The Director of Marketing and Advertising for Information Technology Services at Penn State is retiring. Last week, several candidates for the position were brought in, and one session was an open presentation/forum, where each candidate did the dog & pony show, then fielded questions from the audience.
My question was a written one - "How do you promote a service to PSU students in five seconds or less?" The moderators must have thought it was a joke, as it never made it to the candidates. Yet I was dead serious.
Some say today's students have shorter attention spans than previous generations. I disagree. It not that their attention spans are shorter, it's that the ability to gain and hold their attention is harder. There's too much noise. Even if you get someone's attention, the background noise continues, and chances are a blip will occur that will shift that person's attention away from your stuff. Time - the fourth dimension - is our enemy when it comes to reaching the current generation. We have to get in, snatch attention away from so many competing elements, make our point, and get out.
As an instructional designer, I always pay attention to TV ads. the good ones do what we need to do. In 30 seconds or less.TV advertisers understand they have a blip of time to reach and convince their audience to buy or do something. Instructional Designers can learn a great deal from their approach.
So what would an instructional lesson designed to acknowledge the fourth dimension be like? What if we tried to meld it with
Gagne's Nine Events of Instruction?
- Gain Attention
- Inform Learner of Objective
- Recall Prior Knowledge
- Present Material
- Provide Guided Learning
- Elicit Performance
- Provide Feedback
- Assess Performance
- Enhance Retention and Transfer
Gain Attention - Let's borrow from TV here. We need something splashy, with some cool background music. Something that reaches learners on the affective level, pulling them in and motivating them. In five seconds or less.
Inform Learner of Objective - Well, how about using Twitter's 140 character limit as a limit on how to present these? KISS - Keep It Simple, Stupid (or Keep It Short and Sweet).
Recall Prior Knowledge - How cool would it be to be able to link to learner's e-Portfolios and pull up relevant artifacts, visibly showing how the new lesson ties to existing knowledge? Work for assimilation, not accommodation unless you must.
Ausubel would be so proud!
Present Material - Wow - this is a tough one. This is where the bulk of time is spent. Again, turning to a body of evidence of prior learning, like an e-Portfolio, why not do a quick and dirty assessment of learner's prior knowledge, then pull up a quick Yes/No survey that asks the learners if they know the listed aspects of the material to be learned? Let's say there are 10 "chunks" of content, each relating to a specific learning objective. Some program/expert system/LMS pulls up some evidence of learning artifacts from the learner's e-Portfolio perhaps tied to the current objectives and asks the learner to indicate what they do/do not know about the current objectives. Then the instruction is tailored to the individual to present just the material that is needed. This implies an underlying electronic system that can handle this, and a body of evidence to tap into, but it could be done without all that - it would just take more up-front work bythe designers an implementers of the instruction.
Provide Guided Learning - How do you provide help as needed that's quick and unobtrusive? I think we cover that in F2F situations fairly well. We look for body language cues to indicate if learners "get it," adjust as needed and offer additional information, than carry on. In electronic situations it's different. We can provide the tried and true question every several minutes to see if the learners "got it," then brach instruction accordingly. A bit old fashioned, but it works for learners that don;t have a clue about their own learning styles and don't know how to reflect on their own learning. Better would be to teach learners up front these skills and provide them with Electronic Performance Support Systems (EPSS) that allow them to choose when and where they need guidance. Best would be some way to monitor students galvantic skin responses, eye movements, etc. and use that strem of data to make decisions akin to an instructor that can observe the learners F2F, but that's far fetched for now.
Elicit Performance & Assess Performance - Ah , the crux of the biscuit! Did the learner actually learn? Why not build the performance & assessment right into the instruction - couple it so that it occurs naturally, instead of having a time-consuming TEST at the end of an instructional sequence. Simulations and games offer this possibility, as do mini-activities build into instruction.
Provide Feedback - Following the "Elicit Performance" step, feedback should occur throughout the instructional sequence, where it will be perceived as natural and not a timely add-on after instruction.
Enhance Retention and Transfer - This fails to happen so many times in education. We teach, assess, them move on to another topic that may have little conceptually to do with the previous topic. In recent years instructional theorists have moved away from the notion of far transfer, citing little empirical evidence to support instructional activities that lead to it. So way try to build it into the instruction at all? Why not ask the learners to make the connections, in the form of reflective exercises that are tied to an e-Portfolio, exercise that the AI/expert system for the
next instructional sequence can tap into to KISS this upcoming instructional experience?
So - instructional design and the fourth dimension. We can't escape the fourth dimension, for without it you have no learning. Learning takes time. Yet in today's world, with so many things constantly clamoring for our attention, instructional designers need to look for ways to design the five-second lesson. We'll never get there, but it's a goal for which it's worth striving.
