As an Instructional Designer, motivating learners is an important consideration because in reality learners are not always motivated to learn. They are busy, have other things to do, don’t see the course/session as being important or have had a bad learning experience in the past. I’ve come across Dr. John Keller’s motivational design model known as ARCS and thought it was worth sharing.

The ARCS model comprises four major factors that influence the motivation to learn – Attention, Relevance, Confidence and Satisfaction. It’s described as a problem-solving model and helps designers identify and solve specific motivational problems related to the appeal of instruction. The model was developed after a comprehensive review and synthesis of motivation concepts and research studies. It has also been validated in studies across different education levels.

The four categories of motivation variables consist of sub-categories along with process questions to consider when designing:

Attention = Capturing the interest of learners, stimulating their curiosity to learn.

• Perceptual Arousal: What can I do to capture their interest?
• Inquiry Arousal: How can I stimulate an attitude of inquiry?
• Variability: How can I maintain their attention?

Relevance = Meeting the personal needs/goals of the learner to affect a positive attitude.

• Goal Orientation: How can I best meet my learner’s needs? (Do I know their needs?)
• Motive Matching: How and when can I provide my learners with appropriate choices, responsibilities and influences?
• Familiarity: How can I tie the instruction to the learners’ experience?

Confidence = Helping the learners believe/feel that they will succeed and control their success.

• Learning Requirements: How can I assist in building a positive expectation for success?
• Success Opportunities: How will the learning experience support or enhance the learners’ beliefs in their competence?
• Personal Control: How will learners clearly know their success is based upon their efforts and abilities?

Satisfaction = Reinforcing accomplishment with rewards (internal and external).

• Natural Consequences: How can I provide meaningful opportunities for learners to use their newly acquired knowledge/skill?
• Positive Consequences: What will provide reinforcement to the learners’ successes?
• Equity: How can I assist the learners in anchoring a positive feeling about their accomplishments?

The following link is to a YouTube video where Dr. Keller discusses the ARCS Model, some background in its development and the addition of volition to the model.

ARCS: A Conversation with John Keller

Apart from the motivational aspects of the model, what I really like about ARCS is that it puts the learner at the centre of the design process.

After all, that’s how it should be.

References:

arcsmodel.com

Keller, J. M. (1987) Strategies for stimulating the motivation to learn. Performance and Instruction. 26 (8), 1-7.

Recently I presented at the iDesignX conference in Sydney. It was  great day and it was wonderful to connect with so many other eLearning practitioners and meet the Articulate legends a.k.a Tom Kuhlmann and David Anderson.  My presentation was called Personalising Learning through Conditional Interactivity.

I examined how we could use gamification techniques to make our online courses more meaningful and ultimately a more personalised, learning experience. I like to say things in threes, so I’ve summarised my presentation into three main parts:

1. Are we putting our learners at risk?

Are you putting your learners at risk every time they do an eLearning course? I did examine the area of actual electric shocks being delivered via the mouse when the user makes the wrong choice but I don’t think that would go down that well with health and safety! Jokes aside, what I was really referring to was the concept of challenging our learners…..are we  challenging them enough? Do they have anything to lose when they do a course or can they just do the quiz unlimited times until they pass and are marked competent on the LMS. …no risk involved! Putting your learners at risk can be a great way to motivate.

2. Gamification can add a level of risk/challenge to your content.

I am a big fan of the work of Karl Kapp and his book Gamification of learning and Instruction. This book gave me a great insight into gamification and education. Basically gamification should have the following elements:

It should be:

• Game based
• Mechanics
• Aesthetics
• Game Thinking
• Motivation
• Promote Learning
• Solve Problems

One thing I learned from Karl Kapp is that not all gamification elements need to be present. However, the elements that you do include must be done well e.g. don’t just include points for the sake of it. They must have meaning or be in some way motivating to your learner. In my presentation I said that gamification is not a new concept. As a former schoolteacher I used it almost every day. However in eLearning we must re-imagine the learning experience. Gamification techniques are not new but when they are done well they can help create a meaningful learning experience.

