Learning Experience Design — get to know the elephant.
As someone who came to Learning Experience Design from a very different field (a mixture of innovation management, change management and psychology), at first I was overwhelmed by the amount of information and perspectives. My initial aim was to understand how to create an effective online course, but I ended up changing my career to LXD. Or better to say, for a long time I could not understand what exactly my new field of interest was. Now I understand it much better and would like to share my thoughts about one hot topic. What is Learning Experience Design?
Usually when I try to explain it to other people, they only can relate to something they already know. “Ahh… it is about online courses?”, “Are you a trainer now?”, or “Wait, but it is instructional design”. Later I noticed that the same happens in a community of learning professionals. Sometimes the articles and discussions remind me the parable of the blind men and an elephant. Not meaning that people having other opinions are blind and understand all wrong, but meaning that the elephant is more than they can see (or can’t see).
Let’s look at some popular opinions about what is LXD and try to understand where these views come from.
“Learning Experience Design is a new brand of Instructional Design”
Instructional Design as a field appeared in the 1950s as the answer of cognitive and behavioral psychology to the needs of US Army in World War II to effectively train a lot of people for a very short period of time. The two of 3 most frequently used ID models appeared at that time (Bloom’s taxonomy — 1956, Kirkpatrick’s Model of Evaluation — 1959). Since then, Instructional Design methodology was adapting and evolving all the time due to new theories and findings in psychology, digitalization and changing needs of learning. For example, the original version of ADDIE looked like a linear process, nowadays it’s mostly presented as an iterative process. Under the influence of modern times ID had to change. If previously it was enough to focus on instruction, today it’s seen as inefficient to put all people with their different needs in one learning conveyor. The logical step for ID is to think not only about the instruction and content, but also about the experience of the learners.
The development of ID created two types of ID — the old ID and the new ID. In order to emphasize the difference, the new is sometimes called Learning Experience Design.
“Learning Experience Design is UX design applied for learning”
User Experience is the experience from interacting with a product, system, or service. In most cases UX implies interaction with a digital product. But what if the product or service you interact with should teach you something? For example, instead of booking a flight you want to learn a language. Let’s apply the principles of UX design and create products and services that provide learning experiences. Since UX design already deals with experiences and puts the user in the focus, we just need to replace the user with the learner. And here we come to Learning Experience Design.
“Learning Experience Design is applying Design Thinking to teaching”
Teaching has long been one-way information flow from the teacher to the students where the content was the most important thing. It was reasonable as long as information itself was valuable. But today information about almost everything is accessible at your fingertips. Therefore, teaching or training as providing information does not make sense any more. Today it’s more about creating the right environment and activities for learning, both digital and physical, where teacher takes a role of a facilitator. This format of teaching requires a different approach to educational process. Instead of preparing a standard curriculum teachers try to design learning process using such metodologies as Design Thinking. Teaching leans more and more towards designing experiences of the students instead of focusing on teacher giving content and instructions.
As we can see, 3 different fields of expertise are moving in one direction but do they meet exactly in one point called Learning Experience Design? Each of the routes requires considering experience of the learners. Each of the routes produces experiences of taking part in an online course, learning languages with an app or listening to a professor at the university. But is it the result of Learning Experience Design?
In order to see the elephant, it may help to forget everything you know and start from one simple idea — people learn from experiences. However, not all experiences are specially designed for learning, but they can be designed. If you imagine the variety of experiences you may have in life, you will understand that LXD has infinite opportunities for creation. Moreover, the approach and the tools you would use in LXD will be different from those used in other disciplines (though there might be some similarities, such as journey maps and empathy maps in Experience Design or theories of how people learn in ID).
Another important characteristic of LXD is that it is rooted in Human-Centered Design. HCD is “an approach to problem solving that develops solutions to problems by involving the human perspective in all steps of the process”. Acquiring new knowledge and skills is not a problem, it is what can help to solve the problem which should be defined first. Using this approach can result in completely unexpected experiences far away from traditional online courses and classroom lectures.
So, what is Learning Experience Design?
What LXD is:
- Learning Experience Design is about designing experiences that guide a person to a meaningful change in knowing, doing or being. Of course, change is not only about learning. But any change involves learning.
- This definition by itself opens up the limits of how this change can happen. There are practically no limits how learning experience can look like.
- This change is important and relevant for the person in the first place. This is not only a “user/learner centered”, but a “human-centered” approach, where learners are seen as people in all their complexity, and not as business functions which only need to improve their skills to perform better. People have their own goals, challenges, needs, feelings and pain points. All these factors influence the design.
- Learning Experience Designers have to design for a person in the context where learning happens.
- Different learners will have their own unique experiences from engaging in the same activities. But we as LX designers are responsible for making these experiences goal-oriented and PPP (positive, personal, profound).
- Learning Experience Design is a creative discipline and is rooted in human-centered design. This implies a process, where final solutions are not predictable in the beginning, and might seem quite unconventional.
- Learning Experience Design is a problem-solving approach, where the complexity of all factors influencing the learners should be considered, and where feedback, testing and iterations are a natural part of the process
LXD is NOT only:
- Learning Experience Design is NOT only about digital learning. But it can work with digital tools if they can help to achieve the goal.
- Learning Experience Design is NOT only about education. Education also needs good design, but experiences we learn from happen anywhere and anytime, not only in education.
- Learning Experience Design is NOT only about content. Actually, an experience can work perfectly ok for learning also without content in its traditional form. But content is in fact an important part of many learning experiences.
If you want to know more about the difference between LXD and other disciplines, I recommend to read the articles of Niels Floor
