Learner Experience Design — Readings

18 min readJan 19, 2017

Readings, research, and insights for LXD, Spring 2017. Instructor: Stacie Rohrbach

Please see my main article on in-class documentation!

Design For How People Learn — Dirksen
How Learning Works—Ambrose

Thursday, January 19, 2017

Chapters 1 from Ambrose and Dirksen

These pieces place the context of the learning journey. In particular, it’s important to know where the student is, and where they want to be. Explicit benchmark goals (or success measures as Intuit calls it) are important to efficiently completing any task. In fact, many advise New Years Resolutions to be more specific.) Even if the goal is to gain a piece of knowledge, there needs to be an actionable goal of what one hopes to do with that knowledge.

According to Dirksen, there exists several “gaps”, or what’s separating you from where you want to be:

Knowledge: how much information, when, and in presented in which way?
Skills: What will they need to practice and when can they practice?
Motivation: What’s the learner’s attitude toward change and is that an inhibition to reaching the goal?
Environment: Is the environment preventing the learner from being successful; and if so, what is needed to support them?
Communication: are the goals being clearly communicated?

Dirksen’s piece, which supposedly is from a design perspective, includes a more empirical application of the information, including types of questions we could ask to create a context. Meanwhile, Ambrose’s approach seems to advice to teachers in a classroom setting. It also emphasizes the impact prior knowledge has on learning, as it’s easier to learn than unlearn. Incorrect, limited, or inappropriately applied prior knowledge can inhibit learnings of new ones. Nevertheless, one can extrapolate Ambrose’s concepts to a higher level:

Understand what knowledge the student currently has and to what extent. This can be achieved through outside research or investigating the students themselves. The latter could include a comprehensive diagnostic or a simple assessment (“I have heard of this term”, “I could explain it to someone else”, etc). One could also look for patterns that denote certain schemas.
Expose student to accurate prior knowledge: Provide resources to correct materials externally or within own course, use real life examples, set context of information.
Identify necessary prior knowledge to continue and when new knowledge can be applied
Correct incorrect knowledge: teach how to justify reasonings (philosophical tools of logic and reasoning could be helpful), provide practice, allow sufficient time (rhythm and pacing to information presented).

Friday, January 27, 2017

Chapters 2 and 3 from Dirksen

Chapter 2— Knowing your learner

Much like human centered design emphasizes the importance of knowing the user, in learning problems, we must understand the learner. In this chapter, Dirksen outlines several ways we can understand the learner:

General demographics (there could be trends associated with the demographics, such as level of maths for certain ages, or even cultural schemas)
Why they are here to learn (is it intrinsic or external motivations?)
What they like and don’t want
Their skill level

This information informs ways of providing assistance throughout the learner’s journey, because the same task could seem easy or challenging depending on the learner’s background.

Ideally, one would provide aids/tools and frame the teachings in a way that appeal to a variety of skill levels. For instance, in an interface, a designer could input vocabulary definitions that only appear when the user hovers over the text— that way the definition does not hinder experienced readers who don’t need help.

A learner’s expertise also determines the “push” or “pull” method— whether there is more hand holding, or if the learner is given the freedom to determine their direction and the teacher provides tools and feedback.

Like any design research where we’re getting to know the user, Dirksen suggests getting to know the user not just through academic research but through personal interactions. Below outlines potential questions:

questions to ask learners to understand pain points and gain insight to what we could do better.

I’m reminded of “follow me homes”, a term coined by Intuit founder Scott Cook who, after noticing low sales of his product, stood in stores and literally followed customers home who bought the product and watched them set up and use the product. I’m a bit wary of relying too much on directly asking users what we could do to make things better; there’s a popular quote at Intuit, supposedly by Henry Ford, that “If [he] asked people what they wanted, they would have said ‘faster horses’”. The point is that our role as designers is to use insight to create solutions beyond the user’s expectations or imaginations so they are truly delighted.

