The Human Factor: Delivering Training to Multi-Taskers

Don’t look now,but your learners are multi-tasking. Regardless of the age group yourclass belongs to, the delivery mode of your training, or howcarefully you’ve constructed your lesson, in today’s world, it’srare to gain your learners’ full attention.

Multi-tasking maybe a learner’s preference or the result of a demanding job, buteither way, it’s a pretty sure bet that learners are switching backand forth between their online coursework and other tasks.

Typically,designers of online training don’t tend to spend much time thinkingabout the multi-tasking habits of their learners. With the learnersout of sight, the fact that a host of other media sources compete fortheir attention seems like a non-issue. Learners who switch away froman online course for a moment to answer the phone don’t create aclassroom management problem the way they would in a live classroom.And, in any event, there’s very little an online learninginstructor can do to prevent students from multi-tasking.

Does it really matter?

Multi-tasking ismore than a classroom management problem. It’s also a distractionthat lengthens the time a learner takes to complete a task, andimpedes the learner’s ability to complete the task accurately.

More than that,multi-taskers don’t learn as deeply as their counterparts who workthrough the lessons without distraction. One study (Foerde, etal., 2006), found multi-taskers were more likely use the part of thebrain associated with building habits to learn a new task. Theircounterparts, in a single-task version of the experiment, were morelikely to use the part of their brain associated with declarativememory, meaning they were more likely to be able to flexibly use theinformation they learned.

What to do about it

The pragmaticsolution to the problem is to break the training into small, shallowsections so that learners can digest them in quick bites. If thebites are small enough, learners may be able get through anindividual piece of content before they have the opportunity toswitch to something else.

It’s anunsatisfying solution. Although attacking content in small pieces mayhelp boost course completion rates, it’s unlikely (with someexceptions) to be thorough enough to address the learners’ trainingneeds. Content worth teaching generally deserves more exposition,explanation, and analysis than short snippets can offer. Corporatetraining requires employees to apply information from an onlinecourse to situations they face in the course of their jobs. In otherwords, they need to be able to use the course content flexibly.

Course designersand developers may not be able to influence multi-taskers to turn offtheir other media for the duration of a course, but they can designcourses to require learners to engage in higher-order thinking. As itturns out, the relatively new problem of multi-tasking learnersactually may have a relatively well-established solution: write solidcourse objectives, and match the instruction and the assessment tothose objectives.

In addition toalerting the learners to what you expect of them, good courseobjectives remind you, as a course designer, what learners should beable to do when the course is completed. Bloom’s taxonomy(Knowledge, Comprehension, Application, Analysis, Synthesis,Evaluation), with an accompanying list of action verbs for each ofthe levels, can be enormously helpful in identifying which behaviorswould indicate a learner’s mastery of the course material. In manycases, those action verbs can suggest activities that would serve asgood ways to build interactivity into the course. For example, ifyou’ve established that learners will need to work with theinformation at the “Application” level, knowing that learnerswould ultimately be required to compute,manipulate, or modify something suggests that you build certainkinds of practice into the course.

In a similarfashion, well-constructed course objectives help keep aninstructional designer on track when deciding how to assess alearner’s performance. If the objectives state that learners shouldbe able to work with the content at the “Analysis” level,assessment items should support analysis-level understanding of thecontent.

More than likely,the ubiquity of technology and media choices means that learnermulti-tasking is here to stay. As we learn more about the demandsthis behavior places on the human brain, we’ll likely developadditional techniques to address them. Fortunately, the basics ofinstructional design provide a good starting line.

References

https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=7700581

https://www.nwlink.com/~donclark/hrd/bloom.html

Foerde, L., Knowlton, B.J., & Poldrack, R.A.(2006). Distraction modulates the engagement of competing memorysystems. Proceedingsof the National Academy of Sciences,103, 11778-83.

Ophir, E., Nass, C., Wagner, A.D. (2009). Cognitive control in mediamultitaskers. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,Published online before print August 24, 2009, doi:10.1073/pnas.0903620106.