Module 2 - Section 6

Creating Digital Learning Resources

So, how do we put all of this put into practice in our approach to creating digital learning?

Introduction

So, how do we put all of this put into practice in our approach to creating digital learning?

Learning Design is simply creating effective learning experiences. This can be in a classroom, online, or a blend of both (blended learning). Instructional Design Models are frameworks that guide you through a structured process to create these learning experiences.

In this section we will explore a number of Instructional Design frameworks and other factors to consider before planning and preparing a learning experience.

Four Key Questions

But first, when designing your learning, there are four key questions we need to consider. Check out the answers below.

Who are the learners?

What’s the nature of the learning?

What are the constraints and enablers?

Can technology support or enhance learning?

Putting It All Together

At its most simple, the aim should be to design with a very straightforward Acquire-Apply-Reflect-Record approach.

In other words, the aim should be to structure our learning resources to support learners to learn something new (or in more depth), apply it to their practice; reflect on the experience (guided by structured recording formats) and record this process either to discuss with their manager/ supervisor/mentor or, claim an Open Badge (we’ll cover more about open badges in the Assessment module). By taking this approach, we are aiming to reap the benefits of the situated learning approach and maximise the transfer of learning to practice.

It’s worth also saying something about reflective learning at this point.

Reflective learning is a term which is widely used in qualifications and workforce development in the social service sector. In fact, it’s so common, as learning and development professionals we can often assume that everyone knows what it is and is comfortable with the approach. This isn’t necessarily the case.

In our experience of developing and implementing Open Badges to give learners credit for their learning, we’ve found that instead of asking them to provide reflective accounts (with little in the way of explanation of what this means), providing them with a set of questions or badge criteria for them to write to helps scaffold the process and provides a structure for their thinking and writing.

This is helpful in de-mystifying the process for less confident learners and helps them develop skills in reflective writing without necessarily thinking about it.

The diagram below gives a helpful overview of the types of things you can include.

For more advice and assistance in designing learning and activities for online/digital learning we’d recommend Julie Dirksen’s 'Design for How People Learn' and Gilly Salmon’s 'E-Tivities: the key to active online learning'. Austin Kleon’s 'Steal Like An Artist' also helps point out ways of sourcing inspiration for your learning designs. Design for How People Learn E-Tivities: the key to active online learning Steal Like and Artist

Before we move on we’d also like to quickly introduce you to Will Thalheimer’s Learning Transfer Evaluation Model (LTEM).

LTEM is based on research into learning and is designed to help organisations get feedback to build more effective learning interventions and validate learning results. It differentiates between knowledge, decision making and task competence and helps you to design for learning transfer.

We’d encourage you to read the full report at the Work-Learning research website. This video will also provide an overview:

See more here

So, when we are designing resources and learner activities, our approach is to design with levels 5, 6 and 7 in mind:

Level 5 - Decision Making Competence (in particular, ‘remembered decision making competence’ - evidenced via their badge applications).
Level 6 - Task Competence (in particular, 'remembered task competence' evidenced via their badge applications).
Level 7 - Transfer (both 'Assisted Transfer' and 'Full Transfer’).

Although LTEM is designed as an evaluation framework, it can play a useful role in informing the design process for learning. After all, if your goal is promote skills development, skills improvement or more generally improve workplace practice, it would be argued that in order to achieve learning transfer, you have to design learning experiences with that in mind.

Learning Design Frameworks

Let’s have a look at the most common frameworks used when designing digital learning resources/courses. In this section we’ll cover ADDIE. SAM and Action Mapping. Let’s start with ADDIE.

ADDIE: ADDIE is an acronym for the five stages of a development process: Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, and Evaluation. and is intended to be used by instructional designers to carefully consider all of the elements leading to the best result.

Lets quickly go over each of the steps

Analyse

In this stage, you are expected to analyse the current situation in terms of training, knowledge gaps etc - What is the point of the training? Why are we doing it? What type of behavioural change is desired? Will training actually help? This should lead to an analysis of training needs and a training plan.

Design

In this step, you take the outcomes of the previous step and use it to make practical decisions. This includes a strategy, delivery methods, structure, duration, assessment, and feedback. The next step is to storyboard your ideas and/or create a prototype. You are creating a blueprint for your courses. So, the outcome of this stage is an overview of the course design and storyboards/prototypes.

Develop

At this stage, you begin to create the courses. You should be heavily guided by the prototype/storyboards at this point. Each element of the course should be developed to match the design phase. The core of the content has already been decided. All you need to add is a level of detail and polish to the courses.

Implement

Once you have completed your courses and you are satisfied that they are fully tested, it’s time to share them with the learner.

Evaluate

Once implemented, you need to know if the course/ resource is having the impact you intended - is it addressing the learning needs you identified.

Although a useful place to start, ADDIE does have some weaknesses:

It tends to be inefficient because it is not iterative.
Also, the linear approach tends to work well for static content but may be restrictive when dealing with user generated content or learning outcomes that do not have a predetermined end state.
It assumes that you can know all of the requirements before you develop the content.

Some people do find ADDIE to be too inflexible, but, if you are familiar and comfortable with Agile Project Management model, you’ll like the SAM approach to learning design.

