THE IMPORTANCE OF WRITING FOR BETTER ......Instructional Design Instructional design and writing use...
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THE IMPORTANCE OF WRITING FOR BETTER INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGN Jenny Beer 10/29/2013
THE IMPORTANCE OF WRITING FOR BETTER ......Instructional Design Instructional design and writing use different terms to talk about a lot of similar things. \爀 䄀 挀漀甀爀猀攀
Instructional design and writing use different terms to talk about a lot of similar things. A course objective is like a thesis statement—it’s the behavior change you’re looking for, the goal or point of the course as a whole. The learning outcomes are like the topic sentences of your course. How you chunk the content is kind of like when and how you decide to start new paragraphs. And keeping things job relevant is a lot like sticking to just the facts, please. There are also some elements of good instructional design that aren’t relevant to good writing (though anyone who still loves actual, physical books will tell you that writing is interactive and visually appealing). There are some key elements of good writing, however, that aren’t often discussed in the world of instructional design. I often find these elements missing from instructional design—especially eLearning design—and I think these elements are what prevents otherwise good design from being really effective, compelling instructional design. A solid logical argument is essential to a good essay, and it’s also essential for enacting behavior change through training. Transitions are the glue that hold your logical argument together. A carefully selected and maintained tone connects you to your audience and drives home your point without being preachy. All of these are goals of good writing, but why wouldn’t they be goals of good instructional design as well?
Better Together
Writing is focused on how to best communicate
content.
Instructional design is
focused on content and
learners.
(Happy learners!)
• Supporting a Logical Argument • Turning Paragraphs into
Interactions • Including Transitions
Examples of Writing-influenced eLearning Design
NOTE: Examples have been revised or removed from original presentation to
Course structure needs to be transparent to the learner. In an online course, you can’t scan ahead to see how many paragraphs until the next section heading. In addition, each screen will have opportunities to dig into the content, and visuals or multimedia to distract them. They can get lost in the details and forget the bigger point those details are supposed to be supporting. So, make your outline clear. Use the outline feature in Storyline, or use a more creative visual option.
Could use something like this visual process diagram, and make it available as a rollover icon on all screens. Could also do something like a bread-crumb trail across the top. Whatever it is, make sure that the learner knows whether they’re on a level 1 heading, a level 2 heading, etc., and how that all supports the main thesis.
Here two examples of an outline in Articulate. Both present a clear outline, so they’re winning points there. But one of them does a much better job of carrying the argument with just a quick glance at the section headings. Which one is it? Right—in the brown one, it’s not clear how the headings relate to each other. How is Additional PPE different from Basic PPE? Did we just run out of room? Is it optional? Is the assessment a learning assessment or something I should do to my PPE? As “topic sentences,” these aren’t really supporting my argument that PPE is necessary, and that there are many elements of PPE that must be used in combination to keep my safe.
To get to a clear outline, of course, you have to first have documented content to work with. Sometimes jumping in at the topic sentence or heading level is easy. Sometimes it takes a lot of work to get to that point. This is a sample of a very complicated course I worked on for nearly a year. 60% of that time was spent writing the paragraphs you see here, long before it was ever an eLearning course. I don’t often write out my eLearning courses in full narrative first, but for the complexity of this course it was a great exercise. Often, when we’re designing a custom course for a client, the content doesn’t exist yet. The biggest part of the job is documenting the content—pulling it from someone’s head (or six different people) and making sure you’ve gotten the right information. Technical writers, this should sound pretty familiar to you. But I think what’s different about instructional design from technical writing is that you really are trying to make that argument—you’re trying to tell a story that drives home the point of the course. Technical detail alone won’t get you there.
After you’ve gotten all the content correct, the most important step before turning that content into eLearning is spending time on the outline and order of that content. The more complicated the content, the more difficult this is, but also the more important it is. You can see here that I used a numerical system to keep it straight, and followed my own rule of using headings that supported the overall flow. The headings tell a story, and the actual narrative told the story on a more detailed level. Everything is supporting the argument I’m making about how this particular client helps the end-user at a hospital site. Now that we’ve got our meta-story figured out, we can finally start putting this information on screen. Let’s follow this particular example through.
Three paragraphs ended up all on one eLearning screen, as part of a layered story. This is a busy screen to see in miniature as a screen shot, but let me tell you what’s going on. I’ve revamped the paragraphs to tell the highest level of the story from Cory, the end-user’s perspective. Cory’s speech bubbles tell layer number one, which is summary of all three paragraphs we saw earlier.
Cory logs into the MMIS and does a search in the system’s item master, which is a list of items that have been approved for purchase by the hospital’s purchasing department. The purchasing department has sourced the items from a specific manufacturer….
Then, when the learner clicks on each panel, they hear narration that tells them more about what is going on behind Cory’s speech bubbles. This first panel contains most of paragraph one.
…Part of the challenge of the healthcare supply chain industry is that item information is constantly changing. In fact, 30% of the items in a provider’s inventory will change within a single year.
We’ve already crammed a lot into this screen, and we’ve managed to do it while keeping the story emphasis on the end user. But there are additional details about the industry and the client that are still helpful to know, if you’re the type of person that wants to know it all. That was the content in paragraph three. What we did here was offer that information in a participant guide. If you want to know the “nice to know” information, then here’s a prompt to remind you to check out additional information at your leisure.
We’ve already crammed a lot into this screen, and we’ve managed to do it while keeping the story emphasis on the end user. But there are additional details about the industry and the client that are still helpful to know, if you’re the type of person that wants to know it all. That was the content in paragraph three. What we did here was offer that information in a participant guide. If you want to know the “nice to know” information, then here’s a prompt to remind you to check out additional information at your leisure. I also want to point out one more thing on this screen: transitions. In this case, we made them big and obvious, in keeping with the graphic-novel type theme. Even the onscreen directions serve as a transition and a reminder of where this course fits in the overall scheme of the course, supporting the meta-story told in the headings.
The graphic novel and layered storytelling is one way to convey a lot of information without getting to far into the technical weeds. Here’s another more straightforward example of representing paragraphs of information. On this screen, we are now showing the changes that occur once our characters have purchased a portion of the software solution offered by our client. In this case, the tabs across the top represent paragraphs of text. Each of those tabs is a mini-topic sentence, supporting the impact the software has at this point in the story. To keep things interesting, we added as much visual interest as we could to a story talking about behind-the-scenes data transfer. When you click Benefits for Kevin, the associated text is told through narration, and we see an animated example of electronic documents going back and forth. I had to include this example because just because I’m emphasizing a writing-influenced design, doesn’t mean I advocate all text all the time. Click What about Cory, and we find out why he is still frustrated, which is the transition to the next segment in the story (because the customer needs more of the client’s products to solve Cory’s problems).
Bringing It Together
Presenter
Presentation Notes
The concept of using writing-influenced design works for non-technical content, too. Here’s an example of a course on virtual leadership. I don’t have an end-user to use as a character, but I’m still telling a story—or making an argument. The learner clicks the buttons on the bottom of the screen to read a paragraph of associated text. Even though the content is applied—practical tips on how to demonstrate these behaviors—the content for each button still starts with a topic sentence, and that topic sentence connects each button to the content that comes before and after it in the interaction. Everything on the screen works as a connected whole toward the heading of Practice Effective Interpersonal Skills.
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