3.  Where do I start?

I often get asked this question. People will say…”yeah gamification is good and well, but I don’t have any time for those high level techniques. My boss wants that course by next week”. I understand these constraints but remember gamification is nothing new. My advice is to start with the story. Story is one of the most powerful elements of gamification (game thinking) and is something that we use in our training and teaching on a regular basis.

The Hero’s Journey is one of my favourite storytelling techniques and it’s used by a lot of game designers. It’s basically like the story of The Hobbit….normal guy/gal is needed to save the world….they meet a mentor….. they are not really sure they want to help…then something happens and they go from the known world into the unknown world. …….there they face lots of challenges and gain new skills…then they face their biggest challenge and we think they might die in an epic battle but they win and are on their way home and we think everything is okay but they face one more epic battle where the villain comes back……they win this battle and then they return to the known and life returns to normal. So could we use something like this in our Induction programs or compliance training? A new employee goes from the known to the unknown. They face lots of new challenges and skills. They get help from a mentor and the story unfolds. For me it’s about re-imagining the learning experience……no rings or wizards necessary!

Final Thoughts

When applying gamification it can be worthwhile if your learner takes on a role or maybe chooses an avatar. The avatar must be realistic to their context. Throughout the course, they have to make choices and there will be consequences (electric shocks are optional). This is where you can build in the mechanics e.g. badges, points or levels.  Aesthetics is crucial so it’s important to have a strong design concept at the start. I showed a sample (image above) that I had put together in Articulate Storyline. The content was aimed at sales assistants in a pharmacy. I created a talking avatar and inserted that as a video into Storyline. I used the power of conditions and variables to apply some gamification techniques e.g. choose a character, achieve points etc.

I’ve learned that you don’t just apply gamification for the sake of it. During the definition stage of your project you should decide if the course will be gamified.  Ask yourself:

• Why am I gamifiying this content?
• What purpose will it serve?
• Will it help me meet the learning objectives?

Finally have some fun with it. Chances are if you have fun building it, then your learners will have fun doing it.

Speaking of fun, I’d  better get back to teaching the Master eLearning Course…..now where did I put that electric cattle prod?

These were the two messages that stood out over three days in Sydney at the iDesignX  Australian Instructional Design Conference (21^st March) sponsored by B Online Learning and Articulate and the eLearning Design Workshops with Tom Kuhlmann and David Anderson (22^nd and 23^rd March).

I was fortunate to attend the sessions in Sydney last week and for me it was a dream come true to not only be in the same room as Tom and David but to hear and learn directly from them (I also got to meet them which was an incredible experience and a real highlight too).

Practice

As someone with a keen interest in learning generally, but eLearning in particular, I’m always looking to other experienced people in the learning field to find out how I can improve my own skills and knowledge. While it would be great if there was a magic pill you could swallow and voila! you’d be transformed into an eLearning whizz, the reality is that when you look at anyone who is successful in their field, the one thing they have in common is a commitment to developing their skills over a period of time. Tom and David are no exception to this.

Over the years they have worked on many projects but they also make time to experiment and try new things. The speakers at iDesignX also showed that they have put in a lot of effort over the years to get to where they are today.

Tip: a good place to start practicing your eLearning skills is in David’s Weekly Challenge.

Sharing

Tom and David are role models when it comes to sharing. Their jobs at Articulate along with their travel schedule must keep them extremely busy. However, they are extremely generous with their time and have a great willingness share what they know, provide advice and help anyone who needs it. It’s something all learning professionals can learn from and do more of.

