Technology Leading

With all the technology available to the instructional design market place, designers still make the technology fit the learning instead of the other way around. The technology should never become more important than the integrity of the training. Allowing technology to govern the training is credited with much of the e-Learning disappointments of the past and present.

For example, Captivate is a powerful and widely accepted tool today. It capably records anything made for the screen, inserts interactions, and produces a Flash file for publication. It is generally used to capture processes within programs and Internet sites. The user is taken through the process as a movie, as a simulation prompting them to perform each step, or as an assessment where the user must complete the process without any prompting.

In any process, especially a long one, it is vital for the designer to remain aware of what the objectives are. If the objective is for the learner to memorize the process, then the process must be presented entirely. However, this does not mean that each piece of the process is worth making the user struggle through it.

In presenting a long process, look for ways to divide it up into multiple sections. Does the process include a log in? Does the process require the user to look something up? These pieces could become prerequisites to the process and omitted with just a mention.

In addition, consider the process itself. Remember the basic instructional principles that guided the original objective development. At that time, care was taken to determine what the learners already knew. The same applies here. Ask what areas of the process are too intuitive to force the learner to perform. Does the process ask the learner to click into four or more text entry boxes to enter an address? If so, how vital is doing this to the learning? Chances are that entering an address is very intuitive to any learner with even the minimum of computer or Internet skills. This is a good place to manage the process. Consider omitting the interaction by the user and inserting a mention that it is done for them.

Also, consider stopping in the process to ask the learner a question about the process instead of simply clicking through it. Instead of the user clicking the appropriate drop-downs and entering information on a screen, ask what elements on the screen are needed to advance the process. This helps alleviate the drudgery of following the long process and works to assure the user knows what the important parts of the process are.

While designing process learning ask:

• What are the main learning objectives?
• How much of the process is required to meet the learning objectives?
• Can the process become several smaller processes?
• Is it possible to omit parts of the process?
• Is it logical to replace parts of the process with questions or an activity?

The longer the process the harder it is for the learner to remember, and trying to replay a process they have only seen a couple times can lead to frustration. By using technology to present the objectives, the learner is presented with the most important parts of the process.