Is a course really the answer?
Let’s imagine for a moment that you have a kidney stone (sorry!). After the drama of the emergency clinic is over and you’re comfortably drugged, you want to know why the stone formed and how you can avoid another one. What do you do?
Web sites: quick
If you’re like many people, you go to Google, which gives you several sites like this plain English site from the US government and this more advanced one from the Mayo Clinic. Thanks to the concise menus and clear headings on these sites, you quickly learn what you want to know.
Online course: slow
Google also shows you this online course at Medline. But it’s a lot harder to get information from the course, due to the slow narration and the tiny amount of information on each screen.
Even in your narcotic bliss you get impatient. “Courses are no good,” you think. “It’s a lot easier to learn things from a web site.”
Fair?
But are you being fair? A different course design would probably be more effective. Maybe someone with a bigger budget could do a Flash cartoon showing the adventures of Stan the Stone, a bookish fellow who is wrongly evicted from a quiet corner of the kidney and who wreaks his revenge in a hell-raising road trip through the urinary tract.
But most courses are like the one you found: click Next, see a snippet of info, click Next… And would Stan the Stone let you go directly to what you want to know? Which leads me to ask:
Courses: what are they good for?
When should we put information in a click-Next-to-continue course rather than a web page? By “web page,” I mean a concise reference on the intranet with useful illustrations and maybe some embedded Flash interactions, searchable and immediately available, with information from a reputable expert.
If our main goal is to provide information, I think an intranet page should be the default, especially as wikis are replacing conventional intranets and it becomes easier to create content. Apparently others agree, as corporations rush to embrace more flexible approaches to learning.
Maybe a standalone course is a good answer in these situations:
- The learners need a place to practice. A simulation or highly interactive course will let learners practice safely and privately before trying things in the real world. (Not something “click Next to continue” usually delivers.)
- The information is challenging and learners will benefit from a lot of animation and a mostly linear presentation.
- We want to control learners. This isn’t a good reason, in my opinion, but I realize that it’s a consideration in many organizations.
- Ummm…what else? Help me out. When is a click-Next-to-continue course a better solution than a concise, clearly organized web page?
on December 13th, 2007 at 4:41 pm
I think a general answer is that you use structured instruction when the user needs to learn (remember) the information rather than just refer to it. You might remember something you read on a website, but you’re much more likely to if you’re required to work with the materials using examples, case studies, practical assignments and reflective exercises.
on December 13th, 2007 at 4:52 pm
Clive, thanks for your comment. I agree that we need to interact with information–use it–to remember it well. However, a web site can provide that interaction with embedded Flash, case studies, examples, and so forth. A site can also be highly structured, with a menu showing the recommended path, for example.
My concern is that we seem to use click-Next courses automatically, without considering whether they’re the best solution. As a result, we get multiple copies of the same information in different forms–a course in the LMS, a page on the intranet, maybe a PDF too–and they get out of sync with each other.
A course-like set of HTML pages in the intranet not only can provide the interactivity that learners need, they can also serve as a just-in-time reference.
on December 13th, 2007 at 5:20 pm
Janet Clarey has just posted a great slideshow making related points here: http://brandon-hall.com/janetclarey/?p=453. Highly recommended!
on December 13th, 2007 at 6:01 pm
Good point Cathy, although I’ve hardly ever seen this done.
on December 13th, 2007 at 9:59 pm
Thanks Cathy. I had to repost the slideshow due to some annoying typos. New link is http://brandon-hall.com/janetclarey/?p=454
Re: your question…when is a click-Next-to-continue course a better solution than a concise, clearly organized web page?
Perhaps when it must be tracked and reported on. I have seen some compliance courses that track how long it took you to complete the course (so you didn’t just click through). It would be hard to show “completion” of a clearly organized web page. In the past, I actually had to produce documentation of compliance training completions for employees in response to litigation and regulatory inquiries. This was always something that got under my skin. Some of these mandatory compliance ‘courses’ had to be taken by senior executives. It was probably their first experience with e-learning. And it was bad.
on December 14th, 2007 at 7:17 am
One aspect in favour of ‘course’ style page-turners is where you want to focus on one small part of the overall info – say a definition or example – then another then another. It involves the designer making a decision that the subject requires this – it should be a deliberate decision to depart from the default of a web page which the reader can scan or skim at their own speed. Much as your own Dump the Drone creates attention on one point then another. The PDF is available where you can quickly skim it, but has less impact. The idea appeals to me that the course can be the ‘hook’ or attention-grabber for the information resource.
on December 18th, 2007 at 10:26 pm
This is a great “ponder” Cathy. Makes us question the “standard”, which is (in my opinion) always a good thing. My question is why do we have the click next to continue in the first place? Where did it come from? ..do we have powerpoint to blame?
on December 19th, 2007 at 11:43 am
Janet–I’ve also received a comment in email agreeing that we use click-next-to-continue to track learners. I’ve even seen a compliance course that uses a timer. If you go too quickly through the course, you have to sit and stare at the screen until the timer runs down a bit. Then you can click Next again.