Chapter 3— Setting Goals

Again, at Intuit, and also in Peter Scupelli’s class on Design Futures, there was this concept of “success measures” or “benchmark goals”. The idea is that to set an obtainable goal, it must be specific enough to realize. In other words, how will you know when you’ve achieved your goal?

Many learning problems claim that the problem would be solved if the learner just “knew better”. However, simply learning a concept is neither specific nor measurable. In fact, it’s impractical to assume people can magically just “know” something and then apply it in all relevant tasks. Instead, asking why— helps us unpack a vague concern into a doable task.

An example of how asking “why” helps you get to the core goal we’re trying to achieve.

In addition, here are more types of questions one can ask to unpack a knowledge goal.

What is measured varies depending on the learning intentions. On the Y-axis of the graph below are types of learning intentions. It is more persuasive to the learner and makes the learner feel more meaningful if the measurements are applicable to real life instances. For example, a French test shouldn’t ask the student to recite all prepositions in alphabetical order.

Depending on the proficiency goal, the X-axis of the graph below, the student may be asked to fill in the blanks of correct prepositions from a word bank, or be asked to deliver a speech and graded on how accurate their grammar is.

How much of the topic do you want the learner to learn and how well do you want them to understand the topic?

It’s also important to note that

learning takes time, so set reasonable amounts of time.

Types of skills can be imagined as a house:

Throw pillows (easy) and furniture (medium): Skills that are specific procedures or skills that require practice can be learned fast to moderate. They can be address by providing appropriate tools (a checklist, formula sheet) or some practice (role-playing with feedback).
Structure (hard)and Foundation (challenging!): Skills that take more time to develop are higher level, conceptual thinking that may also stem from personality or cultural backgrounds. Sometimes, we must acknowledge and accept certain parts of a person that are difficult to change and adjust our designs to work with the habits of the user.

The concept of measurable goals recurred in one of my friend’s Facebook posts about setting achievable New Year’s Resolutions. In addition to being specific, he also suggested the following:

The commitment must be based with a specific frequency (consistency to your practice).
Include a specific time of day to set aside for your practice (essential to habit-forming)
Include a time frame longer than a month (e.g. set an appropriate time length given the difficulty of the task.)
Have someone hold you accountable (this is an interesting. How would we translate this into a design situation? Obviously having a literal person is not pragmatic for every solution.)
Include a backup plan should I miss a commitment. (this is something I haven’t heard about yet in the design realm— I wonder if having a backup plan would relieve pressure from learners or give them room to slack off?)

Saturday, February 4, 2017

Chapter 4 from Dirksen, chapter 2 from Ambrose

The reading from Ambrose discusses that learning is not just about what you know but also how you organize what you know. Similarly, Dirksen discusses how we remember. These analogous information are relevant because Ambrose stresses the importance of building deep and meaningful connections between things we learn, and ten Dirksen explains how our brain processes and retains information.

According to Ambrose, we organize information functionally, using associations based on experience patterns. There’s:

Temporal contiguity: flipping a switch and light turning on
Ideas that share meaning: Conceptual relationship between fairness and equality
Perceptual similarities: Similarities between a ball and a globe

However, these organizations vary based on people’s experiences and cultures. Ambrose also introduces the idea of knowledge maps, or how our knowledge is organized and connected with each other.

Illustrations of novice and expert knowledge maps. The more deep and complex one’s understanding of a topic is, the easer it is to build off and apply knowledge.

We, as experts, may organize information differently from students who are novices. Thus, ways to reveal and enhance knowledge include:

Create concept maps to analyze your own organization to help orient students in your mental space
Determine the most appropriate knowledge organization for the task
Explicitly outline organization of lecture or discussion
Use contrasting/boundary examples that encourage deeper understanding. Ex: comparing sharks and dolphins forces students to think beyond superficial relationships. At the same time you can also highlight deep features to explicitly make connections
Ask student to draw concept map or use sorting task to assess their understanding
Monitor students’ work for patterns that show problems

So how do we build these relations?