SAM (Successive Approximation Model):
Think of the successive approximation model as an instructional design method that utilises small, quick steps to the goal, - that uses a continuous iterative design process throughout the lifecycle of development rather than rather than one big leap. It relies on tight timelines and quick turnaround as a catalyst for rapid design & development.

SAM has four phases which you cycle through:

Preparation

This phase is employed to collect background information on learners. This is a rapid phase that generally consists of examining the strengths and weaknesses of learners, learning about inherent prior knowledge, and establishing the overall goals of the project.

In this phase all stakeholders gather and begin brainstorming on the design of training - meeting should consist of brainstorming, rapid prototyping, and repeating. At the conclusion of this start, the team should come away with potential designs for each content area.

Iterative Design

As the project moves into the iterative design phase, the team generally becomes smaller and is narrowed down to Subject Matter Experts and project designers/developers. This phase consists of project planning and additional designing.

This is when project design decisions are made and the instructional components become more polished and tangible.

For any one content area, the design team should strive to create three potential designs. The reason for three is so the team doesn’t become fixated on one design

Basically, it stretches the team to be creative and think beyond the obvious design solutions. [Next Build]

Iterative Developemnt

Once the team has an agreed-upon design, the project then moves into a constant loop of developing, implementing, and evaluating.

This is one of the biggest differentiators with SAM. Unlike ADDIE, which waits until the end of the project to receive feedback, SAM always has something usable that learners can use and interact with at all stages of development. [Next Build]

Alpha, Beta, Gold Release:

The Alpha stage serves as the first version of a fully complete project. At this stage, all components of the course are useable from beginning to end - no major course flaws should be discovered, but it is still common for minor editing opportunities to come up.

The beta is a modified version of the alpha based on feedback and final review.

Once final corrections have been made, the project moves into the gold release and is ready for full deployment.

Finally, I want to introduce you to Action Mapping.

Action Mapping Developed by Cathy Moore, Action Mapping takes that view that we should analyse problems and, when appropriate, design experiences that solve those problems. The experiences shopped be realistic activities through which people make decisions and learn from the results of those decisions.

It breaks the process into 5 steps

What's the problem? How will we know we've solved it? Ask, "What are we currently seeing that tells us we have a problem?" and use the answer to create a project goal.
What do people need to DO, and why aren't they doing it? List the on-the-job behaviours that people need to perform to reach your project goal. List visible, specific behaviours, actions that a someone with a clipboard could observe and check off
How can we help them PRACTICE what they need to do? You're writing performance objectives, avoiding words like "define" or "identify" or other verbs that take place only on a test.

Prioritise these behaviours, and then with your SME take the most important ones through the “Will Training Help Flowchart” one at a time.

Remember, your learners might already know what to do - the key is “Why aren’t they doing it?” - Organisational culture? Procedures getting in the way? Custom & practice?

The goal here is to confirm that training will actually solve the problem, and you're looking for easy, non-training solutions. For the behaviours that really do need training, brainstorm activities that will help people practice making the decisions that they make on the job.

What information MUST they have to complete the practice activity? Next, identify the information that people absolutely must have for each activity. Also decide whether the info needs to be memorised or can be looked up in a job aid.
Create a stream of activities: And, finally, create a sequence of learning inputs and activities to support the outcomes you want learners to achieve from the process

You can read more about Action Mapping in Cathy Moore’s excellent book:

User Experience Design for Learning (UXDL)

Also worthy of mention here is the User Experience design for Learning (UXDL) framework developed by The Centre for Extended Learning (CEL) at the University of Waterloo. Their UXDL design framework is based on psychological research in cognition and learning and places learners at the centre of the design process, ensuring that courses/resources are useful, desirable, accessible, credible, and intuitive.

The UXDL Honeycomb was inspired by Peter Morville’s UX Honeycomb, which they adapted for a teaching and learning context with permission from the author.

The UXDL Honeycomb starts with looking at how to create valuable learning experiences with content. Content is time-consuming and expensive to produce and, well-designed content can significantly facilitate learning.

Each cell in the honeycomb surfaces evidence-based principles that will help you create content that is useful, desirable, accessible, credible, and intuitive (findable & usable).

We would encourage you to explore this framework in detail at the UXDL website and consider how you could apply this to you work.

Activity 9

Blog

Identify a piece of learning (either classroom based, or online) from you job role and describe it in up to 500 words. Think about how you apply the UXDL framework to redesign this piece of learning to create a resource which is:

useful;
desirable
credible
useful;
accessible
intuitive

You should post your response to this activity (or a link to your response) on your blog and discuss with your peers.

A Few Closing Words

In completing this module, we hoped you would: develop an understanding of several different models of learning; understand benefits to the learner and the organisation of applying these models to your learning and development practice and grasp the importance of organisational context in supporting effective learning. Most importantly, we hope you can now see how you can apply these models to your work in learning and development.

It’s worth emphasising that this isn’t the only module where you will be encouraged to think about how to help people learn effectively. For example, in Module 1 (Fundamentals of Learning Design) touched on topics in this area and, in Module 4 (Learning in a Networked World), you will again explore topics related to this module such as Connectivism and Social Learning etc. Learning about how people learn is something of a recurring theme on this programme and it’s our hope that by the end of this programme, you leave with a range of strategies to help you create learning designs that ‘work’.