So, in the interests of sharing, here’s firstly what I took away from iDesignX (you can also check out all the tweets at #iDesignX):

“Instructional design is about crafting the appropriate learning experience. We need to reframe content so that it’s meaningful and relevant. Then we need to give learners something to think about and have them make decisions.” Tom Kuhlmann – VP Community at Articulate

“Tips when using virtual training: prepare and support participants, consider cognitive load, design for different levels of engagement, have learners interact often, support facilitators, pilot the training and test, test, test, test.” Brenda Smith – Medibank Health

“When using video in learning experiences, authenticity is very important.” Mark Parry – Parryville Media

“Clean and balance (in graphic design) creates stability and can direct learner focus.” Minh Nguyen – DEEWR

“Using curation for learning design > collect, filter, evaluate, arrange, present, distribute.” Anne Bartlett-Bragg – Ripple Effect Group

“Before you gamify your eLearning course, make sure it meets the learning objectives.” Ruth McElhone – B Online Learning

“Learning experiences should be meaningful, memorable and motivating.” Ruth McElhone – B Online Learning

“Using video for manual or process tasks shows the correct way to do something.” Tony Nye – Australian Red Cross Blood Service

“Pictures clarify words and stories add context to content.” Blair Rorani – Ever Learning

BTW, this is the ninja I drew during Blair’s session:

“What makes an industry pro? Experience; Skills (practice your craft); Authority and Luck.” Tom Kuhlmann – VP Community at Articulate

“Luck is where opportunity and preparation meet.” Tom Kuhlmann – VP Community at Articulate

“You need to be proactive and look for opportunities. Sharing expertise creates opportunities.” Tom Kuhlmann – VP Community at Articulate

And from the workshops with Tom and David:

On designing an eLearning course:

Ask yourself:

1. What content needs to be in the course?
2. What is the right look and feel?
3. What is the learner supposed to do?

Be intentional, stick with a consistent design and don’t settle for defaults (colours, fonts etc.)

On eLearning makeovers:

Review the five common components of eLearning courses:

1. Text – should be from the same font family
2. Elements – the goal is unity not uniformity
3. Colours – use colour for contrast and emphasis
4. Background – it should contribute to the visual and not dominate
5. People – if you use characters maintain unity

On interactivity:

Interactivity connects the user to content. There are two types of interactivity:

• Touch – the learner interacts with the screen (by clicking, dragging or hovering)
• Decision – the learner interacts with the content.

On Learning Objectives:

When thinking about learning objectives, ask yourself:

• Who is the learner?
• What is the situation?
• What do you want them to do?
• How can they prove it?

On building interactive eLearning:

• Know your tools – don’t build clucky courses
• Create relevant content
• Use stories for learning especially if there’s a lot of content
• Remember the 3 C’s:
  • Challenge the learner
  • Give them choices
  • Have consequences for decisions

There were at least a couple of hundred people at the conference and about 80 people each day at the workshops. If everyone incorporates just one or two of the things they learned into their eLearning courses the quality would certainly improve. But if everyone also shared what they’ve learned with others in the field, it would help to improve even more courses and contribute to building a strong community of learning professionals!

All in all it was a great three days of learning from the best in the field and also chance to meet lots of people that I’d only known via Twitter and make the physical connection. Let’s follow Tom and David’s example by practicing our skills and sharing what we know so that we can develop ourselves as well as others.

If you went to the conference and/or the workshops what did you learn and have you shared it yet?

Years ago my mother and her friends used to go and get their colours done with Colour Me Beautiful. This was like a personal stylist service that matched your own natural hair colour to a season. You could be spring, summer, autumn or winter. By finding your right season you could figure out what colours worked best for you when shopping for clothes or make-up and in the long run become a more ‘beautiful’ version of yourself!

Well I don’t really use the Colour Me Beautiful services but I wish I could apply this concept to eLearning.  I get asked a lot of questions about colour when I teach the Master eLearning course….. what colours go well together?…… how do I know which colours to use and when? …….. how do I find out what colours compliment my company’s colours?

Q. 1: Should I use a dark or light background?

The best answer here is to use black text on white light background. Using a pure white background can put more stress on the eyes. Instead, it’s recommended to use a non- white background. White reflects light and this actually makes it harder to read large amounts of text on a screen e.g. a paragraph.

Q.2: When should I use certain colours?

This question came up in Connect (social collaboration site we use on the course). It was brought up by Andy, a fantastic contributor to our space.

