Design for How People Learn

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

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

The more you can consider your learners’ attitudes and motivations, the better you can tailor the learning experience.
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).
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.
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.
Scour their situation for intrinsic motivators.
Try to tie it back to relevant, real- world tasks.
Avoiding extensive theory and background.
Stick with specific examples and challenges that directly relate to real- life scenarios.
Use interesting (to them) hypothetical problems to awaken their intrinsic motivation.
puzzle- solving or winning.
Your job is to make your learners feel smart and, even more important, they should feel capable.
It’s fine to challenge your learners— this isn’t about making it easy for them.
you don’t want to have your learners feel shame about what they do and don’t know.
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.
Unfortunately, a single learning design is frequently expected to accommodate many different levels of learners.
slowly helping them build their mental model before adding in content) are pretty much guaranteed to make the expert absolutely nuts.
don’t make people sit through classroom training they don’t need — optional or take- home.
Consider pull vs. push.
You can generally trust experts to get the information they need if you make sure that it’s easily available and applicable.
Use walkthroughs. Have the learner go through the whole process with a simplified case.
I was seriously ashamed of myself— I had been subconsciously assuming that my experience was the norm.
What learning experiences were effective for you? How do you like to learn?
Consider your learner’s context for the material.
They were able to understand and retain the information specifically because they already had a mental picture
you have a picture in your mind, and your learners may not.
Use a high- level organizer, road map, categories, overview, basic principles, acronym or a mnemonic device.
Ask them how they would present it if they had to teach it to others.
All learners, both novice and expert, filter their new learning through their past experience.
the scientific evidence of effective use of learning styles is pretty weak
learning styles are pretty popular, but haven’t proven to be very effective.
Why are you learning this? How will learning this help you (how are they motivated)?
job shadowing, and in the user experience community it’s often referred to as contextual inquiry,
You want your learning to create contextual triggers that will allow learners to remember things later.
Try stuff out with your learners along the way.
Create prototypes, do user testing, have pilot tests.
You think you are being clear, but you know how it’s supposed to work.
Don’t just hand your learners information, but instead help them construct and organize their framework for that information.

Before you start designing a learning experience, you need to know what problem you are trying to solve.
identify the problem:
“What bad thing will happen if they don’t know this?”
“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)
After you’ve defined the problem, you need to define your goal( s).
The student will be able to create
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?
There may be times when it’s not feasible to have real- world tasks.
learning objectives are more for you as the designer than they are for the learner.

Memory is the foundation of learning,
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.
Variation good, inconsistency bad
Variation can be a useful tool for maintaining attention, but it should be used in a deliberate and meaningful way.
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).
Chunking can be based on things that are similar, sequential, or items that are in your long- term memory.
The more ways you have to find a piece of information, the easier it is to retrieve,
Whenever lives are at stake, training almost always involves in- context learning.
The difference between knowing and doing can be a huge gap when the context of encoding and the context of retrieval are significantly different.
heightened circumstances can cause us to rely less on our intellectual knowledge and more on our automatic responses.
Use role- playing.
Create pressure.
You want the information encoding to align with assessment and use.
Recognizing the right answer from a set of options almost always involves less effort than recalling the answer.
Recognition activities are easier to grade— computers can do it for us. Recall activities usually require a person to evaluate.
Job aids change the task from “recall the steps” to “follow these steps,” reducing the need to rely on memory.
the practice needs to match the eventual use.
memories are processed in different ways, and that people are not consciously aware of all their memories.
Declarative memory is mostly the stuff you know you know, and can state explicitly, like facts, principles, or ideas.
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.
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.
Procedural memory is our memory for how to do things.
step- by- step process.
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.
It’s frequently difficult to talk to others about these kinds of tasks, because you didn’t learn them in a verbal, explicit way.
vivid memory for emotionally charged events is call flashbulb memory.
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 )
emotion seems to have an impact on how much we remember.
it’s important for a learning designer to figure out how to have reinforcement without resorting to monotonous repetition.
multiple exposures
habituation tells us that people also tune out repetitive, unchanging things.
The biggest problem with memorization through repetition is that it frequently puts the information on just one shelf:
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.

