How much support do learners want/need?

Lately I’ve been working on lots of cool projects where I get to help create interactive, learner-driven e-learning. Love it!  Which means that I get the opportunity to talk a lot about how much help learners should have, along with how soon they get feedback after making a mistake.  My challenge is that my first reaction is to provide very little help. My philosophy often is,  “In real life I don’t have someone looking over my shoulder telling me whether I’m making the right decisions.” Clients are often a little nervous about that approach and say, “We don’t want learners to become frustrated or feel like it is too hard.” Which position is right?

Well, it depends. Don’t you love that answer?  I think it depends on two things 1) the topic and 2) the learner.

How the TOPIC impacts the level of learner support:

Real-life consequences of making a mistake. The higher the potential consequences of mistakes, the more important it becomes to test learner ability in the training environment. I recently did an online module that was broken into two modules, Learn It and Do It. The Learn It module had more support, but the Do It had much less. We needed to be sure that the learners had mastered the skill.Ambiguity of right answers. I recently did a course that was product training and included conversation practices with customers. There are a lot of ways to sell a product and a lot of ways to approach customers. Because there wasn’t one “right” answer, we let learners go all the way down a path before giving them feedback with things for them to consider next time. No real conversation they have with a customer will be exactly like the one in the e-learning course, so we didn’t need to worry about them getting it “right”.

How the LEARNER impacts the level of learner support:

A less experienced learner (one with little prior knowledge about the task or topic) needs more support. Because they have less of a framework, they can’t evaluate their own progress as well as a more experience learner can.A tech-savvy learner will be more comfortable exploring the learning and making lots of mistakes to learn because they are comfortable in the learning environment. If your audience is not familiar with the learning environment (the computer, user interface, etc.), they have additional hurdles to overcome in addition to learning the task. Those audiences may need more support earlier to avoid frustration with the technology – which can transfer into frustration with the learning.

What SHOULDN’T  impact the level of learner support. There are a couple of arguments for lots of learner support that I really don’t buy:

We don’t want learners to think that the task is difficult. If it is really difficult, we aren’t helping anyone by making it easier in the e-learning than it really is.We don’t want the learners to feel bad if they make a mistake. Welcome to life. If they can’t handle that reality, there are other issues to work through!

What do you think? What other criteria helps you make decisions about the level of support to offer?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 31st, 2010 at 8:47 am and is filed under learning design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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