5 Reasons Why Learner Stories Are Better than Learning Objectives
It’s been a busy few months as we move to a pure Agile workflow here at Croomo. We’ve been playing planning poker, prioritising cards in our Kanban system, and making a whole lot of awesome.
In this post, I want to share some of the ways we’ve adapted Agile thinking into our Learning Experience Design process by introducing learner stories to our clients.
We’ve been creating learner personas (where we define the demographics and learning objectives for different learner groups with our clients) for a while now. More recently, we’ve started using learner stories to articulate the overarching learning experience to give the project team a clear barometer for what ‘done’ looks like.
In the worlds of Agile and SCRUM, stakeholders create user stories for specific functionalities. The stories are written in simple language, and phrased as follows:
As a <type of user>, I want <some goal> so that <some reason>
We then add our definition for ‘done’, which gives whoever is responsible for the task a clear set of criteria that their deliverable needs to fulfill at the end of the sprint.
Finally, we add user-acceptance criteria. This sets out in the user’s terms what they should be able to do to with the deliverable to determine that the task is complete.
1. Learner stories help you justify the existence of an objective
What I love about learner stories is that they’re actually a much more intuitive way to define measurable learning objectives! Learner stories force you to justify each objective. As soon as you can’t provide a reason why a learning objective should exist; you discard it. Your learners will thank you in the long run.
2. They keep language simple and concrete
It should be an immediate red-flag if you include the word ‘understand’ in a learning objective. Understanding is an abstract concept that’s practically impossible to measure. Learner stories encourage you to focus on tangible outcomes that can be actively phrased. You’ll find that you struggle to create a sensible story using words like understand.
3. Prioritise!
SCRUM is all about setting priorities early on so that you tackle the big ticket items first. The things that blow a project’s budget out of the water are rarely the tasks that we’re the most familiar with.
Prioritise learning objectives, interactions, and content with your stakeholders. If you take care of the difficult things first, you can quickly decide where your efforts should lie to finish off the remaining tasks.
4. You’re forced to think like a learner
Learner stories take into account learner types, their concrete learning goals, and the reasons why they have that goal. So, you don’t have much choice but to think like your learners when you’re designing content.
5. Tin Can Statements are like little learner stories
If you’ve already started implementing the Tin Can API, you’ll know all about how it relies on Statements to show what’s been a learnt.
Tin Can structures statements as follows:
“<Noun>, <verb>, <object> or ‘I did this’.
Pretty similar to a basic learning story. Coincidence? I think not.
Writing concise and active learning objectives makes designing and creating an amazing learning experience so much easier.
How does your organisation or team write learning objectives or learner stories? Let me know in the comments below.
