If you work in Learning and Development, you can’t have failed to notice the big buzz on the scene is Learning Experience Design, or LXD as its mates call it. But what is learning experience design, does it matter, and how does it apply to elearning?
Neils Floor describes himself as a pioneer in the field of LXD and defines LXD as “the process of creating learning experiences that enable the learner to achieve the desired learning outcome in a human centered and goal oriented way.”
He explains LXD as an approach combining design disciplines with learning disciplines.
Design disciplines
And he elaborates further on the five key points of LXD.
Experience. LXD is about creating powerful educational experiences that will last a lifetime.
Design. The LX design process typically includes research, experimentation, ideation, conceptualisation, prototyping, iteration, and testing.
Learning. The focus is on the learner and the process they go through. You have to understand why and how people learn. Experiential learning is part of the LXD foundation.
Human centered. Know and understand the people you design for, figure out what drives them and how you can ignite their intrinsic motivation.
Goal oriented. Choose the right goals. Select activities that enable the learner to reach goals. Align learning experience form, medium, and technology to the goals of the learner.
LXD has only been around since the late noughties, and it’s still very much considered a neophyte on the learning scene.
So, it may be illuminating to compare it to its more established counterpart, Instructional Design (ID), a learning approach originating in the mid twentieth century. Neils’ article on Learning Experience Design vs Instructional Design compares the two learning design approaches. He summarises his case by establishing a series of oppositions between the two disciplines.
Learning Experience Design
Instructional Design
This take establishes the two approaches as very different. However, Neils is also candid that he has no background or training in ID. Therefore, his positioning of LXD in opposition to ID is based on observation, rather than an intimate knowledge of the more established discipline.
Instructional Design and e-learning designer Devlin Peck has a different take on the relation between LXD and ID. In his identically titled article, Learning Experience Design vs. Instructional Design, he compares the two disciplines based on methodology and concludes they’re identical in all but name. Both conduct learner analysis, design with clear goals in mind, recognise how people learn, and put scientific learning theory into practice.
Devlin sees LXD as a brand positioning play, rather than a distinct methodology.
He describes LXD as a natural backlash driven by designers “well-versed in the modern web” to the lamentable domination of the learning industry by death by PowerPoint.
And we’ve all been there haven’t we?
Rocked up to a day of training. Bit knackered because we’ve worked our arse off getting everything done, so we could take the day to learn. But we’re there and we’re looking forward to getting our teeth into some new skills.
Then the trainer gets into it, and our heart sinks as we realise we’re about to spend the next eight hours having 100s of verbose, badly designed PowerPoint slides read to us verbatim.
Devlin believes much corporate training and e-learning “devolved into glorified PowerPoints,” because “most instructional designers don’t conduct analysis, don’t pay a ton of heed to the science, and don’t push boundaries when it comes to the learning experiences they design.”
He cuts the perpetrators of PowerPoint atrocities some slack, saying: “Part of this may be because they fell into the role without getting trained as an ID, and an even bigger part may be the organizational pressure to churn out information-heavy training without regard for analysis.”
As graphic designers and web designers encroached on learning designers’ turf, they brought design thinking principles with them. The mediocrity of the learning design they found made them believe these principles were new to the industry, and they coined the term LXD as a statement “to differentiate themselves from their more traditional peers,” not realising design thinking was already at the heart of instructional design methodology, if not its practise.
Whether you side with Niels’ infectious optimism and believe LXD is a brave new dawn or tend towards Devlin’s more pragmatic take that there’s nothing new under the sun, it’s indisputable that the principles of LXD are a valuable tool to help us all up our learning design game.
Because magic happens when people become so immersed they forget they’re learning, and a practise that makes learning more fun and engaging will deliver better learning outcomes.
Some learning designers question whether e-learning can embrace LXD principles because they perceive e-learning to offer too limited a palette to create blended learning experiences.
This may have been a valid critique when e-learning platforms were in their infancy, little more than PowerPoint on steroids. But now e-learning platforms like Chameleon Creator offer rich, multi-layered options to take learners on a journey, the learning experience you can create is limited only by your imagination.
Indeed, we firmly believe it’s a cop out not to embrace the principles of LXD to make the e-learning experience as rich and multidimensional as possible.
The LXD design process is a typical user-centered Agile design process, with a focus on research, experimentation, testing, and iteration to improve your learning product.
If we were to formalise the stages of LXD design it could look something like this.
It can also be useful to consider the phases of an optimal learning experience.
We sat down with designer and e-learning developer Annette Khaw from etrainu, an e-learning development consultancy based in Australia and Atlanta, USA. Etrainu specialise in creating courses that deliver high learning retention for their customers and use Chameleon as a platform to deliver their interactive and engaging e-learning.
We’re big fans of Annette’s work. She makes some the best e-learning we’ve seen, so we’re tickled to share her thoughts on how to make e-learning a more delightful experience.
Annette uses the Action Mapping process developed by Cathy Moore. This streamlined process helps her map out training needs and explore how training will be delivered. Note how this aligns closely to the first four steps of the LXD design process described earlier.
Annette also uses five key design principles to make her e-learning engaging and sticky.
Use your learners’ own words and experiences. Make sure the language, voice and real life scenarios you use are familiar to your learners.
Annette has allowed us to share some examples from her work, where she’s used Chameleon Creator’s array of interactions to create a rich, blended elearning experience.
Many meetings are unnecessary. In fact, while we’re dealing in harsh truths, a lot of meetings could be an email. Which is why Annette’s guide to good meetings is a jolly fine thing. View the full module here, and check out the key elements we will explore below:
If you keep coming back to the three keystones of good learning design:
You’ll create useful, effective content.
But we believe the intent of LXD is to exceed this, by also delivering the X factor of fun and delight. This elevates learning from chore to a pleasure, from dry instruction to rich experience.
That’s why we’ve invested time, energy and imagination in making Chameleon Creator a tool that offers learning designers a full toolkit of interactions that empowers you to mix it up for all learning styles. Bon appetit friends.
In our 10-minute recorded demo, we'll show you how to build and publish your own module.
Written by: Rhys Kerr | CUSTOMER LEAD
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