Coming over all andragogical

Instructional designers are primarily concerned with how adults learn. Andragogy, in case you didn’t know, is the art and science of helping adults to learn (unlike pedagogy, which is just for kids). Critically, andragogy also refers to a ‘learner-centred’ approach, whereas pedagogical methods are centred on what the teacher does. These double meanings are significant – experts agree that instructional design for adults must be learner-centred; it must put the learner in the driving seat.

Emerging as the dominant theory in adult learning is ‘constructivism’ (these words will impress all your friends). According to funderstanding.com, constructivism is “a philosophy of learning founded on the premise that, by reflecting on our experiences, we construct our own understanding of the world we live in”. Courses built on constructivist principles “pose roblems for learners to explore, seek and value multiple perspectives, encourage reflection, embed learning in realistic and relevant contexts, and recognise the social dimension of learning” (Sevilla and Wells, 2001).

To what extent is what we know about adult being applied to real e-learning product? Well, SkillSoft is probably the world’s largest publisher of e-learning courses in soft skills. Their instructional design model underpins all of their products: “The model draws heavily from adult learning theories that emphasise learner initiative, self-management and experiential learning, and from social learning theory, which emphasises the importance of observing and modelling the behaviours, attitudes and emotional reactions of others”.

Case study: NETg

NETg is one of the world’s largest e-learning publishers and winner of the 1999 IITT Training Company of the Year award. With between 150 and 200 courses to produce a year and hundreds of developers on multiple sites, NETg clearly has to take instructional design seriously.

Jim L’Allier is NETg’s Chief Learning Officer and VP Research and Development, working out of Naperville, Illinois: “Although we have instructional design standards, we want our designs to be open, not all the same. We have adopted an eclectic approach, drawing pragmatically on research from a variety of schools of thought”. Jim’s team are currently examining the latest thinking on study skills to see how NETg’s learners can be helped to obtain the maximum benefit from e-learning. NETg are also working directly with the University of Utah to conduct a large-scale evaluation of the effectiveness of their courses in changing behaviour on-the-job.

NETg has 60 instructional designers working in their Limerick offices, many of whom have been recruited directly from the Technical Communications course at the University of Limerick. Working in close collaboration with NETg, the university have adapted this course to include a significant component on instructional design. According to HR Manager, Juliet Finlay, this provides an excellent basis, although the company also provides a two-week course for all new designers, to ensure they are fully conversant with the company’s overall instructional design model.

New e-learning developer Academee has discarded old models of instructional design and is basing its approach on a learner-centred, constructivist model, emphasising the importance of collaboration between learners. Chief Knowledge Architect, David Bird, has made it a point not to recruit his team from the existing ranks of instructional designers, having found that those with teaching or training experience empathise better with Academee’s approach.

Well-known American author and e-learning developer Roger Schank believes passionately that real learning is achieved by doing and not by telling. Learning occurs naturally when we’re in pursuit of a goal and we fail in some way. We develop a theory of how to improve and then we try again. Schank headed up a team at Cognitive Arts working with Columbia University and Harvard on a series of e-learning courses that employ simulation as a way of immersing learners in realistic problem scenarios. Purveyors of page-turners should beware when these ‘page-burners’ hit the market.

Henry Stewart, MD of Happy Computers, a former IITT Training Company of the Year, believes that the principles that have served them well in the classroom apply equally well online. “With our new e-learning venture, LearnFish, we are aiming to apply TAP – the Trainer Activity Profile – to our interactions with the learner. We never present information when we can prompt the learner to find things out for themselves. We use the real application as a basis for all our practical work, so learners have no difficulty in relating what they’re taught to the real work environment.”