What makes for good digital learning design?

Over the last few weeks I’ve really been enjoying using a tool called Sonic Pi. It’s a tool for making music and sound with code created by Sam Aaron and his team, and heavily supported by the Raspberry Pi Foundation.

In this article, I set out to explain what makes Sonic Pi such a great learning experience, picking out what I believe are four critical characteristics of good design practice.

Coding to make music is not a mainstream experience. Many would think it weird. It is certainly quite far from hugging a guitar to you and gently strumming out a soul-filled song. But Sam Aaron seems to believe that live coding music can be just as expressive and responsive to mood. To prove it, he is constantly touring the world doing just that, you can watch some examples here.

I make music using digital tools all the time, so the concepts are familiar to me. However, the way they are embodied in this particular approach to music making is still very new to me, and one that I need to learn. Sam has designed Sonic Pi to work very well for young people learning how to code, but as soon as started to play with Sonic Pi I realised it was pitched perfectly for me as well.

The illusion of intimacy

One of the things digital learning experiences can suffer from is a lack of humanity. In case that sounds over the top, bring to mind a time when you learned something that truly inspired you or changed your life. More likely than not you’ll remember a relationship; great learning with a teacher is often suffused with the warmth of a real human personality. The need to transmit that sense of intimate connection is central to other dislocated mediums, like radio and novels. Nigel Smith, Head of Content atFutureLearn uses the phrase ‘the illusion of intimacy’ to suggest to those creating courses for the platform that it is not enough to have high quality materials. The whole thing needs to be conveyed with a rich sense of personality, and the sense that the course is speaking directly to you, the learner.

Sonic Pi oozes personality. You wouldn’t necessarily spot that from its simple design full of different shaped text boxes but here are some phrases in the first few tutorials:

• ‘Welcome to Sonic Pi. Hopefully you’re as excited to get started making crazy sounds as I am to show you. It’s going to be a really fun ride where you’ll learn all about music, synthesis, programming, composition, performance and more…’
• ‘…Now, play around. Change the rates — what happens when you use high values, or small values or negative values? See what happens when you change the rate: value for the :ambi_choir sample just slightly (say to 0.29). What happens if you choose a really small sleep value? See if you can make it go so fast your computer will stop with an error because it can’t keep up (if that happens, just choose a bigger sleep time and hit Run again)…’
• ‘…Don’t worry if this means nothing to you — it didn’t to me when I first started. All that matters right now is that you know that low numbers make lower beeps and high numbers make higher beeps.’

It feels like Sam is speaking directly to me, but also that he has anticipated my learning journey and is busily addressing those thoughts that might crop up that would slow down my progress or make me doubtful. This is not an easy thing to pull off, but I think is an effort worth making in any digital earning experience. The question you might ask yourself is: ‘if I were there with the learner, what would I be saying to them to help them engage with the materials I’ve given them?’

The joy of progression

Digital learning experiences can feel flat. Humans like to feel that they are getting ever closer to their goals. If an experience simply places an endless sequence of tasks in front of the learner without conveying a sense that it is all going somewhere, it will struggle to inspire and motivate.

Digital learning experiences can tend towards this directionless form of learning, because it is so easy to just create a big bundle of learning materials and stick them online for the learner to work through — much easier than creating a clear story that binds those elements together and feels like a valid path to progress.

Sonic Pi, like great console games, has an incredibly well calibrated set of tutorials that helps the learner discover new concepts at just the right moment. Not only that, each tutorial reinforces the concepts that have come before, building on the knowledge already acquired by the learner. This of course can only work if you have designed a learning system that enables the learner to re-use introductory concepts, refining them and re-purposing them for more complex tasks as their confidence builds.

This constant moving forward whilst making clear to the learner what they have already learnt is also an essential method for keeping learners active and happy. When designing a digital learning experience we might ask ourselves: ‘is the path of progression clear enough for the learner? Are we supporting and rewarding learner progress in the right ways?’

Happy useful failure

With all that joy of progression it is easy to forget the important flip-side — failure. In all learning experiences, failure needs to mean something useful to the learner. This is doubly so in a digital experience where there may not be an empathetic teacher in sight ready to pick you up and dust you off.

When designing a digital learning experience it is worth asking this question: ‘how can we ensure that a user learns something useful when they get something wrong?’

Sonic Pi does something else as well — it encourages failure. Sam calls this learning through play, and it is all about setting up the learner’s expectations and permissions. One of the first tutorials starts with this phrase, which sums up Sam’s whole approach to explorative learning:

• ‘Whilst we’re on this subject, let me just give you one piece of advice I’ve learned over my years of live coding with music — there are no mistakes, only opportunities. This is something I’ve often heard in relation to jazz but it works equally well with live coding. No matter how experienced you are — from a complete beginner to a seasoned Algoraver, you’ll run some code that has a completely unexpected outcome. It might sound insanely cool — in which case run with it. However, it might sound totally jarring and out of place. It doesn’t matter that it happened — what matters is what you do next with it. Take the sound, manipulate it and morph it into something awesome. The crowd will go wild.’

Sam actually invites useful failure in the first tutorial to set the permissions for the learner as open as possible. As we saw above, he asks the user to see if they can break their computer:

• ‘What happens if you choose a really small sleep value? See if you can make it go so fast your computer will stop with an error because it can’t keep up (if that happens, just choose a bigger sleep time and hit Run again).’

Designing in a good approach to learner failure can elevate a learning experience, because it can make a learner feel more comfortable and ready to experiment and can generate really useful insights for learning.

Feel the quality

I remember an occasion while working on a great digital music learning project for Heart n Soul called SoundLab when we were trying out different drum machine apps. Lilly, one of the participants, told me: ‘I don’t want to make plastic toy beats, I want to make heavy grown up beats.’ I got what she meant immediately. Some of the software we were using had amazing and powerful ways to create music, but had terrible weak sounds. Just those weak sounds meant Lilly didn’t want to learn how to use that software — she felt like it would lead nowhere useful. Some learning experience designers just assume that any material will be good enough. The same is true of software, with the same perils, since any software that requires a learning curve from its users is in itself a digital learning experience.

Matthew and I have surveyed countless digital learning experiences over the last few years, and we are often amazed at how poor some of the learning materials can be. Perhaps the creators assume that the learners will be so amazed that they are are doing some cutting-edge learning on a fancy digital platform that they won’t care if the materials are a bit off. We think the exact opposite is true. We think learners are wowed by the quality of the experience as a whole; but that means that if they encounter badly recorded sound, vague incomprehensible text or tiny images, they will quickly lose heart.

Quality is a slippery concept, but it might be considered more of a state of mind. Sonic Pi feels like a labour of love. The choice of sounds that Sam has made, the wonderfully crafted tutorials, the breadth of example files for learners to play with, the in-depth explanations of every aspect of the software all contribute to an overwhelming sense of quality. One of the biggest traps any new digital experience can fall into is the erroneous assumption that if it looks good, it is good. Quality is not about how it looks but how it feels. When designing a digital learning experience we might ask the simple question: ‘are any of our materials letting us down?’

There are of course many other principles of good design for digital learning experiences. We would love to know which digital learning experiences have worked for you and why you think they are great. We’ve all got tools and platforms that we use and rely on, but it is always useful to hear about others that are out there, and what we can learn from them. Let us know on twitter — https://twitter.com/theunthinkables using the hashtag #digitallearning.