eLearning designers and developersspend a lot of time on assessments, particularly things like quizzes and knowledgechecks and tests. It’s easy to fall into blame-the-learner mode when they don’tdo well: I often hear everything from “they aren’t paying attention” and “theyallow distractions like email and phones” to “no one reads anything.” Butsometimes, easily fixed design issues are the culprits. Here are a few.
Overload and extraneous information
Too much information, especially ifonly tangential to job performance, risks inviting learners to focus onunimportant detail rather than critical content. It’s a bad use of their timeand our efforts.
One solution: Design assessments first. Too often designers create a course, then go backscouring for items to turn into contrived multiple-choice or true-falsequestions. (My own memory of this calls up a question in abasics-of-supervision course that asked whether our merit-based recruitmentpolicy was established by House Bill 886 or House Bill 668.) Write performanceobjectives and work backward from there, leaving out unrelated content. Ifyou’re having trouble, try applying my “Find Your 20%” model, focusing on the question “What will learners actually use on the job?”
Another solution: It’s no secretthat “stakeholders” often insist on including content tangential to actualperformance: background, history, every-extenuating-circumstance legal information,etc. If you must accommodate those requests, try to negotiate them as linkedmaterial, additional reading, or “further exploration.” And don’t discount thevalue of getting some negotiation-skills training for yourself. I find thatmany instructional designers, due to lack of skill here, fall into the role oforder-taker even when there is some safe room for negotiation.
“Wall of words”
Cluttered screens, too much text,too many fonts, bad fonts, branding elements that eat up screen real estate …the list goes on and on. More than just being dull or hard to view, this kindof design error can, like the extraneous information problem, keep the learnerfrom learning. If this is hard for you, try learning something about sketchnoting,where the best skilled practitioners find wonderful, quick ways to representcomplex ideas. And while it isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, Twitter forces you toget to the point. Try participating in a few Twitter chats (like #lrnchat,Thursday evenings at 8:30 pm ET) or follow the feeds of some people who knowhow to convey information that is both useful and concise. Or just step back,look at your screen, and ask: “What if I had to pay $5 a word?” See if thatdoesn’t help you decide where you can cut.
Wrong information
Really? Yep. We probably all knowof projects on which everyone was so busy arguing over the color of an avatar’ssuit that they missed a glaring content error. My favorite example involved aYouTube safety video launched without checking the auto-captions, one of whichtold viewers … to throw water on a grease fire. Luckily, the error was caughtbefore it did any damage. Make sure information is correct, and make sure the informationpresented matches its presentation in things like quizzes and certificationassessments.
“One size fits all”
My work in state government puts mein touch with an incredibly diverse workforce: doctors, lawyers, lawenforcement officers, teachers, park rangers, housekeepers, food serviceworkers, prison guards, software engineers … you name it. While I understandthe economics of it, the reality is that a single safety or harassment orcustomer service course will rarely meet the needs of those people equally.Even if concepts are similar—as with something like communication or conflictresolution skills—the language levels can be vastly different. With somethinglike reducing staph infections, the prior knowledge of the nurse is likely verydifferent than that of the janitor—although both play critical roles in achievingthe goal. Failure to attend to such differences can affect learnerunderstanding and subsequent performance. It’s possible to create multipleversions of a course without having to completely reinvent the wheel. And I’vehad good luck with offering “choose your own” scenarios as part of anexperience, so landscapers could access different, more targeted, examples thanthe office workers, and supervisors could access additional information aimedspecifically at them. See where you can make similar accommodations to makemore content relevant to the many rather than the few.
So when considering learner evaluation, givesome thought to how much these basic design issues—not just content itself—canenhance or interfere with learner success.
