Be sure to read this paragraph. It tells you that in this post, you’ll learn how to manage stakeholders who want to treat learners like idiots. If you have trouble reading the paragraph, click the speaker icon located in the bottom right-hand corner of this screen and a professional narrator will read the text to you in a soothing voice that slides like oil over any functioning brain cells and gently smothers them.
Now read the next paragraph.
“Assume intelligence,” Jerry Weissman tells us in Presentations in Action
Contrast Weissman’s advice with what your stakeholders might be telling you, or what a small voice might be saying in your head.
- “We should tell them how to navigate the course.”
- “We should define ‘safety’ to make sure everyone knows what we mean.”
- “We should explain that they’re about to be shown a story in which a character will have to make a decision, and they’re going to make the decision for that character.”
We’re all adults here
If you’re designing for the corporate world, which is what I focus on in this blog, your learners have decades of experience figuring out what buttons do, reading text on a screen, and interpreting what’s happening to them as it happens.
Unfortunately, stakeholders might focus on the possible exception, the one person who can’t figure out that a button pointing to the right will move them forward and who will sit staring at the first screen until the lights get turned off.
A common solution is to provide optional help: a tab called “How to navigate this course,” links to definitions, and optional popup explanations like, “This is a fictional activity. You will pretend to be a person who is facing a challenge…”
A sign of a deeper problem
Unfortunately, stakeholders or small voices saying that you need to guide learners by the nose are symptoms of a deeper issue that can poison your materials, regardless of your optional help tabs. [Read more...]
“We shouldn’t use contractions because then people won’t take the content seriously.” Sound familiar?
For example, more courses than I ever want to see use sterile images of bland business people because the courses are about business, and “everyone knows” that business involves people in suits talking at meetings or shaking hands. That’s the functional mindset, and it has spawned thousands of lifeless photos.
“I don’t have all 217 Jubumba Beanie Bops!” your child cries. “I only have 216! I have to have the last one! Just one more! Pleeease!!!”
“No one reads the objectives.” If that’s true, maybe it’s because we tend to write objectives in TrainerSpeak. In this makeover we’ll turn some conventional objectives into goals that learners care about.
