If What You Mean Is the Opposite of the Thing, then Yes...

This month's Learning Circuits Big Question is:

DOES THE DISCUSSION OF "HOW THE BRAIN LEARNS" IMPACT YOUR ELEARNING DESIGN?

I think there is some further parsing that's needed in the question, but in my case the answer is a simple yes, but not in the way that's implied. The details are problematic.

In instructional design there are some established best practices when breaking up content into appropriate pieces, how to handle visual presentation, the quality of narrators, as well as other considerations. All of these and others are based on responses human audiences have given to instructional events and their design. While none of the above should be taken as "gospel", many of these best practices are generated from experience and research in evaluating learning programs and their effectiveness. To this end we have discovered at least some of how the brain works (or rather, behaves), and we as professionals incorporate these success-minded considerations as we design and develop solutions.

The best practices are, at least in some cases, not directly derived from direct application of learnings from research on the brain itself. In this sense many of us are not using knowledge of brain functioning but rather knowledge of human behavior. Clark Quinn expresses a somewhat similar point of view. After all, we got pretty far into the twentieth century without knowing a whole lot about how our brains learn, and our more primitive instructional strategies were fruitful in some significant way. This is of course not to excuse or endorse bad or traditional strategies, but simply to point out that we may not know enough yet to say we're applying the concept deeply. And that's my main point in answering this month's query.

Jason McDonald explains some of my sentiment as well. I put some heavy stock in Jason's point about the disconnect between what science has actually found, and what is communicated by journalists in periodicals. Not to paint too broadly here, but scientific results are consistently mis-represented/mis-communicated in the press. An assessment of the average person's understanding of evolutionary theory's basic thrust is enough to confirm that.

My question in response to the Big Q: Do we know enough about the brain to really say we are applying the fruits of brain-based research? At the risk of sounding like a denier of the evidentiary discoveries thus far, I do not think we know enough yet for the actual science of brain functioning to impact WLP work. I think what we have gained from pure practice and evaluation, and from other sciences such as human psychology, has been and may be enough for a while.

Whewww!

So the last two weeks have been quite action-packed for me. Finishing up this quarter's Masters project proved more time consuming than initially expected, and I'm glad I started it a couple weeks early! I had to prepare elearning and classroom instruction modules that complemented each other for a new software application put in place by my client. This was an interesting project in that it really illustrated for me how instructional design as a field is beginning to merge with Human Performance Improvement/Technology (HPI/HPT), as I discussed in a post last month.

My client is in the process of integrating his training team with an application that tracks performance data of individuals and shifts to specific equipment metrics, and aids training personnel in working with their customers on how to best solve performance issues. They are getting a kind of visibility into performance improvement opportunities that my client's training group has not previously had, and the new functionality allows the training team to uncover solutions it had never considered in the past. This is about going beyond training, and getting into other HPI interventions that may be more capable of solving the performance issue.

There's an obvious caveat to the project however, in that training personnel can view individual job performance data. This can lead to sticky situations that can be hard to dial back if the application is misused. It's a good thing though that my client recognizes this and has already forged a partnership with HR and training's stakeholders to put in place rules to guard against misuse of data.

It's been a wonderful project, and a great opportunity to take part in such a significant new development for this client. I heartily thank my client for agreeing to let me help them with this effort, and in turn helping me with my studies and application. And, in the process of completing the project, I was able to test Captivate 4.0 thoroughly enough to do a write-up! I'll be posting that hopefully in the next couple of days. Stay tuned!