Asking your learners to rely entirely on willpower and concentration is like asking the rider to drag the elephant uphill.
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?
The elephant likes puzzles
our responsibility is to make the learner feel capable.
Show them the before and after. Your learner should be able to see how they will be different if they master the skills.
Creating a sense of urgency is one of the biggest benefits you can get from using scenarios or stories in learning design.
You can’t capture the elephant’s attention by just asserting that a topic is important.
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.
SEE and FEEL the importance.
Give people time constraints or resource constraints and set them at a problem.
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.
Interesting dilemmas— Give your learners interesting choices to make.
Better options include choices between:– A good option and a very good option– Two bad options– Good, better, and best options
Two options that are each a mixture of good and bad, but in different ways.
• 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.
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.
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.
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.
Creating the visual association between the trigger and the action is an important part of encouraging the memory and the behavior.
If what you are teaching has a hands- on component, then the learning should, too.
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.
Extrinisic rewards can demotivate people.
Once you start paying people, it becomes work, and can have a negative effect on performance and motivation.
Rewards can be great motivators if they are intrinsic.
There’s one catch to designing for intrinsic rewards: You don’t get to decide what’s intrinsic to the learner.

give learners an inventory of the content, and have them rate their level of comfort with each topic.
If something isn’t signficant, important, or unusual, why would we want to remember it?
Creating opportunities to interact with the material can make a lesson even more engaging for your motivated learners.
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.
if people have to make the connections themselves, it’s likely they’ll remember more later.
If someone is new to baking, stick with one way to do things.
matching an example with a non- or counter- example.
If it’s too easy to follow the individual directions, then the learner won’t learn.
Examples Followed By Concepts
There’s a lot of benefit to letting learners drive themselves whenever possible.
validate / diffuse / assist

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:
In order for practice to be effective, learners need to be able to tell how they are doing.
The incorrect skill can become ingrained, and then correcting that skill later will require unlearning behaviors that have become automatic.
Increasing the frequency of feedback is great, but if you do that, you also want to have various ways to provide feedback.
character reactions, scores, and visual cues.
you don’t get lectured about poor business choices— you lose money,
encourage learners to report back on their experiences.
Have virtual critique sessions
You want the course to help develop skills, not just deliver information.
cycles of extended practice, tests of mastery of that practice, then a new challenge, and then new extended practice.

we don’t always learn the right thing when we learn from experience,
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.
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—
If it is useful, how will the learner know that?
Show Don’t Tell becomes particularly important here.
positive endorsements from trusted peers.
Is the new behavior easy to use?
Everett Rogers’ classic book Diffusion of Innovations.
The degree to which an innovation is perceived as being better than the idea it supersedes
The degree to which an innovation is perceived to be consistent with the existing values, past experiences,
The degree to which an innovation is perceived as difficult to use
The degree to which the results of an innovation are visible to others
The opportunity to experiment with the innovation on a limited basis
Everett’s attributes (relative advantage, compatibility, complexity, observability and trialability),
Self- efficacy can be described as someone’s belief in their own ability to succeed.
In addition to feeling capable, it helps if learners also feel that the necessary task or skill is within their control.
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—
People have a strong reluctance to discard something that they’ve already invested in.
Make progress visible.
Change is a process, not an event.

Changing the design of the environment can make knowledge or skills gaps disappear.
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.
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.
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
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—
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.
This handy guide is built right into the countertop.
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.
shift the burden from a recall problem to a recognition one.
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.
What’s everything else we could do (besides training) that will allow learners to succeed?
“what could we do beforehand to make people more ready?” and “what could we do afterwards to reinforce?”

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