Instructional versus experiential design: do you have what it takes?
Thank you Koreen Olbrish for this guest post. Koreen is on the LEEF 2010 Advisory Committee. She also is CEO of Tandem Learning. She is an entrepreneur currently developing innovative, experiential learning solutions with like-minded team players
If your instructional design experience has focused on e-learning modules, workshop development or print instruction, you don’t have the skill set to design experiential learning. At least, not yet.
Instructional design typically focuses on the systematic layout of content in a way that can be easily understood, and hopefully learned, by the intended audience. Classroom curriculum development, print, e-learning typically present the content, explain the concepts, and allow for some kind of practice before providing assessment what you learned. Most instructional design degree programs focus on this pattern, and applying it to different content. Many instructional designers become experts at breaking difficult concepts down into easy-to-understand, bite-sized pieces.
This actually makes a lot of sense, right? If something is difficult to understand, it’s important to simplify it so that it is understandable. This type of instruction is important, and has its place, but it’s not the same as experiential design.
The truth is, life is complicated; decisions are complicated. Many times, there isn’t a right or wrong answer; there are better and worse answers. There are often hidden implications, in addition to the obvious ones, for any decision we make. There’s a reason why it’s called complex decision-making. It’s not easy. And you really can’t simplify it so that it’s easier to understand. We can really only get better at dealing with the complexities of the real choices we are faced with every day by practicing them.
Enter experiential design: where immersive and experiential learning succeeds in replicating realistic environments. Experiential design presents complex problems that require deeper reflection than most concepts presented in traditional training. To design experientially, you have to design a mirror to reality. You wouldn’t want a doctor who hadn’t practiced numerous times and faced a multitude of different situations to perform surgery on you. Nor would you want to be a passenger on a plane with a pilot who had only flown a couple times. Why would you want a company full of employees who weren’t skilled in handling the complexities of business decisions that companies face every day? No, those decisions typically aren’t life or death, but they could mean the life or death of your organization.
In real life, there are very seldom heroes who always make the right choice or villains that always make the wrong ones. Most of us struggle day-to-day with facing tough choices, weighing all of the options, and making the best decisions we can. The potential of experiential learning design is to be able to provide practice making those decisions. It allows us to see the potential short-and long-term implications before we make the decisions in real life. Call it insight; call it reflection. Experiential design allows us to help people overcome short-sighted decisions by providing the long-term implications.
Isn’t that the kind of understanding we’d like to see in all of our organizations? Isn’t that what we’d like to see in ourselves?
I’m looking forward to talking about this topic more at Learning Solutions, March 24-26th in Orlando, in my session with Ellen Wagner and Cammy Bean, titled New Skills for Instructional Designers. And I’m thrilled to be participating in Harrisburg University’s LEEF conference June 17-18th where I’ll be spending 2 days hearing amazing case study examples of experiential design in simulations, games, and virtual worlds for enterprise (& I hear I’ll be presenting on alternate reality games as well.).
It’s time that instructional designers more specifically define their skill sets and identify their expertise. Are you designing for simplicity or complexity? In either case, do you know what it takes?
If you would like to hear more from Koreen you can hear her presentation on alternate reality games by attending the LEEF Conference 2010. Register now!
I agree that I want my learners to think critically about the decisions they make, but I still start with “filtered reality,” a simplified version of what they will do on the job. After mastering that level they can move on to the next one that more closely approximates reality. The problem often lies in the fact that too many managers think that once you teach the basic info it’s simply a matter of letting learners practice back on the job until they “put it all together.” Too often, I suspect, this does not occur.
I appreciate the concept of immersion training, however, I would suggest that NO instructional designer has ‘what it takes’ to develop this kind of learning by him or herself.
To develop this sort of training, I believe ‘what it takes’, at minimum, is a deep understanding of the subject/task as obtained through consensus of multiple subject matter experts; an understanding of the barriers each learner’s environment will present when he or she takes action; and an understanding of how the learners themselves process and try to apply the new information. (I work in healthcare which is an extraordinarily complex environment.)
It has been my experience that this level of detail can only be obtained through working with key stakeholders including those who are experts at the tasks being taught in multiple realistic environments and the learners themselves.
Additionally, I would suggest that the ID must always be aware that those who would be tapped as ‘experts’ in complex fields such as medicine would likely have a stake in preserving their way of doing things, even if the technology or environment has changed and calls for new behavior.
This all costs a tremendous amount of time and money and the ROI can be very difficult to quantify given the complexity of an environment and confounding factors that can impact learner behavior besides the provided education itself.
I would be interested to see training for IDs that would provide effective guidance on the difficult issue of resolving conflicts of opinion between subject matter experts and stakeholders.
Thanks for the opportunity to comment.
Karen Holloway