Colours for Memory: there has been a lot of research done in this area. In a study done by Dzulkifli and Mustafar (2012), they found that “warm types of colours such as yellow, red and orange have been found to have a greater effect on attention compared to the cool type of colours like brown and grey”. These types of colours can be give your design a positive, energising feel with yellow seen as the most positive and energising colour.

Colours can also have an emotional effect on us …. “It was found that the majority of participants associated green colour with the feeling of calmness, happiness, comfort, peace, hope, and excitement. Black colour was associated with the feeling of sadness, depression, fear, and anger” (Dzulkifli and Mustafar 2012).

It is recommended to include cool colours such as greens, blues and purples to your work to give it a professional look and also to give a sense of calm. Click here to view some great examples of where different colours have been used when designing web pages.

We also have to be mindful of people who are colour blind and make our content accessible for them. Research has shown that 1 out of 12 males and 1 out of 20 females are colour blind. Red- green colour blindness is probably the most common so we need to take this into consideration when designing our content.  Click here to take a colour blindness test.

Q.3: How do I choose a colour scheme?

Most of us have to use our company colours when we design our eLearning courses. I recently delivered a two day eLearning workshop in Sydney and the company I was working with were really sick of using their main corporate colours and wanted to ‘mix it up’ a little. I’m sure there are others in the same position but may not feel confident about knowing what colours work well together. There are some really great free online tools out there that help you come up with a variety of colours that work well together.

Below are some of the links to help with choosing colour schemes:

• Adobe Kuler
• Colour Lovers
• Changing the Player Colours with Articulate Storyline

If anyone has some other colour tools they use, please let us know via the comments area below.

Finally, from my ‘Colour Me Beautiful days, you may be wondering what season I was. Well from memory I think I was summer but to be honest I never did like any of the colour palettes for that season but better not tell my Mother that!

Watch Ruth McElhone discuss how to create memorable conversations in your learning space and also provide some tips for e-gardening.

I think we all agree, when developing eLearning for today’s widely diverse user groups, one of the key challenges is to make that content dynamic, engaging and full of user driven interactions. Without this the content comes across as tedious and dull and what’s worse, the message and key learning’s can be lost in a mire of text and static imagery.

Elearning developers who have already discovered the power of development tools on the market, will be aware these tools are increasingly gaining acceptance as the preferred development method. Mainly due to their immediacy, where content can be developed end to end without the need for an entire development team of instructional designers, graphic designers and programmers and also due to their ability to publish the one piece of content across multiple platforms with the click of a button.

These factors represent a major step forward for the companies providing the development tools and the organisations who license and use them to build their eLearning, however they do not necessarily provide a platform from which truly engaging courses can be produced in a timely manner and in a way where the focus of the development can be course content and not the creation of interactions.

B Online Learning use Articulate Storyline development tool to create the next level of user focused, engaging content for our clients and in this blog I would like to outline three of the key concepts Storyline uses to create this type of content in a developer friendly way. These concepts are:

• Triggers
• Variables
• Conditions

Triggers are one of the fundamental development concepts within Storyline. In essence a trigger is what Storyline uses to carry out a command that within the content. This command can be one of many things such as:

• Progressing to new screen
• Showing a new item on screen
• Playing media (Audio, Video, Flash)
• Changing the visual state of an object
• Controlling a quiz
• Selecting a path
• Submit an interaction

These are only some of the triggers available to the developer and Storyline’s ability to multiple triggers to the one action means that interactions can be developed in a holistic manner that focuses on the broader interaction dynamics instead of the coding of individual commands.

So the basic premise with triggers, if we think in a Newtonian way, is that any user action (Click, hover, drag and drop, play, typing) will cause one or more content reactions.

Triggers are amazing and form one of the main building blocks for any engaging interaction, but what if want to have more control over the learning environment. To replicate the workings of a true learning environment the developer also needs to be able to easily add attributes to their triggers so that the experience of the learner can be controlled to suit their learning outcomes.

