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Learning Leaders: Jean Marrapodi on Improving the eLearning Experience
Jean Marrapodi, the chief learning architect at ApplestarProductions, is a lifelong educator and learner. She believes that universaldesign principles make eLearning a better experience for all learners. TheeLearning Guild recognized Jean as a Guild Master at Learning Solutions 2016Conference & Expo. She lives by her motto: It’s a great day for learning!
I spoke with Jean recently about universal design in eLearningand how emerging technologies might be used in learning and development(L&D). The interview has been edited for length and clarity. More of theinterview will be published in September.
Pamela S. Hogle: There’sa trend toward creating online learning that is more accessible, moreuniversally usable by more people, but at the same time, there’s a trend towardgiving people more control: the on-demand, the just-in-time, the microlearning,short lessons instantly accessible on their phones. Is there tension betweenthose two? Do they work together? How do people design for both custom use anda broad, accessible, generalized body of learning?
Jean Marrapodi: Well, I think universal design needs toinform any learning. Any learning we create should be accessible to alllearners. The ADA compliance law, Section 508 [an amendment to theRehabilitation Act of 1973], requires an equivalent experience. When we buildlearning, if it’s primarily auditory, we should have an option for atranscript. When we’re building something that’s primarily visual, we shouldhave background coded in for the screen reader that’s going to be reading it.When we learn to make that part of our thinking, then there won’t be tension.
We’ve talked, Jane [Bozarth] and I, we’ve talked toorganizations, and they say, “We don’t need to do that because we don’t haveany blind learners” or “We don’t have any deaf learners in our community.”Well, no, but that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t do it.
In the work that I did at New England College of Business,we prepared a transcript for every lecture that we put into the course. Therewere professors who were pretty boring on the tape, and students who couldwatch the video found reading the lecture was a much more efficient way to dothat. That’s an equivalent experience for convenience.
In a lecture, if someone is writing on a whiteboard ordrawing a diagram, it leverages the visual. I need to provide an auditoryequivalent through a description. I’m not visually handicapped, but I’ll oftenlisten to lectures from MOOCs driving in my car, relying only on the auditory.That’s a form of universal accessibility, available for me in a just-in-timeformat, so I can learn it in a way that’s convenient for me.
We have to be aware of that when we’re designingeLearning—that it’s not necessarily for ADA but it may be for learners’ convenience.Instead of clicking through an eLearning course, maybe someone would be just ashappy reading an article to be able to complete the test. Now, that’s goinginto spooky waters there. What’s the best way to get the learning across sothat it will be sticky?
PH: Some people saythat the idea of learning styles, that some people learn better by reading andsome people by listening and some by doing, is outdated and has been debunked.Even if you don’t accept the idea of audio, visual, or kinesthetic learning,it’s clear that people learn differently. People who grew up in a digital worldlearn differently from older people; younger people approach education withdifferent expectations and experiences. How can we accommodate all of that? Itsounds like you’re saying that universal design inherently accommodates that,even if that’s not one of its goals. Is that what you’re saying?
JM: Yes, yes. I would agree. The people who have thrown outlearning styles did so because there were so many variants on it. People dohave preferences in the way they do things. I would see this when I was doingsoftware training. You had the person who wanted the teacher to give youstep-by-step-by-step-by-step. You had the person who wanted to read ahead andtry it on their own. And then you had the person who was just going to goclicking around and figure things out and get completely lost in class, andthen try to catch up with where the teacher was. Those were preferences for theway they liked to learn things.
For yourself, when you want to learn something new, where doyou start? Do you go to the library and get a book? Google it? Take a course?People like to do things in different ways. We can’t throw out the notion thatpeople have preferences in the way they want to do that. I think for us asdesigners, we have to accommodate that by including variants in what we haveand sometimes even giving the learner a choice—if they want to listen, if theywant to just read, how they want to best learn it. Not every content fits thatway, but it’s something to think about.
PH: So, if designembraces this more universal approach, we’re not only going to be accessible toa broader set of people with different abilities, we’re going to be able to letpeople control learning according to their preferences.
JM: Absolutely. And one of the things that universal designfor learning thinks about is the remedial learner, the ESL [English as a secondlanguage] learner, and the gifted learner. So it encourages you to putsupplemental materials in for the gifted learner, who wants to take it farther,who wants to look in the bibliography, who thinks, “Oh, this is just soawesome, I need to learn more about that.” And it also scaffolds the learningfor the person who needs terminology definitions—it might include a glossary,it might include pronunciation code. It really depends on what and who inparticular you’re teaching, what’s in there. It’s considering not just thedeficit model but the supplemental model as well.
