As leaders, we can struggle to provide thought leadership while inspiring team members to use their own creativity. But how about design innovation? Leave design to the designers, right? Too many managers treat e-learning as primarily the concern of instructional designers, without recognizing their own role in a forward-thinking vision.
The problem with expecting designers to drive creativity is that factors affecting design often lie outside their sphere of influence. Design may be shaped by budgets, delivery technologies, learning management, authoring tool selection, vendor selection, etc. Disruption and innovation often call for design analysis at a different level. Without that analysis, we may find ourselves forcing old design on new technologies.
Too often, e-learning follows its own conventions, regardless of changing contexts, while the rest of the Web goes along without it. We’d all like to believe that conventions originate from research or best practices but they mostly come from practicality. Someone devises a workaround to solve a problem, the workaround is reused, the reuse creates an expectation, the need for efficiency leads to automation, and the result is lock-in,an approach perpetuated in large part because of its practicality.
For example, let’s choose the ubiquitous narrator persona. This strategy is decades old, has survived several shifts in technology, and is available as a template in most do-it-yourself tools. The practice is locked in. It doesn’t matter that using course narrators — a practice that migrated from live instruction to video to pre-video WBT — was originally a workaround, or that subsequent research disproved the efficacy of the strategy. Furthering the inertia, the do-it-yourself tools allow busy designers to reuse this strategy very efficiently.
The problem begins when we start to believe that locked-in conventions set a standard. Over the past few years, we’ve seen the rise of several trends across the web at large that should disrupt e-learning design, but are seen rarely or only at a relatively slow pace in training. These disruptions include:
- Mobile design
- Responsive design
- HTML5
- Material design
- UX design
We don’t ignore them completely. We sometimes address one issue, like mobile, without addressing its cousin responsive design. These issues have been called out as key trends for years. The disconnect is that behemoths like Apple Inc., Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp., have come up with solutions and approaches to address these factors, but we don’t follow them in our courseware; they were not designed specifically for learning, they are not in our template libraries, and they push us outside the narrow framework of our locked-in strategies. The key players are doing user experience, or UX, design and testing to test their navigation schemes. Learning professionals usually can’t afford to — so why aren’t we following those who do?
Here are some of the biggest gaps that could be a starting point to revisit old standards:
|
E-learning Conventions |
Web Media Trends |
|
Unique or themed menus & navigation |
Standard menus & navigation |
|
Timed events & integrated media |
User-triggered events & segmented media |
|
Immersive environments |
Less thematic environments |
|
Fixed layouts |
Flexible in-flow layouts |
|
Desktop delivery |
Delivery to multiple devices |
|
Gratuitous “interactivity” |
Richer media |
|
Horizontal page or slide content |
Content that scrolls vertically |
|
Ignored or hidden browser controls |
Anticipated and leveraged browser controls |
|
Locked navigation |
Searchable content |
|
Experienced as an individual learner |
Integrated with social features |
The Web is going in a different direction because of changing technology and changing expectations. Consider user-triggered events. E-learning used to favor timed events because we wanted to fully design the learner experience. For several years now, timed events have been prohibited on certain tablets because of performance and security standards.
We also know users want more control. Consequently, the Web has moved to user-initiated media playback. There is both a technology and a UX rationale. Can we have learners control media without losing instructional value? Of course, but it takes a little imagination.
Momentum is shifting learner expectations away from the way courses usually work. Do a comprehensive evaluation of solutions. They should all equip designers with the rationale they need to toss out tired conventions, benchmarking designs against leaders from other industries like marketing and technology.
We want to be proud when stakeholders ask, “Doesn’t that look too much like a website?” Yes, actually. And that’s OK because we can take the best of the web, infuse it with creativity and instructional know-how, and reinvent the UX for today’s learners.
Michael Noble is chief learning officer at Allen Communication. Comment below or email editor@CLOmedia.com.
