Planning for Engagement in Instructional Design

Pat Parrish had an engagement plan for his course. It looked* something like this:


He thought that students would generally start with lower levels of engagement, that that engagement would grow as they learned new material and completed assignments, that it would plateau in the middle of the course, and then rise to a climax near the end of the course when the applications of their learning became more apparent to them. Pat measured the engagement of each student throughout the course. Each line represents one student's reported engagement on a per module basis. This* is what he found:



Wow. Try following any one path through the chart. Now compare it to any other path on the chart. Explain why the two paths are different. Good luck.

So what's the point? Two points.

First point: Pat is way ahead of the curve. Pat actually had an engagement plan. He actually thought about how each part of the course would engage learners and to what extent he thought it would. He actually implemented learning activities to reflect his plan. Have any of the rest of us really tried that? Do we have a plan for engaging students in any systematic way? Do we have picture of the ideal engagement arc of our course in our heads? Or are we just focused on achieving learning objectives (somehow) or, worse, content coverage, and hope/assume that engagement will happen? Or are we resigned to the sad fact that learners choose to be engaged or not engaged, period, not my problem? Is this how a screenwriter, a playwright, or a music composer would think about their audience? I believe that while learners do have a choice to engage, we also have a choice of deciding how seriously we are going to try to reach out to them in engaging ways. How determined of a suitor of meaningful student engagement are we going to be?

Second point: Pat's students were all over the map. And we have no idea why (though I imagine that Pat has some guesses). Most of us have students like Pat. I would bet valuable property that 95% of us would find a similar, random looking set of curves if we tried the same experiment in our courses. We have no idea why they are or aren't engaged. We have no idea why in module 7, one student who had been averaging between a 6 and a 4 dropped to a 2 when six other students posted increasing engagement scores for the same module. This is the sort of thing that I feel like we really, really need to know. We should be able to read these patterns, perhaps not easily or perfectly, but we should at least have a sense of why these things are happening.

If we want to engage learners, and I do, we had better start finding ways to create and understand charts like Pat's. We are at the starting point of this kind of research (to my knowledge, if I am wrong, please let me know). The point when everything looks like random chaos. But it isn't random. There is a reason for every bend up or down on those curves. Let's go find out what is going on so we can design in engagement into our learning experiences. Yes, the learners have to choose, but let's give them every reason to choose to engage.

*Graphics used by permission; taken from an AECT 2007 presentation. Update: looks like Pat put the paper on his website.

Real-time Measure of Learner Engagement

I want to conduct this study:

Twenty college students (or learners of your choice) are given a means and a prompt (and a reward) to answer the following two questions every five minutes for all of their waking hours over the course of a day/week:

1. What are you doing right now (if different than your previous answer to this question)?
2. How engaged do you feel right now on a scale from 1 (I am bored to tears! Save me!) to 5 (Shhh! Go away, I am busy!)?

This would allow us to formulate some baseline data to see where learning experiences fall in the overall spectrum of a learner's environment in terms of engagement. I am guessing that most of them fall into the bottom twentieth percentile, most of the time. If so, that can't be good. This kind of study could also be instrumental in identifying those exceptional learning experiences that are maxing out the scales. Think we might want to look at those particular experiences a little more closely?

Or imagine this variation: You are the instructor of a course. Each student has a little engagement meter, asking to rate engagement on a scale from one to five every five minutes during your class time. You videotape the class. You synchronize the video with the data. You chart engagement across time. Where you see peaks (hopefully) and valleys (inevitably) you jump to that part of the tape to see what was/wasn't going on. How much do you think you could improve your course after just one session of this? After three? Five? Do you have the courage to have the data reported to you in real-time while teaching the class? (Would that even be a good idea?)

If you know of anyone anywhere who is doing anything along these lines, please let me know. I am aware of classroom clickers, but not aware of anyone using them to measure engagement throughout class time to create an engagement graph. And I have never heard of anyone trying to establish an "engagement baseline" for learners that compares their learning experiences to the rest of the daily experiences in their life.