Using variables in Storyline adds a new layer of detail onto user interactions by providing gates or controls over what is happening on screen and when it is allowed to happen.
Let’s look a simple example. Take an action reaction trigger like the one above, in this instance let’s say the user needs to click the next button to move onto the next interaction. It could be represented like this:

• On the left the user click the button, on the right the user moves on.
• But what if, before the user can click on the next button, we want them to finish watching an embedded video on the screen.
• By adding a variable to the next button that only makes it active once the video has finished playing we can ensure that the user watches the required content before they move on.
• Before the video is finished the variable stops the next button from moving them on.
• When the video is finished however the variable is updated and now the next button becomes active, when the user click the button now they will continue their experience.

So that is a simple one to one example but the same concept can be easily used across multiple interactions on the one screen.

Finally lets look at conditions, these add an additional layer to the variables you create that allow multiple variables or triggers to work with or against one another.

In the above example a condition can change the outcome of the interaction with the variables. For instance lets say that at the beginning of this course the user was asked to choose if they were a manager or a customer service representative and they selected manager. Now as the user moves through the content certain items will allow them access, when the variables allow this, only if they are a manager.

Or for our branching example, conditions can be utilised to help select the path through the content again based on users previous choices or even variables that have been accumulating (in the instance of number variables) whilst user has completed previous tasks.

So in closing we can see how content can be taken well beyond the dull read and click format by using layers of additional logic. Building interactions in Articulate Storyline is simple once the basic concepts are grasped, however the point should be made that comprehensive planning of the interaction, its mechanics, the lead in factors that contribute and also the down line consequences is of pivotal importance to making the interaction work with the desired learning outcomes.

B Online Learning provide Articulate Storyline users, new and existing, with detailed training in all functions from simple interactions to advanced development techniques. We are the only Certified Articulate trainers in Australia and New Zealand find out more here.

I was recently asked to speak at an elearning forum on eLearning design trends for 2013. This made me reflect on where I’m currently at with my elearning design and how I can create more meaningful elearning experiences for the people who take my courses.

Visualising the Story

One of the themes of the forum I spoke at was about visualising data. For those of you who may know me, I’m a big fan of using scenarios and stories in my work and this year I’m going to make a concerted effort to improve the visualisation of these stories. I think we can learn a lot from infographics and how they can turn static information into visually compelling learning experiences. I’ve come across two good infographics this week Spotlight Census and Telus. We do have to be careful with visualising out information. It’s crucial not to let the images, graphs or diagrams get too complex otherwise it becomes all about the design and the message or story may be lost.

Gamification

I’m currently reading ‘The Gamification of Learning and Instruction’ written by Karl Kapp. Firstly, thank you Karl! This book is really making me rethink how I create online content. We are living in an age where a vast majority of our course participants will have played some form of online games or commercial games so we need to look at how to get this audience to buy-in to our online content.  Gamification is not about building World of Warcraft to replace your security awareness training but instead ‘taking principles that make games addictive and applying them in a learning context to improve retention and recollection of knowledge and better application and practice of skills’ (Kapp 2012).  Building courses that using game mechanics can take time and will take longer to build than your basic one hour of ‘text and next’ but the cleverly designed course using the principles of gamification will ensure a richer learning experience.

Personalising the Learning Experience

In the past we looked at personalising our online content by using a conversational, informal language in our text e.g. I, we, you etc. You may have also looked at avatars or help characters that guide users through the content. I think back to my days as a primary school teacher and how I used differentiation in my pedagogy to cater for the individual needs of the student. I’m really keen about trying to incorporate this more into my online courses. With the advances in authoring tools such as Articulate Storyline I think we now have the technology to do this at some level and make it more personalised and ultimately more meaningful.  Using variables in Storyline can help achieve this.

Variables are a way to remember information—such as a learner’s name or numeric input—and then present dynamic content based on that information.

My goal is use variables in my content display information that will be more meaningful for different groups. Again this will take longer to build than your basic text and next but I believe it’s worth it.

Finally, I believe all three of these elearning design goals are interconnected. If I apply gamification, I will need to visualise the story of the game and by using gamification I’m really personalising the learning experience by achieving results based on the individual’s choices and actions.

Let the visualisation, gamification and personalisation begin!