According to Dirksen, information is stored with various “tags” that are used as organization and retrieval methods. The more “tags” or “associations” something has, the deeper the understanding and the easier it is to retrieve it. It is through this deep understanding that something makes it to Long Term memory. Other types of memories and how they function are—

Sensory Memory: Everything you sense and perceive. You don’t notice something unless it catches your attention, so one must be cautious of habituation. When someone is used to a sensory stimulus, they will no longer notice it. Thus, consistency is useful, too much is bad, and annoying variability is also bad.
Short Term: What your take notice of, whether it’s significant to you, something you’re looking for, something that needs action, or surprising/confounding. This is also where your working memory resides, where you keep information as long as you need it.

How do we make short and long term memory efficient?

Primacy and regency effect suggests we are most likely to remember beginning and end things
Chunking things based on similarity, sequential, or items in your long term memory are effective
Learning something in-context helps recall. While it is often not pragmatic, we can use aids ands cues to help replicate the environment. For instance, since emotional pressure can throw off our intellectual knowledge, we can try creating the contexts using role-playing, creating pressure, and investing in high-quality acting.

All of these techniques can also turn into associations that help long term memory.

Other types of memory that don’t just fit into long/short term include:

Declarative/semantic: stuff you know you know and can state explicitly
Episodic: declarative information specific to personal stories and recollections
Conditioned: implicit memory as a result of stimulus → response. It can be physical.
Procedural memory: what you remember how to do but may not know how to explain. Related to muscle memory.
Flashbulb memory: vivid memory for emotionally charged events.

Saturday, February 11, 2017

Chapter 4 Ambrose— How Do Students Develop Mastery?
Chapter 5 Dirksen— How Do You Get Their Attention?

What is Mastery?

Beyond just knowing individual skill sets; must be able to apply cohesively in proper context.
Ex: good group work necessitates not only knowledge, but also people skills
Students may also not recognize relevance of certain skills to other tasks
When you do something enough, it becomes like a habit. *Habits: Our Cognitive Shortcut by Gidi Nave points out that habits help us in navigating overwhelming amounts of choices.

How to Achieve Mastery

Students often have difficulty processing complex skills because of the large cognitive load. To tackle this, we can:

Focus on one skill at a time
Reduce additional skills/demands that aren’t related to learning goals
Discuss conditions of applicability

It’s also important to unpack complex skills, especially since teachers can have expert blindspots:

Consistently ask, “what would students have to know/know how to do to achieve objective?”
Enlist help from teaching assistant (someone earlier in the learning process than you) or someone outside the discipline
Provide isolated practice of weak or missing skills

How Do You Get Their Attention?

As we discussed in the previous Dirksen chapter, we don’t notice many sensory details; instead, senses are recognized and processed into short term memory when something catches our attention. We can think of the human brain as a person riding the elephant: the human, small and logical, often has difficult controlling the larger, emotional elephant. Thus, an approach of grabbing and then maintaining someone’s attention is to appeal to the elephant by:

Telling stories. These are interesting and the logical flow makes shelving information easier. It also often contextualizes the facts, adding emotion or environment. Scenarios can also be phrased in the first person to create a sense of urgency (ex: “this is important” vs. “your senior manager left and is on his way to Africa. You need to audit accounts— what should you look for?)
Surprise them. Perhaps with rewards (but use these sparingly)
Show shiny things. Take advantage of visuals as decoration, and metaphors. They can also distribute the load of verbal information (prevent huge chunks of text page after page), provide context, and build more shelves.
Tell them other elephants are doing it. Elephants are social creatures. Collaboration helps people learn topics better by helping each other out, and it also provides encouragement through difficult topics. Social proof makes an activity seem interesting and people are more inclined to do something when they see others’ doing it. Competition could be used as motivation but it should be used very sparingly because it decreases enjoyment: it teachers learners how to win instead of how to learn.
Leverage the elephant’s habits.

