Recently in Instructional Design Category

The other day I downloaded a beta version of Adobe Edge. Edge is a simple animation tool that uses HTML5, JavaScript, etc. to produce and play web animations. Here's what I was able to do in 45 minutes with no prior experience.

This kinda reminds me of Flash 1.0. Simple, easy to use.  I hope Adobe keeps Edge simple. If it does, lunkheads like me that need to show simple, non-interactive animations to strengthen an instructional point might actually be able to do so ourselves!

Action Games and Role-Playing Games (RPGs) architectures often include several levels of "live" obstacles, from weak (easily defeated) characters to strong (tough to beat) bosses. In a previous post I diagrammed the relation of the weaker characters to the stronger. Recently I started thinking about the names we used for the weaker characters we encounter in games (and perhaps the work environment) and came up with four names: Minion, Peon, Lackey, and Stooge. Are these just names, or do they imply something more? Let's take a look at their respective definitions, courtesy of Wikipedia.

Minion



A minion is a follower devoted to serving his master relentlessly.

Peon




The word peon has a range of meanings but its primary usage is to describe laborers with little control over their employment conditions.

Lackey



A lackey or lacquey is a term for a uniformed manservant, in its original meaning. The modern connotation of "servile follower" appeared later, in 1588. Lackey is typically used as a derogatory term for a servant with little or no self-respect, who belittles themselves in order to gain advantage. Such advantage is often assumed to be slight, temporary and often illusory.

Stooge



A stooge is generally defined as a person that is under the control of another. Being called a stooge is an insult. Stooge can also sometimes be used to mean "idiot."

I also came across a few other related terms: Sycophant, Flunky, and Toady.

Sycophant

1. One who uses compliments to gain self-serving favor or advantage from another.
2. One who seeks to gain through the powerful and influential.

Flunky



A sycophant; a servant or hanger-on who is kept for their loyalty or muscle rather than their intellect.

Toady

A sycophant.

Wow - we have all sorts of words to describe the followers of others. In the case of most action games and RPGs, these folks are evil to boot; creatures you have to defeat not just to win the game, but to deliver the world from the clutches of evil!

How does this play out in an educational environment with added game-like elements? First, we need a richer vocabulary to describe prerequisite learning skills. Currently we have "skill" and "pre-requisite" skill. Dull, limiting, and perhaps dangerous. If we can't clearly define types of pre-requisite skills, then it may be difficult to determine the best approach to teaching that skill. Also, we have no way to map the instructional type to the best game-like approach.

Just taking a stab at this, we could begin defining pre-requisite skills just as we do the to-be-learned skill by asking the following: Is the pre-req in the psychomotor, cognitive, or affective domain? (See http://www.personal.psu.edu/bxb11/Objectives/ for more on these domains.)

If it is in the psychomotor domain, is it an observing skill, an imitating skill, a practicing skill, or an adapting skill?

If it is a cognitive skill, is it a remember, understand, apply, analyze, evaluate, or create skill?

If it is an affective skill, is it at the receiving, responding, valuing, organization, or characterization by value level of commitment.

 Once you have that, how do you tie this to a gamelike element? Hmmm. I think I'll save that for another post; this one is long enough! I'm not sure you can even do so in a way that can be easily operationalized.

Do you hear about bored, non-engaged students? Are you wondering what you can do about it? While there is no magic bullet for ensuring engagement in instruction, knowledge about the concept of flow may help you as you build learning activities.

 

Have you ever had an experience where hours passed by in minutes, where the light of an impossibly early dawn warmed your furrowed brow as you "came to your senses?" Welcome to the state of flow.

 

Flow is a term coined by M. Csikszentmihalyi (1990). It is a merging of the learner's total attention with the task at hand such that all other sensory and cognitive distractions are invisible to the learner. In these cases, the learner's attention is totally on the learning environment and it is very difficult to distract him/her. The learner is unaware of time passing, and may later remark on this.

 

So why is flow important? It may be the ultimate intrinsically motivational state of learning, where the learner is so immersed in his/her learning that everything except the learning environment conceptually disappears for a time. If, as learning designers, we can foster flow in a learning experience, we've guaranteed cognitive engagement. No more bored students!