This approach is based on the unfortunate misconception that all we need to do is expose people to information for a certain period of time and record the fact that the exposure occurred.
on December 19th, 2007 at 11:48 am
Cathy – Yes, and I think it is driven by government mandates and litigation. I believe the corporation accepts the fact that the goal is not to learn, the goal is to say they “learned.” I belive most people in the industry want to spend time or resources on this type of training but can’t avoid it. I just wish it wasn’t associated with e-learning at all.
on December 19th, 2007 at 11:57 am
Good question.
I think the essence of Janet’s comment hits the nail on the head. Compliance training cretaes the need for this stuff. From my perspective, most of it is a waste of time, so we tend to do the least amount of work to meet the regs and then get back to doing better stuff for meaningful training.
I also think you have these considerations. First, most people think of training/learning from the course paradigm. Thus, if you want people to learn, you create a course that mimics most of how we get our formal education.
I also think that it’s a hard sell to tell a customer to rely on an informal approach to learning. For example, if I want my real estate lenders to follow the various laws, not only do they need to know them and be certified, I need to know that they went through a process to learn the information that was consistent across the board. Trusting that they can search for related info is not the same as going through a formal structured course.
Which goes to the question about just creating a web page. This would work. However, I find that I can create a quick course using one of the authoring tools a lot faster than I can building an interactive web page.
Personally, I’m with you though. If they need to read, give them a PDF, why have them sit online reading a screen. If you need to do a “course” make it as easy as possible for the user to navigate the course and get what they need.
At a minimum, I try to get clients to break content into what I call, Coursels (course morsels).
Have a great holiday, Cathy. BTW, I was listening to Sufjan Stevens. He’s probably one of the few alternative artist who can get away with playing a banjo.
on December 19th, 2007 at 12:08 pm
Norman, I agree that there are times when a focused, one-screen-at-a-time approach works well. I think it’s useful for short presentations, and these presentations could be embedded in a bigger project that gives learners more control.
So, for example, if I click on the menu item “How to install a widget,” I could see a short presentation showing me one step on each screen. But an entire course like “All About Widgets” presented one tiny screen at a time is harder to defend.
Dump the Drone was born as a slide presentation for a conference. People have offered to convert it into a “course” using rapid tools, but it wasn’t designed as a course–it’s just a presentation. I think this confusion is at the heart of a lot of click-Next projects.
I’m using some of the Dump the Drone content in the Elearning Blueprint, but I’m breaking it up into much smaller Flashes that are embedded in HTML pages. The learner will see the ideas in a much bigger context and, more importantly, will be busy applying them to actual elearning materials. The approach is more like performance support than a presentation.
on December 19th, 2007 at 12:23 pm
Tom, thanks for your comment. Compliance is definitely one of the forces behind this issue, as is the idea that controlling how someone learns something lets us control the quality of that learning.
Rather than tightly controlling how each bit of information gets into the learner’s head, I’d like to see us spend more time developing realistic activities that show how well the learners are able to apply what they’re learning. I’m not sure that making each person read the material in the same order could guarantee that they have learned it and can apply it.
Your “coursels” idea is great, and I agree that creating a conventional web page doesn’t appeal to most people. As wikis make inroads we’ll see this changing–it’s a completely different experience.
on December 31st, 2007 at 7:45 am
Hi Cathy,
This is really interesting discussion. I happened to see it just today and I am new to this site. I am an instructional designer working with an elearning company. I design graduate level online courses for learners in the U.S. These courses are five and a half week modules and a series of such courses leads to a baccalaureate degree. These courses deal with a variety of subjects including Criminal Justice, Media Arts and Animation, Hotel and Restaurant Management and so on. Each module is supported by a textbook and there are assignments that students need to complete in order to pass the course. So, this is not a short presentation.
We use the one screen at a time approach that you are discussing here and we follow a particular sequence – the learners progress from one week to the next. They need to complete each week before proceeding to the next. The material is structured in a manner that a learner reads the lectures (html pages) for each week, the textbook; completes the assignments and then moves on to the next week. The lectures are interactive as they make use of case studies, real world examples, interactive graphics, and so on. The emphasis is on learning by doing, which is also taken care of by including projects that enable students to apply their learning.
I feel that there is a need to have a learner go through this course in a particular order – to learn a particular concept before learning another for which the first concept is a pre-requisite. The course material is thereby structured to make the sequential order clear to the learners and the learning you can say is more guided or controlled in that manner. I am wondering how a Web site approach would work in this case. Would having all the information in the same place prove to be distracting for learners?
Do you think the level of audience also determines whether we choose to lead the learners through a specific path or not. Hoping to hear from you on this.
on January 1st, 2008 at 1:30 pm
Anu, welcome to the blog, and thanks for your question. I’ve read arguments saying that people who are new to a topic and people who may not have well-developed learning skills are best served by a structured approach. This certainly makes sense on first glance. It also seems entirely appropriate to provide a step-by-step approach for complex learning that is likely to take weeks to accomplish.