Other ways to catch elephant’s interests

Ask interesting questions. For instance, you can give interesting dilemmas, such as providing choices of A. a good and very good response, B. 2 bad responses, C. good, better, and best response, D. 2 responses that have good and bad parts in different ways.
Leave information out/be less helpful. This encourages personal initiative.
Use rewards sparingly. Ideally, the rewards are intrinsic to the learning goal. Ex: rewards for learning InDesign is that you can customize your own resume. However, we as teachers cannot determine what the learners’ intrinsic values are).
Use cognitive dissonance as teachable moments in which learners may be prompted to change their mental models.

Friday, February 17, 2017

Strategies for learning experiences with proper practice and feedback

Dirksen 6— Design for Knowledge
Ambrose 5— What kinds of practice and feedback enhance learning?

There’s a common saying, “practice makes perfect”, but there’s a more recent saying along the lines of “perfect practice”. Ambrose dissects the latter in this chapter where she asserts that practice time must be spent efficiently, in particular, practicing what you don’t know.

Learning is fostered when

Target specific goal
Appropriate level of challenge
Quantity and frequency of activity

To optimize practice, it’s important to:

provide clear feedback on targeted skills to practice, perhaps through written specifications of performance criteria and goals
include higher level learning goals in addition to specific requirements
appropriate level of challenge (whether through scaffolding or instructional support)
show what you don’t want

In addition, Dirksen explains how it’s important to teach information incrementally; otherwise the elephant will be overwhelmed! So, you can set expectations about expected time and practice.

More strategies on giving targeted feedback:

Look for patterns to recognize a student’s shortcomings (this is also a way to understand their mental models!)
Enforce their positives as well so they know what to continue doing. This also helps learners gain confidence, so they are further motivated.
Design frequent opportunities to give feedback, and ideally give feedback in real time
Even better, take advantage of peer feedback and social interaction!
Require learners to specify how they used feedback in subsequent work

usual trends in skill increase in relation to time spent practicing

Dirksen takes a few steps out to look at strategies of designing a learning experience as a whole. Remember in previous chapters, we learned that we only remember things that stand out, ones that make us think about them. Thus, it’s important to cause friction, so even if the learner thinks they know the topic, they notice that there is more information worth processing.

Give counterexamples!

After we’ve grabbed the elephant’s attention, we can follow the CCAF learning process:

Context: general (ex, where in the workflow), environment/physical, emotional, what triggers alert learners about when they need to use knowledge?
Challenge: What are appropriate real world challenges?
Activity: what do you want the learners to take away from the activity? Keep in mind that unfacilitated e-learning is only good for recognition, not recall. Roleplays, follow up activities, and job aids are helpful tools the learner can carry with them after the activity ends.
Feedback: Ambrose’s assertions on feedback!

To sustain the elephant’s attention, we can:

apply concept in multiple circumstances, either by 1) giving lots of examples to help learner see patterns, 2) provide concept followed by examples, which may not provide too much context, or 3) give examples followed by concepts and identify concepts from examples (like how Ambrose begins her chapters!)
Help learners gain confidence by 1) doing actual tasks in practice examples, 2) give early success (if you remember the learning plateaus in the beginning, early success is encouraging to learners and get the ball rolling)

Tuesday, February 28, 2017

Dirksen 7— Design for Skills

To understanding designing for skills, we must first recap, “what’s a skill?” If the answer to the question “Is it reasonable to think that someone can be proficient without practice?” is “no”, then it’s a skill.

Skills are a combination of ample practice and feedback. It’s important to give time for rest and practice as well, because students will do it themselves anyways. In those instances, it’s possible the rest or practice they do is done in an ineffective way (such as making bad shortcuts).

