Initially, learning design is all about requirements gathering. In other words, plotting what the business need is. That could be, for example, increased profit or cost-cutting. From that need, we derive the learning objectives, and these ultimately drive the design.
We wear many hats in our role. Some days we’re facilitators, some days we’re technologists, some days we’re investigators, researchers, storytellers, and more! To produce excellent learning content, you’ve got to play all of these roles but all under the banner of ‘Design Thinking’. We work very closely with subject matter experts to ensure the veracity of the content and make sure that it’s hitting the learning objectives. But, ultimately, it should be us leading the way, designing your experience with the end-learner in mind.
Steve Jobs is largely heralded as responsible for ushering in the Design Thinking era, and for that I’m very grateful. When washing machines were designed, the wonder of the machine wasn’t that it delivered a great user experience, it was that it existed at all. Whereas now, all of the big players in tech put UX and design thinking at the heart of their product strategies.
Bringing that back to learning, I think there’s a lot of learning content out there that was designed by people who, with the greatest of respect, don’t really have design skills. They were perhaps people in more technical positions who were told they had to adapt quickly, and as such often created digital content that was functional but not really desirable, enjoyable, and fun.
From a learning design perspective, Clark and Mayer’s Science of Instruction is my bible. It outlines eight principles on the nature of human learning that are crucial: multimedia, contiguity, modality, redundancy, coherence, personalization, exemplification, and practice. Then there’s the UX perspective to consider—we have to constantly interrogate our designs and ask ‘Is this solving the user’s problem?’ Without a learning designer, you lose that crucial learner experience-driven steer through every stage of production.