 

Is flow possible to create in an online distance learning environment? Jones (1998) contends that it is possible to foster flow in a learning environment. He outlines eight criteria a learner must experience to achieve flow (see Table 1). As these criteria are broadly based, these are easily adopted to online distance learning environments:

Table 1 - Elements of Flow

Criteria	Method
1. Task can be completed.	Scaffolded tasks that rest within the Zone of Proximal Development.
2. Learners can concentrate on task.	Reduce cognitive load on environmental operations and low-level cognitive tasks.
3. Task has clear goals.	Provide problems that are relevant to the learner and the content.
4. Task provides immediate feedback.	Environment is responsive to user interactions and reacts accordingly. Actions that are deemed positive by the designer are positively reinforced. Actions that are deemed negative by the designer are negatively reinforced.
5. Deep (losing awareness of real environment & loss of real-world concerns) but effortless involvement in task.	Relevance of task, smooth integration of tools and manipulation mechanisms into the environment, perception of moving towards a desired goal state.
6. Learners exercise a sense of control over their actions.	Learner control of the environment. Ability to navigate to a desired location. Ability to change the environment and see the results.
7. Concern for self disappears during flow, but sense of self is stronger after flow activity.	Achievable goals. Tasks within the Zone of Proximal Development. Eliminate personal "danger."
8. Sense of time is altered.	Tasks and information must flow smoothly from one to the other. There can be no disjointed experiences, such as stopping t figure out what a particular button does in the middle of a task.

I'll add to this that you have to balance the degree of challenge with the current level of student skill, as diagram 1 below illustrates. Too much challenge = no flow. Too easy of a challenge, no flow.

Diagram 1 - Balancing Challenge Difficulty and Student Skill to Obtain a Flow State

All this sounds great, and we have some great ideas here we can operationalize as we build learning environments, but one thing is missing. How do we quantify the learner's current skill level in relation to the level of the current challenge, in a way that allows us to make on-the-fly adjustments to maintain the state of flow?

 

This is not a question that is easily answered. It seems to me that we have to have tools that facilitate adjustments to the learning environment, and we need input from the learner to spark and direct those adjustments. The former is challenging but possible. The latter requires us to rethink learner input with some out of the box thinking.

 

We need to constantly gather data from the learner to guide adjustments to the learning environment. We should build in quick self-checks for the learner, such as "How frustrated are you right now?" questions. We could attach sensors to register galvanic skin levels, eye movement, or perhaps use new "hands off" sensors such as the Xbox 360 Kinect system to evaluate body language. In short, we need more data on the exact state of the learner at a given point in time to move towards an ensured flow state for all.

 

Some of this sounds far-fetched. In the past, it was simply impossible - we did not have the technology to support such constant learner evaluation. Now that it is (somewhat crudely) possible, do we take the next step and begin investigating the possibilities?

 

 

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The psychology of optimal experience. New York: Harper Collins.

 

Jones, M. G. (1998). Creating engagement in computer-based learning environments [Online]. Available: http://itech1.coe.uga.edu/itforum/paper30/paper30.html [2011, April 21].

 

Holy crap! If this is how the majority feels, then we learning designers will forever be marginalized. What are you thoughts, and please don't give me the shining examples of faculty who "see the light." Talk instead about your typical faculty - do they feel the same? What are you thoughts on all this?

I continue to struggle on how to reach beyond the innovators to at least the early majority in terms of learning design, and when I read comments like this, I am truly discouraged.

I just watched Tom Chatfield's TED talk titled "7 Ways Games Reward the Brain."

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/tom_chatfield_7_ways_games_reward_the_brain.html

He's really nailed many thoughts I've had over the past several years what great things we can take from games and use them in higher education. Tom put them together in a decent, bite-sized package. I'm jealous! Guess that's why he has a TED Talk and I just listen. Still, in my new role as the Educational Gaming Commons Evangelist, I want to summarize what he spoke of in my own words.

Five Things We Can Take From Games

1. Use experience bars to measure progress.

In games, this is so common that it's absence is the exception. Yet in non-game learning activities, we seldom use a visual clue to indicate progress. The current PSU course management system, ANGEL, can do so (in a fashion) via the use of milestones.

Why is this a great idea? Students want feedback, and want to know they are on the right path. It's that simple.