To properly structure practice and learning, we can think about this diagram that we’ve seen before:

framing the process of learning with uphills and downhills helps us see how we can give the learner spaced out challenges and breaks.

A benefit of this method is that the new information/challenges (marked by the * points) stand out more when not everything is new/a challenge.

Another way of looking at mapping challenges/breaks is to think about finding the sweet spot of “flow”. When ability/performance and challenge correlate evenly, learners are engaged. It may even be helpful to vary between slightly harder and slightly easier tasks in the challenges we give.

The yellow highlights are parts I identify as things the learner has learned before. These are the downhill portions of the learning hill which gives the learner time to reinforce/practice what they’ve learned as well as feel accomplished.

Some ways we can think about feedback

Follow-ups

When?
What will be evaluated?
What criteria will be used?

Ways

Forum online to report experiences
Send periodic tips/examples/opportunities, allowing the learner to self-evaluate
Virtual critique sessions
I can see some of the feedback methods, especially the digital ones, having opportunity for social engagement!

Looking at pacing from a game perspective

Games are successful in practicing skills and introducing challenges by having immediate, short-term, mid-term, and long-term accomplishments.
The accomplishment of short-term goals are necessary to achieve the longer-term goal, which in turn helps reach the overarching goal
Benefits of framing learning experiences by breaking large goals into small goals: instead of just spewing info, we engage the learner in real world scenarios and get exposure to multiple concepts and material.

Ambrose 3 — What Factors Motivate Students to Learn?

Motivation: Personal investment that an individual has in reaching a desired state or outcome. Influences direction, persistence, and quality of learning behaviors.

Motivation is comprised of two components:

Subjective value of goal
Expectations for successful attainment of goal
How supportive the environment is is also an important aspect of determining motivation.

Students goals may differ from our goals, and may have positive or negative affects on learning outcomes. We can garner more interest if an activity satisfies more than one goal. Some goal categories include:

Performance goals: trying to meet norms/standards
Learning goals: achieving certain skills or understandings
Work avoidant goals: wanting to get work done ASAP
Social goals: wanting social aspect

There are also different types of values:

attainment value: satisfaction from completion/achievement
intrinsic value: personal enjoyment
instrumental value: how goal helps you achieve other goals

As for expectancies, it’s simply important to have a positive outlook, and attribute success to internal causes.

changes in value, expectancies, and environment alter students’ engagement. Being able to target areas can help teachers better encourage students.

Ways of establishing value

connect material to students’ interests
provide authentic, real-world tasks
show relevance to current lives/studies, as well as future lives/studies
identify what you, as the teacher, value, and in turn, show passion and enthusiasm (it’s contagious!)

Build positive expectancies

align objectives, assessments and instructions
create appropriate challenge level
provide early success opportunities
articulate expectations and provide rubrics
describe effective learning/study strategies

Ways to improve both value and expectancies

have flexibility and control in assessments/tasks
give opportunity to reflect

Friday, March 3, 2017

Dirksen 8— Design for Motivation

Motivation is comprised of 1) the motivation to learn, and then 2) the motivation to do. Knowing something is only half the battle; often, even though people “know” something isn’t a good idea, they “do” it anyways.

“I know but…” → caused by the elephant being more easily influenced by experience than abstract knowledge. They have trouble when the action is now, but the consequence is later. This reminds me of the saying:

Discipline is knowing the difference between what you want right now and what you want most.

Change takes time and effort and the elephant is an animal of habit! So, let’s look at ways to design for behavior change and reinforcement.

Technology Acceptance Model (TAM)

Variables that affect how willing someone is to adopt new technology (we learned this in Designing Human Centered Software!) There are two components:
Perceived usefulness— how will the learner know it’s useful?
Perceived ease of use— If it’s not easy, is there anything we can do to help it?

Diffusions of Innovation

Perceived attributes that affected whether a user adopts/rejects innovation. This overlaps with TAM.

