By practical objectives

Changing what people do, not just what they know

Cathy Moore's blog " Making change - Ideas for lively elearning ", with its resolutely pragmatic approach to distance learning, its sense of imagery and, above all, its imagination, has made her indispensable to us.

In a recent slide show, How to save the world with elearning scenarios, she imagines an e-learning order for a client who wants to warn an audience of young apprentices in the catering industry about the main dangers of the trade. Based on this situation, she outlines some of the key principles involved in scripting a distance learning course.

She analyzes a course that hasn't really worked so far: lists of rules that we're tempted to "skip", content to be assimilated without priority, in short, knowledge that's disembodied and too vast.

Training to solve a problem

The instructional design approach it recommends:

Set a realistic, quantifiable objective: reduce the number of accidents within a given timeframe.
Identify the steps and conditions required to achieve the objective.
In this case, she lists a series of actions that the apprentice, student or learner must take to avoid an accident.
Design activities at each stage that address the issue in a realistic way.
In the example provided, the aim is to give learners the opportunity to simulate, before practicing in a real situation, the actions that will help reduce accidents.

The central point of the scenario is personification. Here, a young tractor driver explains the precautions to be taken when operating machinery; there, a young waiter is put to the test of serving a delicate tray. This character faces a real-life challenge.

Entry by task rather than by rule

Cathy Moore shows in detail how, for example, the acquisition of the right gesture in the waiter's job is not achieved by instructions but by questions put directly to the learner, who must justify his choice in given situations and thus question his own gestures.

The order in which information is presented is also important: instead of displaying information followed by activities (exercises, quizzes), it seems more effective to immerse the learner in the flow of activities, with discreet aids for further information. This is what is known as the task-based approach, widely used in adult education.

Cathy Moore develops here what she calls "action mapping", a method for designing training courses by forcing oneself to select as objectives only what learners need to know how to do, a vitaminized version of objective-based pedagogy: "change what people do, not just what they know ".

Illustration: Flore W - Pixabay