THE ANATOMY OF LEARNING EXPERIENCE DESIGN
Or what are we designing exactly?
In conversations about learning experience design, I often hear that a “learning experience” is used interchangeably with a “learning product” — a course, a game, or a module in a corporate LMS. We create a product that provokes some learning activity — and this is called learning experience design, right?
Not exactly. What we produce as a result of the LX design process might be a product, but it also might be no product at all. What we design is a complex system heavily dependent on the learner and the purpose of this design. Imagine a range of possibilities how you can help a person to get from point A to point B. You can create an air balloon, a car, a bicycle, or you can give the person a map and send them to a sports store to buy a pair of comfortable hiking shoes, a backpack, and walking sticks.
For people new to LXD it might sound like “Go I know not where and fetch I know not what”.
To make it less abstract I came up with an explanation that hopefully gives a visual alternative of a “product” to describe what we are designing.
Let’s start from the very beginning.
What is an EXPERIENCE?
It is a conscious event (all the perceptions, feelings, and thoughts) a person
experiences in a specific situation.
A situation means that there is something in the external world (it can be anything — objects, other people, devices, etc)
the person interacts with (= acts and reacts)
in a specific place
during a particular period of time.
Think about any recent experience and try to answer the following questions:
- What and/or who did you interact with?
- What was this interaction about and what defined this interaction?
- Where was it?
- How long was it?
- What is one word that best describes this experience for you?
What makes an experience a LEARNING experience?
Any experience we learn from is a learning experience.
Ok, but what does it mean to “learn”?
Let’s look at Kolb’s cycle — the model that illustrates how we learn from experiences.
An experience becomes a learning experience not in a special kind of learning situation, but through the way it is processed in the person’s mind. In constructivist psychology, we call it “meaning-making”. In other words, we learn when we find out what this experience means for our understanding of the world and our future interactions with it.
This meaning-making process is influenced by multiple factors — it is the learner’s previous experiences, knowledge and abilities, interest and motivation, as well as the context and the environment — social pressure or encouragement, rules, expectations, incentives, etc.
Therefore, learning is to a great extent an ongoing internal process. It includes more than one learning cycle at a time and does not end when the situation is over. As with any other model, Kolb’s cycle reduces the complexity of real life. The real learning experience looks more like this:
But for our purposes let’s stick to the model David Kolb suggested. When the learning cycle is complete, the learner is not quite the same person as before, although the difference might be hard to notice, until it is manifested in a new behavior.
Thus, it is the inner change that makes an experience a learning experience.
Think about your recent experience once again— what happened IN you during this experience — what were you seeing, feeling, and thinking? How did you reflect on it? Did you learn something new about the world or yourself? Could you experiment with this new concept or are you planning to do it in another situation in the future? Was it a learning experience for you?
What is learning experience DESIGN?
As defined by Charles Eames,
Design is a plan for arranging elements to accomplish a particular purpose.
It’s the purpose that drives design. Any design starts with WHY. Any experience can be a learning experience. But not any learning experience leads to a change needed for that purpose.
Using the golden circle of Simon Sinek we can illustrate the main questions when designing learning experiences:
To design a learning experience means to design the learner’s interactions with the world that facilitate meaning-making and lead to a desired change in feeling, thinking, and acting.
This might include designing products such as instructional materials, workshop guides, or mobile applications. However, if learning is an active meaning-making process, it is much more important how these products are used and what impact this experience has on the learner. This is why learning experience designers refuse to copy-paste their old solutions for new projects (that doesn’t mean though that they cannot use and adjust some of them in the new design).
Another important question is how the internal process of meaning-making can be facilitated. The general idea is to guide and scaffold every step of the meaning-making process through different types of experiences. Riding a horse can be a part of learning how to lead. Dancing can be a part of learning about social entrepreneurship. Making an exhibition can be a part of reinventing the concept of corporate Learning & Development. All these examples are real and have great feedback and impact on the participants, though none of them can be described as a “learning product” or “content”.
