This article on design and situational control (which comes by way of elearningpost) gets to the heart of the problem with the majorit of corporate e-learning course designs today. As training designers, we have very little situational control over the e-learner’s environment. We therefore have to work hard to get their attention in the face of competing distractions. But many course designs use inappropriate means, such as forcing hokey interactions every few screens or adding unnecessary audio or video.
Then, to add insult to injury, when spend many hours debating where the navigational buttons should go, what color they should be, how the menus should look, etc., without ever testing to see if our design is intuitive to the user. This is exactly the wrong approach:
I also believe that designing in accordance with user mental models becomes more crucial in low situational control. One reason is that the designer gets a lesser chance to let her design vision unfold. In contexts of low situational control, and low attentional focus, there is less time for the user to grasp the designer’s vision, unless it maps onto their existing mental models. Innovative navigation strategies based on obscure metaphors and the much-maligned Flash Intros of yesteryears, are all, in my opinion, examples of imposing a high situational design paradigm on a low situational control context. One of the reasons that Google works so well is that it is designed for a very low situational control context. There is no integrated Google experience. You use it when you need to, experiencing it in bits and pieces.
What this all boils down to is the fact that most self-paced e-learning courses are designed in a vacuum where designers have no incentive to get into the heads of their end users. This is the main reason why we get perennial research articles proclaiming that e-learning doesn’t work.
