From coloured chalk, to whiteboards, to overhead projectors, to PowerPoint, to Prezi, to Storyline, to 360 VR – the desire for novelty (rightly fuelled by a goal of increasing engagement) in learning design has always been with us. The design options only ever increase with time as every tool tries to outdo the predecessors and competitors with what it offers. However, novelty, and shiny new ways of presenting content can distract from the process of learning that content. The challenge for designers is to ensure that what’s possible serves us, rather than rules us.

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, a Jedi and a learning designer walk into a bar …

Nothing captures attention like a good story. Storytelling is our native language, our way of connecting the dots, of learning ideas, of communicating and engaging. Stories and humour tap into our emotions and the feel-good endorphins that go with them, creating a positive affective learning environment, strengthening understanding and boosting memory.

It’s really a question of respect (just a little bit is enough). Respect of your participant’s time. Respect of their intelligence. Respect of their prior learning. Respect of their humanity.

For the easyA design team, respect looks like a few things –

It’s tempting at this time of year to make predictions about the future. The wind down to the holiday season often frees up some time to reflect on the year just passed, and new year resolutions have us considering future action and improvements.

Listicles (lists dressed up as articles) abound of what’s going to be hot, what’s trending, what’s key, what’s a priority, what’s emerging, what’s new, what’s a word in the thesaurus that someone else hasn’t used yet? Some of them are just (sometimes informed) opinions, others use wide-reaching surveys and occasionally there’s some research behind them. If you start searching, it won’t take you long to complete the bingo sheet:

It’s been a while since most of us were in school. So why does so much learning content still speak to participants as if they’re children?

So. I’m a learner, am I? Just a consumer of content. An empty vessel to fill up. A blank page to cut and paste onto. A persona that’s been created.

When designing learning solutions, it’s easy to quickly alienate the people we are trying to engage by simple mistakes in our language and tone. The team at easyA keeps a few things in mind to manage this risk:

‘In this module you will learn …’

Snoozefest. Forget learning outcomes. Wait. Don’t completely forget learning outcomes but make sure that something much more important is driving the learning solutions that you design – performance improvement.

Learning designers have long been wondering how they can get a ‘seat at the table’. It’s easy. Consider the people at the table – CEO, COO, CFO, HR – all people who have a whole-of-business mindset. People who view every decision, every action, every choice through the filter of ‘what impact or benefit will this bring to the organisation?’ When learning designers view what they do through this same filter, the consequence is inevitable – design for performance improvement, for measurable, observable behaviour change. When we approach what we do with this mindset, we begin to earn that seat at that table.

Mobile learning is a big deal. A recent survey of the world’s leading eLearning experts (Jones, 2017) reported that mobile learning was the top eLearning trend predicted for 2017. This trend shouldn’t be surprising considering the way smartphones have become a ubiquitous part of modern life. In 2014, the number of mobile users outstripped desktop users (Chaffey, 2017) and by late 2016, worldwide mobile (phones and tablets) access to the Internet outstripped desktop access for the first time (Heisler, 2016).

As learners demand to be able to access all kinds of digital information – including learning experiences — on the go, learning designers need to understand the implications of mobile learning technology and adapt how they conceive of and create mobile learning content. This article looks at the advantages and limitations of mobile learning, and offers practical strategies for designing for smartphones.