e-Learning Glitz: misunderstanding video games
Community Connections Forums - Bells and whistles (if you’re not a member, you get redirected to the home page… sorry.)
It’s a little unusual for me to quote from a discussion forum, but this really rang true for me. It’s a quote from the e-Learning Guild’s Community Connections (from the editor of their e-magazine) in response to a question about convincing stakeholders that all the noise and flash they want in their course is distracting from learning, not improving engagement.
I think you’ll find the support you need in the book by Ruth Colvin Clark and Richard E. Mayer: .e-Learning and the Science of Instruction. See the section beginning on page 117, “Psychological Reasons to Avoid Extraneous Sounds” and the section beginning on page 120, “Psychological Reasons to Avoid Interesting but Extraneous Graphics.” Both sections are applications of the coherence principle, and are backed by research. “The problem … is that interest cannot be added to an otherwise boring lesson like some kind of seasoning.” We have known this since Dewey in 1913; it amazes me that somehow the word never got out.
Too often I’ve seen salesmen try to sell me courses by how “cool” the interface looks and all the neat stuff it can do. Actually, that doesn’t apply just to courses. I’ve had people try to sell me Learning Management Systems that looked great, but did nothing, and were actually overcomplicated by the glitz.
And I’ve had stakeholders (and inexperienced designers) try to get me to include flashing, sliding text in a course because it looked cool. Ack.
Inevitably, someone in the industry backs up the inclusion of more flashy interfaces and widgets with “the generation coming up has grown up with flashy video games and it keeps them engaged.” Now, while it’s true that there is a lot we can take from video games and apply to e-learning to great effect, we need to be careful of the reasons we are including “glitz.” The remainder of the e-Learning Guild post addresses an important distinction:
. . . [video] games don’t have distracting-for-the-sake-of-being-flashy graphics in them, unless the distraction is deliberate in order to break the player’s concentration. True, there’s a lot going on in computer/playstation/xbox games, but everything there is there for a reason, and it isn’t to jazz it up (at least not in the well-designed games). It’s all intentional and related to the game itself. I think e-Learning designers get fooled by the light and noise into thinking that the stimulation is somehow needed in order to keep the player’s attention, rather than being an essential part of the immersion into the game environment (or part of the suspension of disbelief). Or something like that.
That’s an important point that isn’t brought up very often. People don’t look closely at the thought process behind game design. Each active element is there for a reason. If you can pick up an object, for example, odds are that you are going to have to use it somehow (either that, or it’s there as part of a challenge to make it harder to find the object you really have to use). Even if it isn’t something the user interacts with and is just an active visual element, in good games those types of items are there to move the plot along, or provide a clue, or provide an immersive experience—it isn’t always obvious at first, but it usually turns out that way.
For example, in the game Myst: Exile (or was it Riven?) there is a section where you run across some seal-like creatures sunning themselves. The animation is great, and fun to look at. It’s not immediately obvious that there is anything to do there but watch, but in the end you realize they serve a dual purpose of hiding a symbol you must find and providing a vital audio clue for a later puzzle. So what could have been dismissed as eye candy turns out to be vitally important.
The point is not to eschew all “glitzy” implementations in e-learning, as some would, but rather to use the glitz to enhance the content in a meaningful way. If we could come up with training that enhances content with visuals and active elements as well as they are used in video games, rather than just to give the user something else to look at, our completion rates would probably sky-rocket. And who knows… maybe comprehension would increase as well!
Tags: e-learning, Learning, training, videoRelated posts
Tags: e-learning, Learning, training, video
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