Am I an Instructional Designer or a Learning Experience Designer?
Trying to understand the differences in both titles, I watched a webinar by Dr. Marty Rosenheck.
Let me share what I learned:
1. The way people develop skill and get proficiency is:
·
10% formal training
·
20% informal/coaching
·
70% on the job experience
2.
According to Dr. Rosenheck, Instructional Designers are focused on the 10%,
whereas Learning Experience Designers are focused on the entire process.
In
other words:
2.1 Instructional Design (ID) is
focused on the CONTENT.
o
Instruction
o
Content Centric
o
Primarily formal
o
Focused on knowing
o
Acquisition
2.2 Learning Experience Design (LED) is
focused on the USER. LED supports and accelerates people’s construction of
knowledge and skills. LED is user centric and concentrates on:
·
Experience
·
Formal, informal and experiential learning
·
Construction on knowledge
3.
Disciplines that inform LED:
3.1 Cognitive Science (how people learn). The learning
process follows a cycle compound of three stages:
·
Act. The action that leads to learn.
·
Perceive. What’s happening. Consciousness.
Working memory . The learning that comes in the stage of working memory can go
to long term memory (experience, information obtained from that experience that
informs how to do things).
· Adjust:
o
It depends on the goals. The goals are
supported by motivations, emotions and feelings.
o
Reflection plays an important role in the adjust
process
o
Pattern matching: has to do with expertise. If
a look at a situation, I automatically pattern match it and see the complexity
of the situation.
3.2 Design Thinking. The process of solving problems. It is focused on the users, not
the content.
Definition: “Design Thinking
is an iterative process in which we seek to understand the user, challenge assumption, and
redefine problems in an attempt to identify alternative strategies and
solutions that might not be instantly apparent with our initial level of
understanding.” (https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/topics/challenge-assumptions)
The five stages of Design thinking are:
·
Empathize. Understand the needs pf the user.
·
Define. Defining the problem. What do they
need to learn.
·
Ideate. Looking for innovative ideas and solutions.
·
Prototype. Start creating solution
·
Test. Put in practice the solutions.
Design thinking is used in (User Experience Design UX)
3.3. User Experience Design.
LED
applies principals of User Experience Design to the
learning
process.
Definition of User Experience Design :“The process
of enhancing user satisfaction by improving the usability, accessibility, and
pleasure provided in the interaction between the user and the product.”
(Wikipedia)
·
Goal: make products and software user usable and
delightful
· Process: user research, design, testing and implementation.
3.4 Content Design and Curation.
3.5 Learning Technology. It supports the learning experience
design.
3.6 Data Analytics. Check the results and the information obtained from for those
results.
4.
How to design a learning experience:
4.1 Define learner persona: who?
·
Empathize: What problems?
·
Goals: Desires, aspirations, challenges,
frustrations and fears.
· Previous
experience level or expertise,
·
Motivations: extrinsic, intrinsic
· What might
he/she be thinking, feeling, saying?
4.2 Define experiences and knowledge by working with experts. Get
the following information form them:
·
Situations. List all the situations they handle.
·
Categorize: Organize those situations into
categories
·
Variations: Identify how they vary on various
parameters
·
Taxonomy: Create a “taxonomy of situations” to
guide creation of learning experiences. (list the kind of experiences they need
to know)
· Knowledge: The knowledge they need to support those things. What strategies they use. Identify the knowledge (content), strategies, and process that experts use to handle the situations.
4.3. Begin with scenarios, challenges and provide content at the
teachable moment.
·
Scenario: Explain a situation and a problem to
solve. Ex: John is a new Customer Service Manager. His first assignment is to deal
with a difficult customer who wants to cancel an order because she feels that
the last customer manager was rude. /how do you manage that situation?
· Teachable moment. Ex: To learn more about company’s services, policies and negotiation techniques click on the reference guide.
4.4 Designing learning path and experience:
Follow the cycle: Do––Reflect––Plan
Do. Informed by goals and motivations. The user will experience the learning process by doing. Different forms of doing are:
- Job task
·
Simulations
·
Scenarios
· Case studies
Reflect.
·
Perceive feedback:
o
Experiences (episodic)
o
Principals (declarative)
The reflect
process can be supported by:
§
Coaching
§
Social media
§
Communities of practice
§
Peer review
§
Portfolio
§ Articulation
Plan.
o
Design experiences, to help users get the
proficiency (skill) they need and Adjust what is not working well to get to the
users’ goals.
Going
back to the question: Am I an Instructional Designer or a Learning Experience
Designer? My answer is not yet decided.
