Harrison Hartley – Instructional Designer

I had been asked to give my opinion on a third-party created eLearning module to import into our new LMS. I gave my thoughts which boiled down to “The content is sound, although it’s a little heavy on the text”. One of the C-Suite replied “Yeah, didn’t the one last year have a lot more videos?” The problem was that the module we had last year was tied to our former LMS platform that was being phased out. I had to agree with them. The new module was spaced out well-enough to allow for someone to leave, come back and feel like they’ve retained momentum.

However, I felt myself zoning out about 20 minutes in. I was having difficulty concentrating, and with no assessments or quizzes to check my knowledge retention I found myself blazing through the modules with little idea of what I had just actually read. If I was feeling this sensation, our learners definitely were going to feel something similar when interacting with the content.

Years ago I had taken some compliance training with my old company while I worked in Tech Support. Some of our Tech Support called for us to interact with sensitive data – nothing financial or medical, but information that couldn’t be left hanging around. One of the modules we had to take was on making sure sensitive information was disposed of properly from our “Sandboxes”, or isolated servers we used for troubleshooting purposes. When I took the module, I remember in the first 10 minutes I had to watch a 5 minute video, take part in a roleplaying exercise to choose the correct option, a matching exercise, another 2 minute video followed by a ranked choice exercise. In retrospect, it almost felt like a proof-of-concept for whatever authoring tool the designers had chosen so the higher ups could see where their money went. I was already burnt out on this module and I still had another 15 minutes to get through.

Interactivity can be such a lifeline for Instructional Designers that helps us pull focus and maintain it. It can also be where attention is lost to the next flashing button to drop the story we’ve built to actually have the person learn. One of the more difficult pieces with this is having the people tangentially involved in a project who are not the designer, SME or immediate stakeholders giving their input. In my experience if you are not one of the roles immediately working in the project your sense of how “exciting” the content can be is diminished. My friend who is a graphic designer has spent many a night with me laughing over the clients who have no other feedback except the evergreen “It’s good… but can we make it pop more?”.

I recall a moment where my band went to a Professional Mixing Engineer to mix our record. We were all really looking forward to his advice and mixing techniques that he had created in his career. At one point I remember we thought of having a coda to a song be this big, airy, ambient part with lots of room sound and reverb. When we listened to playback, the opposite happened. It was suddenly tiny, dead and almost claustrophobic. “Hey, what gives?” we asked him. His reply was “Well, the rest of this song is so BIG, that if we had the coda be big then none of it would sound big.” I have never forgotten that advice. We had to make sure we had dynamics throughout the album, not only in volume but in composition. If the brain encounters the same stimuli over and over again in a relatively short period of time, the brain will start to acclimate and tune out the stimuli. I’m not saying that a wall of text is the way to go either. A wall of text is still over stimulation, just not in the way it might usually be pictured. 

How do we help fight this? Mixing media as well as scenarios and if you can, mixing modalities, helps the brain bounce from station to station and with a little help, can let the learner take a moment to “reset” themselves to the new learning object. This quick period can also help the brain digest the information before moving onto the next interaction which in turn will build a more solid foundation. The more solid a foundation, the easier that retention becomes.

“Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should” is something I try to think of anytime I find myself wanting to throw in an interaction in a piece of content. Is it actually a necessary step for the learner to engage in this particular moment, or am I just reaching for a hammer because everything looks like a nail?