Levels of Evaluation:

• Level 1—reactions—attempts to provide data on how participants reacted to the training. Did participants enjoy the training? Was the training relevant to the participants?
• Level 2—learning—is conducted to determine whether participants’ skills, knowledge, or attitudes changed as a result of the training. Determining this is much more laborious than Level 1 because it requires gathering data at multiple times. Typically, pretests and post-tests are used to measure these changes.
• Level 3—transfer—attempts to answer the question of whether the newly acquired skills, knowledge, or attitudes are being used by participants in their real-world environments. In other words, have participants transferred what they learned in the training into their everyday environments?
• Level 4—results—attempts to evaluate a training program’s effectiveness in business measures, such as increased sales, improved product quality, fewer on-the-job accidents, and so forth.

Morrison

1. Specifying program objectives: Revisit the instructional goals and objectives of the instructional intervention that was developed.
2. Determining the evaluation design for each objective: How will data be collected that will help determine if the learning goals and objectives have been met? Determine what types of data are needed.
3. Developing data collection instruments and procedures for each objective: Appropriate data collection instruments and procedures were discussed earlier in this chapter. Pretests, post-tests, questionnaires, and observations are all examples of data collection instruments or procedures.
4. Carrying out the evaluation: It is advised that data are collected from the beginning stages of the project. This will ensure that the necessary data are collected, especially data regarding costs and time involvement. Data collection may need to be scheduled.
5. Analyzing the results from each instrument.
6. Interpreting the results.
7. Disseminating the results and conclusions: Develop a summative evaluation report (refer to the previous section on Smith and Ragan (1999) to see how an evaluation report can be formatted). Individual discussions and group presentations are often useful (and required by the client) to disseminate evaluation findings.

Chapter 11 – Instructional Media Production Management

The roles and responsibilities of the members of any production team depend on the type of product being created. For example, a team responsible for producing computer-based multimedia might include the following:

• Production manager: responsible for the organization and timing of the production. The production manager ensures that everyone knows what he or she should be doing and when specific tasks need to be accomplished. The production manager may also be called on to resolve conflict within the team.
• Subject matter expert (SME): an individual who is a specialist and authority in the content area of the product (e.g., an astronomer helping with a product that teaches the basics of stellar cartography).
• Writer: responsible for generating text, scripts, and documentation.
• Art director: responsible for the product’s “look and feel” by specifying such things as color schemes, artwork, and typefaces. The art director oversees the efforts of the graphic artists.
• Graphic artist: responsible for creating the graphic elements specified by the art director.
• Sound designer: responsible for designing and producing audio elements.
• Video director: responsible for gathering and/or creating video elements.
• Video editor: responsible for preparing video elements specified by the video director.
• Interface designer: responsible for specifying the product’s human–computer interactions. The interface designer oversees the efforts of the programmers.
• Programmer: responsible for making a working version of the software.
• Talent: the actors whose bodies, faces, and/or voices interpret the writer’s scripts.

Prototyping is a common method of production (this is true for automobiles, architecture, animation, and software development) with myriad examples of successful applications of this method. Rapid prototyping is a production strategy that requires starting with a very sketchy idea that evolves through multiple prototypes to arrive at a finished piece. Rapid prototyping requires the evaluation and revision of each prototype as part of the production process.

We recommend ongoing, iterative evaluation of the product as it develops. In the earliest stages of pre-production and production, product ideas and rough sketches can be evaluated through expert review. An expert review is soliciting input from a person or persons with a great deal of experience with the type of instructional media under development. Because of his or her experience, an expert can gain a sense of the production team’s vision from very rough drafts (a cocktail napkin with a few sketches and a verbal description is often enough to give an expert an idea of the finished product).

Chapter 12 – Visual Design for Instructional Media

In The non-designer’s design book (2015), author Robin Williams presents four basic principles of visual design: alignment, contrast, repetition, and proximity. Williams points out that these four principles are interconnected, and one does not often see one of these four aspects of design applied independently. In creating an effective and appealing design, you apply all four principles simultaneously.

Alignment

Alignment is what leads the reader through the design (this is sometimes called “flow”). Nothing should be incorporated into the design without careful consideration of its placement. One common alignment strategy is to have all the headings line up with each other, with indented subheadings and/or body text beneath each heading.

Contrast

Contrast distinguishes different elements of a design. For example, make headings stand out from body text by using very different typefaces for each. Bold and italic text contrasts with regular text. Contrasting colors can be used (black and white are the most essential contrasting color combination), as can contrasting image and type sizes.

Repetition

Repetition conveys a sense of deliberate and carefully planned design. Simple elements used over again give the design a unified feeling (for example, a large graphic used at the top of a page might be used again at the bottom of the page as a small repeating graphic forming a line).

Proximity

Proximity places together elements that relate to each other, creating one or more “visual units” within the larger design that help organize the information (for example, a picture of a person standing on a scale and text describing weight-loss strategies might be placed very near each other to create one visual unit).

Christian Madsbjerg

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The Moment of Clarity: Using the Human Sciences to Solve Your Toughest Business Problems Christian Madsbjerg and Mikkel Rasmussen

Charles Duhigg

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Christopher Gales

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The Product is Docs: Writing technical documentation in a product development group
Christopher Gales and Splunk Documentation Team

Ray Kurtzweil

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Leah Buley

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INTRODUCTION

Steve Mulder

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The User is Always Right: A Practical Guide to Creating and Using Personas for the Web (Voices That Matter) Steve Mulder and Ziv Yaar why user-centered design is important, what personas are, and how they make Web sites more successful.

