Do Something Interesting!
-presented by Michael Allen (Allen Interactions, Inc. - he was also a founder of Macromedia)
There is no such thing as boring content, just boring instruction!
Three Success Factors:
1. Enhance the learner's motivation to learn. (boring e-learning strangles motivation).
2. Focus learners on behavior-enhancing tasks. ie: don't make them suffer through 100 PP slides!
3. Create meaningful and memorable experiences.
Note: motivation is never high enough, so always be thinking about how to improve it. Use behavior enhancing experiences. For example, this speaker asked questions of the audience and when someone offered an answer he went and gave them a bag of M&Ms. Pretty soon a lot more people were offering answers (maybe the behavior was enhanced by using the bribe or maybe he had warmed up the crowd anyways!). So he was able to enhance motivation via a bribe but others ways can be just as effective.
Also, M&M is a good tool to remember "meaningful and memorable" - all our work should be M&M and we should always keep this in mind.
He showed a bunch of e-learning demos - often in pairs to show the examples of good vs bad elearning for the same content. This was pretty cool. Unfortunately he did not give links to the examples but encouraged us to visit booth #1813 to get a copy of the demo CD! I have it on my list to pick it up tomorrow. He also suggested that showing the examples of good vs bad elearning to senior people in our organizations would be useful to get buy-in on a higher elearning budget.
Other interesting points:
- don't list objectives of the course at the beginning; instead, give a pre-test and make sure the questions are hard enough so that the class fails. Then you are showing them what the learning objectives are and you are hopefully giving them motivation to take the course. If they just get the listed agenda/objectives, they may think they know it all and check out before the course even starts. (useful tip even for non-elearning)
-Instructional design is too focused on content. The focus should be on he learner (see demo CD examples)
-Use of subject matter experts is tricky. They typically don't remember not knowing the concepts. Recent learners are the real experts on instructional design.
Also note: the instructor has a book on creating successful elearning. Sounds like it may be interesting. But let's start with the demo CD and go from there.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
we debated (and I can't remember if we even tried using the pretest idea in our courses - medchem?)- we should revisit this...
The Qwizdom system is particularly well suited to run a pretest. It also allows the participants to practice with the devices. I did it for the Microarray Experimental Design course and the participants liked it a lot.
Yes, I agree with you Bjorn. A pretest via surveymonkey or other tool would not have high compliance but Qwizdom is effective. The real key is that people get the questions wrong. If the questions are too easy then there is less motivation to stay through the class. I made this error in the first DMPK course in Horsham - the pre-test questions were too easy. Fortunately they all stayed and enjoyed the course anayway but it would have been more effective if they got most of the questions wrong.
Post a Comment