Key Aspects of Developing Engaging e-Learning – Part 2

PRINCIPLES

The frameworks (cognitive, emotional, and individual) suggest the following principles for content and learning:
• The learning should focus on important skills that the learner leaves with. Learning should make a difference in their ability to meet their own goals, and it should be actionable. Teaching just abstract knowledge or frameworks leaves people with what cognitive science calls “inert knowledge” that learners can pass tests on, but don’t access at appropriate application situations (it may be retained, but it isn’t transferred).
• The learning should provide compelling situations that drive learners to the knowledge, rather than rote memorization of information, and that requires the knowledge in ways that learners understand are important.
• The learning should be model-based, providing learners with knowledge and frameworks that guide performance. Our mental models–our understanding of how things work–are key to learning and any learning we design must:
o Rely on models the learners bring to the training
o Help learners create new models.
• The learning should be supportive. We need to scaffold learning, and provide support for learner persistence and completion.
• The learning should be set in a context that is meaningful to the learner. We want to incorporate the information that is available in the performance environment into the practice environment. This means we utilize available resources and not reproduce them in the learning.
• The learning should avoid unnecessary materials, and leverage learners’ existing understandings to minimize the amount of information we have to cover.

Practices

Those principles suggest the following practices:
• Our practice tasks should focus on the meaningful decisions we want our learners to be able to make after the learning experience. By framing the task in this language, we move the emphasis often provided by SMEs from one of knowledge (“they need to know this, and this, and…”) to one of skills (“they need to be able to do this, and this, and…”).
• Our language needs to address learners’ interests, and we explicitly need to
include support for the learners’ effort through the learning process.

Content

Given these principles, how should we design content? In this final section we will consider the design of:
• training objectives
• training elements (the progression from introduction, to concept, to example,
to practice, to summary)
• media usage (text, audio, graphics, etc.)
• interactive (games and scenarios)