In closing, could you please rate your level of engagement with this blog post on a scale from one to five? ;)

On Beyond ADDIE: Narrative, Aesthetics, & Learner Emotion

I cut my teeth in instructional design by designing a web-based air quality meteorology course. It all started when, one day, the director of my organization walked down the hall, stopping in at each office, asking, "Does anybody want to build a course for NOAA?" I said, "Sure!" and got to work.

At the time, I had no practical experience in the field to speak of. I had taken one class called "Introduction to Instructional Design." So I opened up my Principles of Instructional Design textbook from the class and started from page one. It was a great resource and got me up and running quickly. Between myself and two meteorology graduate students from NCSU, we produced the entire course that summer. To my knowledge, it was one of the first self-contained courses online and can still be found here (if you visit, please make sure you picture the state of the web in 1996 -- Hotmail was launched that summer and there was a whopping 342,081 websites online).

With time and experience, however, I have come to feel that the ADDIE-type approaches like the one in my Principles of Design book too often fail to account for the humanness of the learner. While you can use those methods to consider the humanity of your audience, you can also fulfill every prescribed step and entirely miss it.

What would I add? Let's start with three very powerful, very underutilized forces:

1. Narrative: Story has been used to bind people together in shared knowledge and understanding for thousands of years. It is arguably the first instructional strategy ever used to convey essential cultural knowledge to the rising generations. It's an essential aspect of virtually every culture on the planet. We are wired for narrative. We think in narrative, we speak in narrative, we even dream in narrative. We perceive our very existence as an unfolding narrative. We collectively pay billions of dollars to experience well-crafted (and not so well-crafted) narrative. Narrative design needs to be deeply understood and routinely practiced in our field.

How many instructional designers have even heard of the field of narratology? How many designers have studied the construction of a documentary, a screenplay, a dance performance, a musical composition? We are starting to scratch the surface with our recent attention to role-play scenarios and gaming, but have far, far to go.

2. Aesthetics: Human beings respond powerfully to aesthetic design. Every decision we make, like it or not, is mediated by our subjective perceptions. The "Bottomless Soup" study done by Brian Wansink, a recent winner of the IgNoble Prize for nutrition (and also has a book on the subject, Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think) demonstrates this beautifully. And, of course, aesthetics don't only make us fat. They can relax us, orient us, inspire us, enliven us. Aesthetics are much more than the surface qualities of an object, but extend to encompass the richness of our experience, and the best applications of aesthetic design can embody and express layers of meaning in a profound, prereflective way. Patrick Parrish is starting the conversation in our field. This conversation needs to be accelerated and expanded.

3. Learner Emotion: Human beings feel, and what they feel influences their readiness to learn, their willingness to learn, how much they actually learn, and whether they will (ever) decide to learn about a particular topic again. As Russ Osguthorpe asks, "If they got an A in the class, and tell us that they never want to see that content again in their lives, have they really learned what we intended to teach them?" Emotions can work for or against learning. In order to account for emotion in our learning design, we need to know what learners are feeling before, during, and after learning experiences occur.

We have a whole science devoted to measuring learning before, during, and after learning experiences and, ostensibly, ways to intervene based on what is learned from these assessments. Where is the science and technique of measuring the learners' emotions? What are the best practices of how to intervene based in what is learned? What makes us think we can teach effectively if we only know what learners know and not how they feel? How they feel about learning this topic, how they feel about their ability to learn this topic, how they feel right now in this learning session during this learning activity? Engagement is both a cognitive and an emotional experience. Can you imagine a flow experience in a learning setting that was devoid of emotion? Can you imagine an overwhelmed, bored, distracted, or anxiety-filled learner maximizing their learning?

We teach human beings. Let's start designing human experiences as well as learning experiences.