PH: Where do newtechnologies—virtual or augmented reality, big data, artificialintelligence—where do you see all of this fitting into eLearning?
JM: I see there’s a lot of potential for adaptive learning,but I know that it’s very complicated to build. I was in a workshop where welooked at the algorithms that you need to consider and the tagging that youneed. It’s very, very code-intensive to build something that will remediate forthe learner [who] hasn’t gotten something, that will give them additionalpractice. I see that in the teaching-reading software that I’ve used with thelow-literacy folks that I’ve worked with; I’ve seen it in a program called ALEKS that teaches algebra; and Pearson has aproduct that has it built in. But it’s very expensive to do it, and do it well,at the discrete level that we want to be able to remediate.
We tend to look at things much more holistically—the personeither knows this hunk or they don’t know that hunk. Well, they may know 80 percentof that hunk and miss just enough questions on the test that you’re thinkingthat they don’t know it at all. We need to look granularly.
Adults are more like Swiss cheese. They have background, butthere are definitely holes and gaps in their information. … They’ve got most ofthe cheese, but they’ve got a couple bubbles in there. We’ve got to look at thebubbles. One way to remediate that is to provide feedback that is instructiveand then give them an opportunity to test with an alternate form of the test. Thatmakes the test a learning opportunity.
Virtual reality—to create those alternate worlds wherepeople can practice stuff and experience stuff—it’s great because it actuallygives the learner the kinesthetics, for lack of a better word, the experienceof doing things and the visual sensation of what’s going on.
The brain doesn’t necessarily discriminate whether somethingis real or in your head. If I talked you through a scenario and took you to thetop of the Empire State Building and had you go out on the patio at the viewingdeck and walk to the very edge and look down, yeah, most people, the pit oftheir stomach would go “Oh!”—except your body is in a chair!
That’s your head experiencing something that you’re beingtold, and your brain has to fight that. It’s the same thing that makes you cryin a movie. Our brains get absorbed in the story of what’s going on and theactual experience. So, I think there’s potential for this kind of thing in ourlearning. I think that it’s still very expensive, and it’s not something we’regoing to be able to whip together in a week, like we can do with some rapideLearning. Now, what you whip together in a week is equivalent to what you whiptogether in a week—you get what you put into something. But those developments,the virtual and augmented reality, have potential, but need the time andresources to implement.
Now, things like Google Glass [an early augmented-realityexperiment]—phenomenal. David Kelly talked about a mechanic wearing GoogleGlass, doing their job, fixing the engine. You’re looking where the mechanic isgoing, you’re watching his hands, able to do exactly what he’s doing, and youhave a much better view than if you’re sitting next to the engine of the car,because you’re seeing what he sees, and you’re seeing what his hands do, thatyou lose from the angle. So there are tools that can absolutely help us andmake things better because they can create the experience.
PH: Going back towhat you said about the remedial reading and the adaptive learning and howexpensive it is to do that really well—do you see artificial intelligencedeveloping to the point of where we could do it that way? Have Siri tutor yourchild in reading?
JM: [Laughs] Nooo. Well, I’ve worked with software, whereit’s done in small enough modules, and if they [the students] don’t get themodule right, they go back and repeat it, but the module is short enough thatit’s working on the discrimination in sound. … With reading, you can break itdown into small, discrete components like that and figure out what they needhelp with. The advantage of computer-assisted instruction is, if your kid needsto hear the same thing 472 times, the computer never gets tired.
Look at the engagement that kids have with games, and lookat the way games are designed. If you played Angry Birds when that came out, or Candy Crush, even Pokémon Go—anyof those that are popular games—they all start you out with very simple tasksso that you are successful right away, and they add new challenges as you go.When you get into the higher levels, you’re getting added challenges that youhave to figure out new strategies to solve. It’s not a random clicking around.It’s a very deliberate, sequential process that’s involved in developing thosegames. And that’s the way our learning should be. We should be buildingsequentially, scaffolding as we go, and then backing the scaffold away from thelearner so they can do it on their own—or with the support, if they need thesupport. When they’ve got it down and no longer need the support, that’s fine.But they may always need the support if it’s something they only do once in awhile. Don’t you whip out your cookbook to make things that you’ve done before?
