I just sat through a session called "Actions Speak Louder than words - Creating Meaningful e-Learning Interactions", by Ethan Edwards of Allen Interactions. The session was about interactions that create mental stimulation to eventually improve workplace performance. Ethan explained that an interaction has four aspects to it; namely Context, Challenge, Activity and Feedback. The focus of the session was on crafting and implementing meaningful challenges and activities for elearning.
What did I learn?
Ethan's session provided a balance of detail between instruction and demonstration. Here are a few things I'll remember.
- A different style of presentations: Show and tell -- Ethan didn't just talk about his work, he actually showed real life examples of the interactions he's worked on. He embedded these as clickable links into the presentation and that made the entire experience almost seamless.
- It helps to have some time aside to answer questions as a conference speaker. Ethan did pretty well to set aside almost 20 minutes for QnA.
- On the content front, my big takeaway was Ethan's rules for elearning interaction design:
- Measure an observable action.
- The interaction should need attention and thought. This I feel is particularly important since a lot of elearning seems to be just a lot of click and turn!
- The interaction should have relevance and meaning in the real world.
- The interaction should allow the learner to model real world performance.
- The interaction should require effort to complete.
- And lastly, in keeping with my philosophy of "a safe environment to fail fast and learn from mistakes", the activity should be reversible. If a learner makes a mistake in elearning, it isn't the end of the world and we shouldn't be making the learner feel that way either!
0 comments:
Post a Comment