Nuts and Bolts: What Is “Good” eLearning, Anyway?

The other day a friend sent avideo-based eLearning program he’d found online somewhere. It was “how to cooka hamburger,” produced by a well-known fast-food chain. It was a case study ineverything we seem to think eLearning should not be—garish colors, cheesy specialeffects, with information delivered by a bad rapper.  

eLearning snobs—and heaven knows Ican be one—would have criticized everything about it.

I did learn

But here’s the thing: At the end, Icould cook a burger, on time, the first time, according to performancespecifications. Bigger picture? If I’d been an actual employee, there would beless waste, many more happy customers, and steady workflow (or whatever othermetric the company used to determine the value of this performance).

Why did I learn?

Why did it work? Well, I saw anumber of things. For one, it avoided the wall-of-words page-turning disease socommon to many programs.

It adhered to Mayer’s principles ofmultimedia learning, especially as they relate to low-knowledge learners: Therewas multiple representation of information through explanation in words andpictures—meaningful ones, presented contiguously. (I’m a low-knowledge learnerhere, by the way. I’ve cooked plenty of burgers, but not according to this company’sspecs that made sense, and I’ll use them in future home-cooking efforts.)

The rap-plus-demo approach wasconsistent with Mayer’s redundancy principle.

And there was no extraneouscontent: the module was tightly focused on howto cook a hamburger, not on adding condiments, cleaning the grill, orcooking fries. And it didn’t begin with the history of hamburgers or a reviewof the company’s burger philosophy.  

Others admitted they learned, too

I showed the video while waiting tostart a conference presentation last week and the attendees agreed: Yes, thecosmetics were dreadful. But yes—grudgingly—they agreed the program worked. Theyfelt confident they, too, could perform according to spec. And the spec wasn’ta drag-and-drop interaction of putting steps in order, or a multiple-choicequiz asking about the temperature of the grill.

Now, to be fair: This one video worked well for me once. The novelty would wear off veryquickly. I don’t want to see 17 videos exactly like this covering everydiscrete job task. Perhaps that’s an argument for novelty rather than the usualuniformity and consistency across programs or modules?

Here’s the thing: What I saw was anexample of someone who took a very specific performance goal and designed avery specific instructional solution for it. I won’t argue that it wasn’tcheesy, and not to everyone’s taste. I won’t argue that the colors weren’tgarish and the rap not to my liking. (Also: I’ve seen worse. At least it wasn’tboring.) But the production values weren’t so overdone as to be distracting.And … it worked.

Forget the snobbery: Can the learner perform?

So my thinking? Snobbery about cosmetics aside, over the years I’ve seen alot of lists of criteria for buying eLearning, for developing a product, andfor choosing a vendor or developer. I agree we have to go in having some ideaof what “good” is, at least enough to keep us away from all text, or bedtime-readingnarration of that text, or seductive but irrelevant elements. And I want to beclear that I’m not trying to make some argument for video-baseddemonstration-based delivery as being somehow “better,” although YouTube hascertainly proven how effective it can be. (Oh, and did I mention that Iaccessed the video on my phone, which I could hold while I cooked thehamburger?) But I am musing—having spent hours I can’t get back in discussionsover the color of an avatar’s shirt—that we maybe sometimes overthinkaesthetics when the experience and outcomes should be of greater concern. AndI’m thinking that the experience (not just module or course) is “good” if, atthe end, the learner can perform. The trick? Finding an explicit performanceneed, getting clear on assessments first (listing the steps, or cooking ahamburger?), and sticking to a plan that helps the learner learn.

Join Jane at the Learning Solutions Conference next week for several sessions, including afull-day pre-conference certificate program, “Designing for Learner Success.”