These are currently cumbersome to set up, so I doubt many faculty even bother. Still, this is an idea worthy of examination, and one that should be considered as a criterion for PSU's exploration of alternatives to ANGEL. We also need to think about ways to make this EASY for faculty to implement outside of a CMS. Can we build a simple experience bar tool to enable faculty to tie learning objectives to progress, to assessment, etc.? Can we develop templates faculty can use to get this running quickly? Can we show faculty how to do this on their own with tools they know well?

Of course, all this implies that faculty have conceptualized their course as a series of sub-goals that lead to goals that lead to total course achievement - not just completion. For many faculty, this will mean deconstructing their course, re-conceptualizing it, and then rebuilding it so a progress bar actually makes sense.

2. Multiple long and short-term aims.

This is tied to the progress bar idea. You have a variety of tasks or "aims" to accomplish to reach the goal. Some are easier/quicker than others. You can work on multiple tasks at the same time. Each task is quantified and the relationship of it to the ultimate goal is made apparent. Tom class these "calibrated slices." Here's a quick and dirty diagram I made to illustrate this.

 

Note I tied goals to bosses and minions. In many games you have to fight the ultimate boss, but to get there you have to fight through the lieutenants, but to get to the lieutenants you have to fight through their minions. Replace boss and minion with goals, and the relationship from multiple "aims" to instructional goals is clear. Also, if you are in instructional designer, this diagram looks suspiciously like a pre-requisites task analysis!

In my opinion, this is a great motivational device for students. They are given the main goal, and the paths they need to take to achieve the main goal. They can see the sequence of activities they must undertake to reach the main goal. In other words, instructional sequences are no longer a mystery to the student; they are participatory events.

Do many faculty think about goals, sub-goals, etc.? In my experience, no. They need an instructional designer to initially introduce the concept and most likely to work through at least one pre-requisite task analysis for at least one main course goal. Then they get it. However, I don't see many instructional designers doing pre-requisite task analyses nowadays. Tom gives us a great reason to do these and while his rationale for doing so comes from outside the ID field, it is no less valid.

3 & 4. Reward Effort and Provide Rapid, Frequent Feedback

This almost goes without saying, but if you look at good games, there is a plethora of feedback for completed tasks. In contrast, how do we mainly reward students in a class? With grades on quizzes and exams. With grades on papers. With a team grade. That's OK, but it's not enough. It's the game equivalent of offering a reward ONLY for taking down the big boss. What about all those sub-tasks? Why not reward them as well? How difficult is it to assign a weighted grade to a student that completes a reading on time? I use grades here as a feedback reward because that's what students are training to look for.

We can easily extend this to other reward structures besides grades. Why not have a leader (top scores) board for some of the tasks in a course, one that carries over many class sections/years? For example, display previous top scores for that nasty team project and challenge the current student teams to beat them. Why not give some sort of reward to the one student that provided the most insightful posts, as voted on by the other students?

5. Add an Element of Uncertainty

Games are great at not letting you know exactly what's coming next, or what the next reward might be. This "lights the brain up," according to Tom. When we can't quite predict something, we get really excited about it.

This is seems to contradict the clear map that long and short-term tasks can provide, but if you place the uncertainty inside a particular task, then it makes sense. Think of this as driving down a road. You know you need to be on this road to reach your destination, but would you rather be on a straight road with clear visibility for miles, or would you want a road with at least a few twists and turns?

This is tied to Vroom's (1964) expectancy-value theory, where an expectancy is the anticipation held by an organism that under a given set of circumstances, a particular behavior will lead to a particular outcome, and also to the Yerks-Dodson Law, that states that as tasks are increased in difficulty, the optimum level of motivation declines. The trick is to arouse a student's knowledge-seeking curiosity without over-stimulating it. Some uncertainty within a task can do just that.

(If you want to read more on my thoughts about motivation and games as viewed through the lens of instructional design, please see

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.124.8975&rep=rep1&type=pdf)

The rest of Tom's talk is very interesting. He talks about how games can manipulate memory, confidence, etc. I agree with him, but it's difficult to make operational as I've tried to do above.

Tom concludes by giving some examples of how we could motivate entire populations to perform civic tasks, to improve education, etc. by using the principles he just outlined. It's interesting to contemplate, but I wonder if some would feel they were being manipulated? We do this with advertising, but this is at a higher level. Do listen to his talk! I'm interested in hearing your conclusions afterward.