Relative advantage: If it’s better than the idea it supercedes. Can we show that the new system would prevent significantly more fails? We can help show advantage with statistics and stories, or have them use the old system and compare with the new one.
Compatibility: is it consistent with existing values, past experiences, and needs of potential adopters? One way is to engage a bit of co-design! Have users consider why the system is incompatible, and then think of ways to make it more compatible.
Complexity: How hard it is to learn. Give opportunities to practice process so it feels easier. Can also reduce complexity if needed (scaffolding!)
Observability: are innovations visible? Are there pilot programs; can you identify opinion leaders?
Trialability: experiment and try out an innovation — smooth out rough edges.

Self-Efficacy

How confident you are; how much control you feel you have to affect a situation*

Can practice role-playing, observing experts (think observability and trialability)
Can practice skill/task in different (maybe easier) contexts

Modeling and Practice

We’ve talked about effective practice, and how if you do something consistently, it’ll become a habit.
Modeling can serve as good practice too, by walking through some steps with the learner as part of the experience
the best scenarios to use are the learner’s actual problems. (this can help them feel accomplished and see value in the task.)

Social Proof

Not only is it useful for attracting attention, but also for encouraging good behavior
Helpful to turn to/cite people we respect. Although, we should consider who’s opinion would resonate more to the audience (e.g. which demographic)
Those people should describe success with process, procedure, or skill so that learners know what they need to do to succeed.
Make progress visible

Visceral Matter

Direct experience and strong emotion
Use immersive experiences to show benefits/drawbacks of alternative systems
Sometimes scare tactics work (but not too much!!)

Follow Up!!!!

Change is a process, not an event

Even though all these other approaches are important, it’s most important to help reinforce behavior over time.
Think about long/short term reinforcements

Ambrose 6— Why Do Student Development and Course Climate Matter for Student Learning?

Social and emotional dynamics in the classroom can complicate learning experiences
Social and emotional gains students make during college are > intellectual gains over the same span of time

Chickering Model of Student Development

Stages of how students (typically college aged students) develop

Developing competence: intellectual, physical, and interpersonal
Managing emotions: being aware of one’s emotions as well as expressing them appropriately
Developing autonomy: emotional and instrumental independence
Establishing identity: *pivotal* With an establish identity, we are less threatened by ideas with beliefs that conflict with my own
Freeing interpersonal relationships: Mature and meaningful intimacy
Developing purpose: Who am I? → Who am I going to be?
Developing integrity: self-interest vs social responsibility

Expanding Perspective

As students learn new ideas, they go through several stages of understanding:

Duality. Black and white.
Multiplicity. No clear right answer.
Relativism. Opinions are not all equal; pros and cons can be understood and evaluated.
Commitment. Acknowledging differences, choosing a view to build new ideas off of.

Learning Environments

environments can be placed on a scale from implicit to explicit, and then centralizing to marginalizing

We learned in a previous chapter of the Ambrose reading that engagement relies on value, self efficacy, and then a supportive environment completes the learning experience. Factors that affect the learning environment include: stereotype, tone, and faculty-student and student-student relations.

Improving the Environment: Strategies to Promote Student Development and Productive Climate

Make uncertainty safe, as well as unpopular opinions
Resist a single right answer
Incorporate evidence into performance/grading criteria (so they know what to improve on)
Examine assumptions about students (students may feel about a topic differently than what you expect)
Don’t have your attempts of helping students come off as patronizing, like you’re not confident in their abilities.
Don’t have individuals speak for entire groups, avoiding “token minority”
Be a role model for inclusive behavior. *I’ll be honest here*— I have views on whether or not we, as humans, are morally obligated to provide “safe spaces” out of fear of offending someone. I don’t think anyone has a right to not be offended.
Give multiple and diverse examples
Use syllabus day/initial class to establish course climate
Get feedback on climate and adjust accordingly
Turn discord and tension into learning opportunity
Facilitate active listening