Students
Michael Allen, Adversary of Boredom in e-Learning
"Too much of e-learning produced today is just pushing out knowledge, leaving learners bored to death or too overwhelmed to have any impact on business outcomes." - Michael Allen
A few years ago, a coworker got us all reading this book – Michael Allen’s Guide to e-Learning. Does anyone remember Authorware? Michael Allen was the creator of this flowchart-based authoring tool still (but not for much longer) available from Adobe. These days, in addition to writing, consulting and speaking on e-learning, Dr. Allen runs a company called Allen Interactions Inc. which is one of the leading providers of custom e-learning solutions for workforce training and performance improvement. The company is especially known for designing highly effective simulations and games. Even programs that could not really be defined as games, feel game-like in that they are fun, interactive and engaging.
According to his book, a key strategy used by Allen Interactions is the use of design teams that include the instructional designer, SME and/or client, artist and programmer. Instead of having an instructional designer conduct analysis, then work in a vacuum to create design specs for artists and programmers to follow, the process is collaborative from start to finish. The team uses a process called “successive approximation” which is a micro-cycled version of ADDIE. Beginning with a very rough prototype, the team creates several iterations of the program – allowing the design to unfold and improve with each version. All members of the design team need to be intimately involved throughout the entire life of the project for this to work.
I’ve found at my workplace, it is very difficult to work in this way (although we’ve tried). I think this is due to the fact that we have several Instructional Designers and only a few multimedia team members, who are simply spread to thin to be truly involved in the design process. I’m excited to have the opportunity to work in this way on our projects for this class, and am interested to hear if others have experienced this type of process on the job.
September 27th, 2009 at 10:37 pm
As an IT project manager, my husband was surprised to see me studying a subject with which he is well acquainted. This above mentioned technique is similar to an Agile PM style where all the players are committed to the project for a designated time period and that is their only focus. Certain business areas of his company are just recently following this methodology exclusively. No one has delivered anything under it yet, but they have very high expectations for it. A similar philosophy is described in this article: http://incsub.org/soulsoup/?p=739 I, too, would like to hear from people who have experienced this method.
September 28th, 2009 at 3:08 pm
Allen interactions makes top-notch (high cost) learning. One of the giants in our field.
September 28th, 2009 at 5:29 pm
Thanks for sharing, Denise. This looks like a really interesting read, and I hadn’t heard about Michael Allen before, though I have a little practical experience with Authorware, though more with Director. Both products are kind of being shunned by Adobe in my mind since picking them up from Macromedia. I actually still use Director for a lot of things actually, and I still think it’s way easier to program than Flash.
I wish we had a big enough team to this sort of collaboration where I work. Granted, much of my work is video production, but recently that’s been getting more into multimedia design as well and everyone really likes the projects that I help produce with several SMEs at a time, but it’s a little exhausting and sometimes overwhelming having to do all of the technical production aspects myself. It’d be nice to have a team to work with for a set period of time on 1-2 projects at once — I think the quality and speed of production would increase dramatically. Definitely need to check out this book.
September 29th, 2009 at 1:00 am
It’s great to see the kind of work Michael Allen is doing today. He really changed the world of elearning with Authorware; many of the instructional designers I work with started out on Authorware. I even spent a few months working with Authorware during college, although I’d never call myself an Authorware developer.
I’m very impressed with the work that his company does. Like Denise said in her post, my team has tried doing a similar micro-cycled version of ADDIE. It hasn’t worked for us in most cases, but it’s awesome when it does work.
Thank you for sharing this. I haven’t thought about Michael Allen in a while, and it looks like he’s still doing top-notch work.
October 2nd, 2009 at 7:51 pm
In theory this would be great, but as you said, at my workplace we were all stretched too thin and ended up much more compartmentalized than we would have liked. We had to depend on the other team members to just get their jobs done, and done correctly. In other words, the instructional designer had to decide on the graphics so that the artist could incorporate them into the eLearning. There was very little back and forth collaboration on some of the larger projects.
This comment– “Even programs that could not really be defined as games, feel game-like in that they are fun, interactive and engaging” — is what we were striving for but rarely accomplished.
October 5th, 2009 at 3:21 am
Interesting post both specifically and generally. The vacuum trap is so universally talked up (the latest “thinking outside the box” term) yet so poorly instituted and utilized. It seems like everyone else who posted has had the same experience as me– expected by design to be collaborating with colleagues yet only every producing in private. Odd how no one ever seems to have time to get together and hammer things out, huh?