I just read a post on this that written back in May. Thanks to Clark Quinn for the Tweet on it! So what is a "quality?" If you look up the definition, you find (among other defs) - "an essential and distinguishing attribute of something or someone."

So is a quality the same as a skill? Seems to me qualities are more on the affective side. Things like having empathy, caring about the completeness of your work, etc. If you read the comments to the mentioned post, you'll see people are mixing skills and affective characteristics together.

This isn't something I've really thought much about. I have my own list of skills an ID should possess, but not qualities. This is something I'll have to ponder more. Just as we divide learning into psycho-motor, cognitive, and affective areas, maybe examining IDs from these viewpoints would shed some light on just who the heck we are.

Tonight in the supermarket I watched a 2-year old watch the cashier work through a problem at the register. Her eyes flicked back and forth between the register keys being pushed and the cashier's face. Do think the little girl wasn't learning? Guess again. This type of learning is akin to what John Seely Brown & Paul Duguid term stolen knowledge.

This is a concept I've been trying to wrap my brain around for some time. Actually, not the concept itself, but how it relates to gaming, virtual worlds, and simulations. There is a fantastic amount of stolen knowledge that happens in a game space. Some comes from the environment, some from reflection, some from game processes, and some from other players (in online games).

How do we quantify this? How do we weigh its value? This is critical as we move forward in our investigations of these spaces most feel are only for fun, yet are truly designed for learning. Just because it's not formal, traditional learning doesn't negate it's value. Yet at the end of the day, week, or semester, we need to assess and prove learning took place. Thus the conundrum.

The immediate tendency is to slam the entire educational system, thump our fists on the table, and decree, "The system is broken! We need to fix it, and here's another example why we should do so." While I don't disagree with the need for systemic change in education, I feel there exists, just beyond my grasp, a way to tie stolen knowledge to acceptable learning practices. Anyone have a smart pill? And an aspirin. My fist hurts.

I've been involved with instructional design at PSU since 1984. More recently, I've become involved in Learning Design. It's a superset of ID, encompassing not only ID, but instructional technology, systemic change, administration, and (IMO) just about anything else that impacts on the educational experience, such as the physical learning environment.

We have over 100 Instructional Designers at Penn State, but no one, to the best of my knowledge, is listed as a Learning Designer. So I wonder if it would benefit the entire Penn State Community to start thinking about Learning Design? We already have taken steps in that direction via the Learning Design Summer Camp [http://ets.tlt.psu.edu/wiki/Learning_Design_Summer_Camp_2009], but we've not looked at Learning Design per se. We've not examined what Learning Design is, how it can and should affect how we plan instruction, how we work together in teams, and how it affects our career paths.

So what is Learning Design? Clark Quinn views it as the intersection of instructional design, information design and experience design. Earlier I alluded it's a superset of instructional design. I think if you step back from the doing and look from the balcony on what's involved in creating educational materials and experiences, you'll be closer to what LD is.

How does it affect instruction? How doesn't it? For an instructional designer, it means taking into account many things we simply ignore. Take the typical prerequisite skills diagram. In this type of analytical diagram, one lists the skills needed to perform the task at hand. At some point you draw a dotted line separating the skills into two sets. The skills that fall below the dotted line are considered already mastered - you don't need to worry about teaching them.



Now imagine vertical dotted lines on each side of the listed skills. Anything that lies outside those vertical dotted lines is not dealt with by instructional design, but rather by learning design. I've only included a few LD things in this illustration - hope you get the point I'm trying to make. Instructional Designers need to not only dig deep, they need to look wide to see what else impacts their tiny portion of the entire learning experience.


So how do we at PSU go about learning more about this tremendous challenge and opportunity? What does this mean for career advancement? I know many IDs at PSU feel their upward mobility is curtailed. Is a move into Learning Design a way to foster a stronger career path?

I'm asking these questions in the hopes of sparking a true dialog with anyone that works to develop instruction - what can/should we be doing and exploring in this space?

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?

1. Gain Attention
2. Inform Learner of Objective
3. Recall Prior Knowledge
4. Present Material
5. Provide Guided Learning
6. Elicit Performance
7. Provide Feedback
8. Assess Performance
9. 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.