The Human Factor: Instructing From a Learner’s Perspective

As an online learning developer, Idon’t often have the opportunity to talk to my users to find out whatthey like and don’t like about the online courses I create. I canalways ask them to take an online survey, of course, but the lack ofdirect interaction between me and my learners leaves me a littleblind when it comes to figuring out how to best meet their needs.

So, to get a better sense of what I’mdoing right and wrong, I like to ask my friends and family about theonline courses they take at their workplaces. For the most part, theresults of my unscientific survey show the world of online learningstill largely consists of page-turners created for compliancetraining. And, for the most part, the learners I talk to oftendescribe their online training experiences as boring or aggravating,and not very educational.

It’s a reasonable reaction. Eventhough learning professionals know that human brains aren’tdesigned to download large bodies of abstract, detailed informationin a short time, page-turners often require learners to demonstratejust that skill. Interactive elements, which are much moreappropriate teaching tools considering what we know about how welearn, are relatively under-represented, even now that onlinelearning is a well-established field. Why the disconnect?

I’ve created my share ofpage-turners, and could easily recount the pragmatic time,technology, or other pressures that led me to offer them as atraining solution. Those motivations don’t tell the whole story.Because even though I know that interactivity can enhance learningand retention, I also know there’s a catch. The drag-and-drops,hotspots, ranking exercises, or threaded discussions are just tacticsthat become instructional only when they’re written in a meaningfuland strategic way. It was hard for me to imagine ways to incorporatethese tactics in a way that would be challenging and appropriate tothe content I wanted to teach. To learn to incorporate them, I had tolearn to start writing instructional content backwards.

Backwards engineering

I can sum up the single most usefulthing I learned in graduate school in one sentence: Courseobjectives, instruction, and assessments should all match. In allthree stages of the process, your goals as an instructor are thesame.

As a result, it really doesn’t matterwhere you start. It may be usual to develop instruction from theobjectives, but it’s equally valid to think about the assessmentquestions that would demonstrate that a learner understands thecontent and to build objectives and instruction to match thosequestions. In some cases, those questions can be turned into part ofthe instruction.

I do a fair amount of applicationtraining, which usually begins with some orientation to the menusystem. In the past, my orientation often started with several slidesof exposition about the menu categories before demonstrating theindividual functions a learner would need to know.

Starting from an assessmentperspective, though, if I needed to demonstrate that learnersunderstood the menu categories, I might ask them to find items thatbelong to those categories. While it might not be appropriate tobegin the module with a quiz, a similar exercise could serve as anintroduction instead of an assessment. A timed scavenger-hunt stylesearch for particular set of menu items would still orient users tothe menu system and allow the learners to engage with the informationthey need to learn. The interaction directly relates to theobjective, and the learners get a chance to work with the contentimmediately, making them more likely to retain the information afterthe training is finished. If exposition follows, it will build on andreinforce the introduction.

Asking learners to predict outcomes isanother assessment strategy that translates well into instructionalstrategy. In this modification, the learner would have theopportunity to alter factors that contribute to different possibleoutcomes and compare the impact of each factor. For applicationtraining, you might allow learners to apply different menu options tothe same image, data set, or document. For compliance training, youmight let learners see the effects of a failure to comply with therules.

Assessment strategies work asinstructional strategies because they mirror the kinds of activitiesactive learners engage in naturally. Creating instruction with theassessment in mind is really creating instruction from a learner’sperspective, forging pathways that will help them form their ownconnections to the content.