Making e-learning more fun

E.learning Age, Nov 2006 by Thomas, David

If people learnt best when they were bored and disengaged then most e-learning would be doing a fantastic job. They don't, of course, yet too many courses are designed as if making the learner's experience enjoyable and memorable comes a long way behind cost, speed of production and ticking off all the required learning points.

This ought to surprise us. In every other medium, from advertising and product design to television and computer games, British designers have a well-deserved reputation for creative excellence that delights users and audiences. Too often in e-learning, creative design is confined to the packaging or bolted on as an afterthought. This may in part reflect the way that e-learning developed in the US following a rather puritanical tradition that sees learning as instruction that must be serious and tends to regard fun as an unwarranted distraction. Yet without an element of fun, or at least enjoyment, it's likely that much learning activity is simply wasted.

It was to explore these issues that Bizmedia, publisher of e.learning age organised a one-day seminar Making E-learning More Fun, sponsored by Line Communications and led by Vaughan Waller from Learning Light, and it demonstrated that fun can be a very serious matter.

Hours spent on games

Ever since personal computers first appeared in the 1980s they've been used for playing games. The younger generation entering the workforce, as well as many of their older colleagues, will have played for hours on computer games. In order to win a share of leisure time those games have to be compelling. With internet-based gaming available on systems such as X-Box Live, they are becoming a social activity as well. By contrast, the typical e-learning model of sitting in front of a screen alone working through mainly text-based pages and occasionally completing a multi-choice test is not compelling for anyone.

According to Kevin Corti of Pixel Learning, computer games have a lot to teach e-learning designers. We need to get away from the idea that they are the province of geeky teenage boys or that serious games are an oxymoron. Entertainment games are now played right across the age and Income spectrum, with women accounting for over 40 per cent of the audience, so ideas and approaches from the world of games are likely to be very acceptable to most learners.

The opportunity is to apply the techniques developed by leading game designers to learning, and this can bear fruit even when the subject is something as apparently dull as learning new financial regulations. The key, says Corti, is to stop thinking only in terms of instruction and to consider the different ways in which adults learn.

Andragogy - adult teaching - is very different from pedagogy. Adults bring their whole lifetime of experience to any learning situation, so we need to think in terms of problem solving rather than just content. Adults are also far more willing to leam when they can see the subject's immediate relevance to them, so using relevant situations and settings is valuable even at the cost of some bespoking.

One important characteristic of any good game is that it should be different every time you play it. Most e-learning is as fixed as a textbook and even when a test indicates that the learner has failed to understand something, they're likely to be invited simply to reread material they've already covered. If the course behaved differently depending on the progress the learner made through it, and rewarded their learning in the way that games do, it could be far more engaging.

Bringing in the creativity of games designers alongside the disciplines of learning design should pay real dividends. It isn't going to be easy, though. "Bringing games and instructional designers together is as easy as mixing oil and water," says Corti.

Left to their own devices a good games designer will come up with something that is engaging and fun to play but misses most of the learning points, while an instructional designer will be likely to do the exact opposite. Good games design is also expensive and it will obviously take a lot more effort and therefore cost to come up with a good game than a page of text with a next button on the end.

However, it is possible to come up with scenarios that are relevant to the learners in a particular organisation. While these will take time and money to develop initially, they can then be used as the basis for whole rafts of e-learning.

Media design

Every one of us, including learners, is exposed to a rich variety of well-produced media every day. Andrew Joly from LINE Communications and Patrick Dunn, a consultant who works for LINE, explored what specific lessons and tools e-learning designers might draw from other creative industries and the research their practitioners have undertaken.

If fun, pleasure and stimulation are so important for learning, then why is so much e-learning so dull? Fun is a very broad term and has many dimensions but, says Patrick Dunn, all learning needs at least one or two of those dimensions. The challenge is to understand which are the most relevant and it's here in particular that we can learn from others.