What's the most painful part of designing a learning experience?
What's the most painful part of designing a learning experience?
The six most common pains suffered daily by people like us.
Hey Folks! 👋
Over the last few months I’ve been doing some research into the pain experienced by people who design learning experiences.
So far I’ve interviewed around 200 people from around the world: everyone from experts in content authoring through to L&D folks, HR professionals, freelance instructional designers (entry, mid & senior), online content creators & lots of others in between.
Despite the diversity of this group, I’ve uncovered some interesting repeated patterns of pain:
🎓 Accessing learning science research: “Most of the stuff I need to read is locked behind firewalls. Sometimes I have to spend 50 dollars to access a single article - it’s just not sustainable. Not being able to access this stuff makes it impossible to design experiences which are optimised for engagement & impact.”
🧠 Translating learning science research into design decisions: “The research is dense and complicated; translating it into actual design practices is a full time job in itself.”
📑 Managing project timelines & stakeholders: “Only about 25% of my time is spent on instructional design; the rest is admin, scheduling & meetings.”
📈 Visualising & documenting my design in a way that works for all stakeholders: “I tend to work on paper & post its. Then, I’ll transfer my design to PowerPoint or Miro to present the information nicely. Next, I’ll transfer my design to a spreadsheet so it’s structured & ready to build.”
💾 Version control & tracking comments / changes: “Working across so many different documents with so many different stakeholders makes version control and tracking comments & changes a bit of a nightmare. One of the reasons I spend so much time in sync meetings is just to keep track.”
👨🎨 Visual / UX / UI / graphic design: “As an instructional designer I’m expected not only to design learning experiences but also user experiences, interactions & graphics. This is a whole separate discipline & is utterly overwhelming sometimes.”
What’s your experience?
I’d love to hear from you in the comments, below:
🚀 Do any of these pain points resonate with you?
🚀 Is there any pain we haven’t uncovered yet?
🚀 How do you navigate these challenges?
🚀 What would a dream solution look like?
🙏 As a thank you: everyone who responds by June 15th will be entered into a draw for a free place on my Learning Science Bootcamp (usually £650).
Happy Designing! 👋
🎓 1. Accessing learning science research: Resonate with 100% - To top it, most research and evidence based practises are based on W.I.E.R.D societies i.e. Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic (WEIRD) societies. A large part of my practise is for the global south. This means that a lot of the research does not directly translate.
📑 2. Managing project timelines & stakeholders. 100% Always looking for ways to be more efficient about this.
📈 3. Visualising & documenting my design in a way that works for all stakeholders. This is not an issue for me. I think of them as seperate processes - designing and communicating. When merged, you can tend to get side-tracked into either goal.
💾 4. Version control & tracking comments / changes. This is not an issue if you set-up a system from the start. As long as your team continue to maintain the system, this is not a challenge.
👨🎨 5. Visual / UX / UI / graphic design: Not an issue, Find them very learnable. However, client expectations are difficult to gauge. You could hire someone seperately to do these tasks and get the quality up, instead of making one person handle too many tasks at one go. Its a timeline and bandwith problem more than skill in my opinion.
Yeah, very solid list!
When I started, my main problem was finding a framework to follow which I could trust, and then the practical examples to back it up. Forums and colleagues were #LOVIN "social learning / constructivist theory" but then there was naff' all examples of how to implement that practically... so point 1 and 2.
Now, from my Product perspective I see pain in a few things
* LDs (Learning Designers) who are following practices loosely based on ideas and chats, but not backed up with data to prove it. i.e., "Yeah students like lectures with comments...", but then not accessing the data in the VLEs or students support to prove their thinking.. so point 2.
* pressures of bandwidth for LDs to check the data for their decisions... so point 3.
* pressures of bandwidth to deliver good learning material... so point 3.
* "don't know what you don't know", on many group calls, LDs self confirm "what works" with each other, without knowing there's science and data to show what actually works... so 1 and 2?
* brave tutors who believe the research, implementation and LDs ability. Lots of tutors just want to translate PPTs into text and maybe forums. That's because of their time pressures and the ability of the partnership (company and university) to sell to them new online learning frameworks... so kinda' point 4, but more a new point on "buy in"?