Everett N. McKay

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Introduction:

Kate Crane and Kelli Cargile Cook, Eds

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Chapter 1: Out of Industry, Into the Classroom: UX as Proactive Academic Practice

Cliff Kuang, Robert Fabricant

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User Friendly: How the Hidden Rules of Desigbae Changing the Way We Live and Wrok Cliff Kuang Robert Fabricant

Introduction: The Empire of User-Friendliness

Brad Nunnally, David Farkas

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Jaime Levy

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UX design and UX strategy are two different things. When you are doing design, you are creating something. When you are doing strategy, you are coming up with a game plan before creating something.

UX strategy is the process that should be started first, before the design or development of a digital product begins. It's the vision of a solution that needs to be validated with real potential customers to prove that it's desired in the marketplace. Although UX design encompasses numerous details such as visual design, content messaging, and how easy it is for a user to accomplish a task, UX strategy is the "Big Picture." It is the high-level plan to achieve one or more business goals under conditions of uncertainty.Page: 7

Customers have to see the value in the new way before they'll consider abandoning the old.Page: 8

STELLAR UX STRATEGY IS A MEANS TO ACHIEVING DISRUPTION IN the marketplace through mental-model innovation. Page: 11

In the digital world, strategy usually begins in the discovery phase. This is when teams dig deep into research to reveal key information about the product they want to build.Page: 12

My formula is this: UX Strategy = Business Strategy + Value Innovation + Validated User Research + Killer UX Design. It's not enough to understand your marketplace if you don't talk directly to your customers. It's not enough to validate that your product works if you're not creating something unique.Page: 15

A competitive advantage is essential to the company's long-term existence. The two most common ways to achieve a competitive advantage: cost leadership and differentiation. When prices hit rock bottom? Then, the battle needs to be about what makes the product better.Page: 16

We need to recognize that building a business strategy isn't about formulating and executing a perfect plan. Instead, it's about being able to research what's out there, analyze the opportunities, run structured experiments, fail, learn, and iterate until we devise something of value that people truly want.Page: 21

In 1984, Michael Lanning first coined the term "value proposition" to explain how a firm proposes to deliver a valuable customer experience.Page: 22

When producing digital products, we must continuously research, redesign, and remarket to keep up with the rapidly evolving online marketplace, customer values, and value chains that are required to keep our products in production.Page: 23

User research is how you verify that you're on the right track with your value proposition.Page: 27

Validation is the process of confirming that a specific customer segment finds value in your product. Without validation, you are simply assuming that customers will find use for your product. Page: 28

Eric Ries popularized the term Minimum Viable Product (MVP). It simply means learning if potential customers want your product by building just the core features of your value proposition. Page: 28

The "user experience" (UX) is how a human feels when using the interface of a digital product while attempting to accomplish a task or goal. The common problem that many product makers don't realize is how much their UX decisions are tied to customer acquisition. Page: 30

Experiments need to be focused on how successful the value proposition can be communicated to the customer from the moment the customer opens the landing page. They learn everything about the existing market space to identify UX opportunities that can be exploited. They talk directly to potential users or existing power users of the product to discover and validate its primary utility with respect to the problem that must be solved. Page: 31

You first need to figure out what problem you're going to solve and what kind of customer needs it solved the most.Page: 37

a value proposition takes the form of a statement and is usually the first sentence out of the mouth, as it was for my movie producer client. Think of it as an elevator pitch — when you distill something into a discrete, easy-to-remember, compelling, and repeatable phrase. Its primary purpose is to communicate the benefits that the customer can expect from your offering.Snapchat is the fastest way to share messages, photos, videos, texts, and drawings with friends for a limited amount of time. Page: 40

Step 1: Define your primary customer segment. Step 2: Identify your customer segment's (biggest) problem. Step 3: Create provisional personas based on your assumptions. Step 4: Conduct customer discovery to validate or invalidate your solution's initial value proposition. Step 5: Reassess your value proposition based on what you learned! Page: 42

Your primary customer's pain point must be severe, because there is a lot of risk involved in trying to change how people do something in a familiar way to an unfamiliar one in an uncontested market space. Page: 43

Write out the customer and problem hypothesis in a statement. Which, if proven true, would validate an important need for the value proposition: Don't build your product's UX around a value proposition unless you have tangible evidence that people will want the product! Page: 45

Don't believe your own hype. Instead, approach every new product or project like an experiment. Personas can be a helpful tool in giving stakeholders and the product team an empathetic sense of what the end user's needs, goals, and motivations are. In this way, they can make a product more "user-friendly." Page: 46

By the third edition of Cooper's book About Face in 2007, he added a new section called "When Rigorous Personas Aren't Possible: Provisional Personas." Thus, you can think of a provisional persona as a "back-up" or "low budget" persona, which is better than having no persona at all. The provisional personas will collect and present the assumptions you are making about your primary customer segment. You want to focus your personas on what you assume is important to customers and how they are currently dealing with the problem. Page: 48

Clifford Geertz

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Works and Lives (PDF)

Geertz was a great writer and, I think, an important Anthropologist. He mentions Kenneth Burke in the Acknowledgements, which is reason enough to read this book. But you can learn a lot about human-subject story telling from him.

Todd Rogers, Jessica Lasky-Fink

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Introduction