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Nuts and Bolts: Crooked Lines
In last month’s column we looked at ideas for effective treatments for online learningexperiences: stories or narrative wrappers that can help make even dull contentmore interesting and engaging—and memorable.
Let’slook at another critical element of good eLearning design.
Put your hands in the air and stepaway from the computer.
Stop thinking about loading“content” onto slides. Don’t be lulled into using the “[insert text here]”command provided by so many authoring tool interfaces—because that is exactlywhat you will do. What would make for an interesting or surprising look? Whatwould break beyond the usual linear, bullets-in-a column structure?
Here are some examples frominstructional designer Tracy Parish. The first, in Figure 1, shows a modulestart-screen from an online program on identity theft. The approach here sparksengagement: first-person narratives, told in different voices; learner choiceabout how many and which stories to hear.
Figure 1: This course offers viewers the opportunity to engage withfirst-person audio stories
This isn’t really interface design: as you can see in Figure1, there’s a fairly traditional setup surrounding the screen, with a menu atleft and room for title and branding elements at the top. A similar approach is used by OxFam’s “A Seat at the Table” program (Editor’s Note:Requires Flash to view. Will not play on iOS devices). When I first saw it Ifound it very exciting and engaging and sent it on to some colleagues, whoreported that they found the approach so compelling they spent time exploringevery scenario, even though I’d asked them to choose only one. (It’s a bit text-heavy, but it’s intended fora public audience with widely varying access and devices.)
Figure 2 shows a screen from a Parish-designed “safelifting” course; it likewise offers nonlinear navigation and learner choice.
Figure 2: Learners choose which items to view
Upon making choices, the learner then accesses individual screensoffering an overview of each item in a discrete chunk, as shown in Figure 3.
Figure 3: Considerations in safe lifting are displayed singly
Put yourself in the learner’s shoes and compare this to atypical “bulleted” look (Figure 4), a linear text-heavy screen that attempts tocapture a great deal of content at once. Which view would be more likely todraw and hold your attention?
Figure 4: The same information as in Figures 2 and 3, presented asa bulleted list. Is this as attractive?
The non-bulleted approach of Figures 1, 2, and 3 also speakto Richard Mayer’s research on multimedia learning and the subsequentdevelopment of his “SOI” model: select, organize, integrate. It is critical forthe designer to help the learner select theimportant information, organize it ina useful ways, and integrate it intoa meaningful whole. In an online course (or a face-to-face one) that last bitcan take the form of things like worked-out examples and elaborative questions.
Learning—and life—rarely happens in a neat straight path. Whendesigning courses, look for ways to break out of the linear. Look intoapproaches that are more interesting and useful for your learners.
Want more?
Jane Bozarth, BetterThan Bullet Points, 2nd edition. Wiley: 2013.
Richard Mayer, in Reigeluth, C. M. (Ed.), Instructional-designTheories and Models: A New Paradigm of Instructional Theory, Volume II.Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1999.
Richard Mayer, Multimedia Learning, 2nd edition.Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Tracy Parish: www.tracyparish.ca
Join Jane Bozarth at DevLearnOctober 23 – 25! Don’t miss her featured session, ShowYour Work: The Payoffs and How-tos of Narrating Work, that grew out of her August 2012 Nuts &Bolts column.