Higher education seems less likely to impose the kind of control that I’m concerned about. My concern isn’t with providing structure and steps to follow. I’m more concerned with the kind of micro-management that occurs in many corporate elearning projects, in which the learner is so tightly controlled that they can’t easily review information or skip what that they know.
Often, the learner has no menu (they can only click a Next button), so they don’t even know what the structure of the information is. Happily, I don’t recall seeing this approach in higher education courses, but I’m not as familiar with that world.
I’ve worked on several projects that provide structured yet flexible courses through what are essentially HTML pages. Probably the most relevant example is a series of four courses on consultative sales (business-to-business sales that require you to learn a lot about the company you’re trying to win as a customer).
Each course in the series was roughly equivalent to a two-hour online course, so the whole thing required about 8 hours of online work. The materials were designed in HTML with lots of embedded and pop-up Flash interactives and simulations.
The company offering the series gave learners a high-level overview of what each course covered. A learner would then open a course and see a full-sized web site with a menu on the left that showed the detailed structure of that course’s info. Each page had an entry in the menu, so the menu provided direct access to each step or concept. The HTML pages were occasionally long enough to require a bit of scrolling and always included Flash interactives.
All four courses were one big simulation based on a story, so learners had a good reason to start with course 1 and go through everything in order, or the simulation wouldn’t make sense.
However, we didn’t *require* the learner to go through the materials in order. The learner could easily go back and review something or could skip ahead if they were confident that they understood the material. The beginning of each course summarized what had happened in the story so far.
The project was designed for people who wanted to improve their sales (it wasn’t required for certification, for example). We designed the simulation activities so the learner would discover for themselves if they understood the material and could gauge their own ability to apply it in the real world.
If instead learners had been required to demonstrate competency, we wouldn’t have changed the course design to control the learners more. We would have collected data about their performance in the online activities and possibly added a final activity as an overall assessment.
Again, thanks for your thought-provoking question!
on January 2nd, 2008 at 4:51 pm
One thought: when you have a complex system with many structured processes, then a more organized course (“likely learning sequence”) seems to make sense.
What I have in mind is something like Amtrak’s reservation system (or Marriott’s, or a bank’s retail-customer system): lots of stuff going on, most of it in the form of transactions that add up to some custormer-valued whole.
You can assemble these transactional molecules in many ways, some guided by particular scenarios. For example, the agent at the station probably does a lot more ticket-issuing; the agent on the phone does a lot more what-if comparisons.
You could (and my team did) assemble clusters of learning, making clear what someone needed as prerequisite skills. A simple nontechnical description helps: “This course shows you how to report arrival and departure times.” (In other words, if you don’t want or need that, don’t take the course.)
This is in no way endorses micromanagement; not everything that can be counted, counts. Far too often, though, the online learning system (or LMS or what have you) is sold to decision-makers at a high level, and tracking means control means I know something, even if it’s not worth knowing.
As for compliance training, I worked on an online, prevention-of-harassment course for which one criteria was that it had to take at least two hours to complete. This was because (at least at time time) the state of California required supervisors and managers to complete two hours’ worth of such training.
So if someone finished in 90 minutes, she wouldn’t have met the standard.
on January 2nd, 2008 at 5:01 pm
Hey Dave, that’s why you give them the course and then a link to a 90 minute movie:)
We had the same problem at a company I worked with. The state required 2 hours but it only took about 30 minutes to get through the content…a very boring 30 minutes, I might add.
One way to prevent harassment is to tell the people going through the course is that if they harass they’ll be subject to taking more courses.
on January 5th, 2008 at 10:10 am
[...] courses structured like the model I posted recently (see link on the left). In her entry, “Is a course really the answer?” she’s hit on a very hot topic, with comments still getting [...]
on February 2nd, 2008 at 12:43 pm
I’d like to point out that page turners don’t have be boring (although I agree that most of them are). I’ve seen two very interesting page turners recently, “Dump the Drone” and “Meet Charlene” at Janet Clary’s site. The information in these slide shows could have been presented as an easy to scan bulleted list or a series of tables but both used page turning as a way to let a story unfold and reveal information in an interesting way.
on February 12th, 2008 at 9:02 pm
Erik, thanks for your point. I agree that page-turning can be used to reveal information in interesting ways. It’s a fun challenge to be creative when all you have to work with are little slides.
I just get uncomfortable when we start to call a slideshow a “course.” It sometimes seems like the elearning is defined as “slideshow with a quiz at the end.”
on February 12th, 2008 at 10:18 pm
I think we’re seeing a transition in the industry. At first, we just mimicked what we did in ILT…only all we did was the content but neglected the interaction. Then the tools made it easier to create the content, but we ended up with click and read courses.
Now, I think we’re starting to see a demand for more sophistication. The industry is growing, the technology is getting easier to use, and people are empowered to understand and try new things.
You blog is a good example of the changes in the industry. Just a few years ago, no one would have known you and benefited from your experience and expertise. Today, you’re able to influence training that’s built all over the world. Pretty amazing.
on June 15th, 2009 at 5:17 pm
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