by Ethan Edwards, chief instructional strategist

The New Year is a time for being open to the new and putting old practices to bed.  This applies particularly, I think, to e-learning design, which seems in so many cases to be stuck in a rut.  Technology changes, authoring tools change, yet the overwhelming quantity of tedious ineffective e-learning persists.  In my opinion, this is much more a flaw in our design practices than in the tools and technology at our disposal.

We at Allen Interactions have long been proponents of an iterative design process relying on early rapid prototypes for review and development of effective designs for interactivity.  Dr. Michael W. Allen and his team were already exploring this idea in the1980’s as a critical element that drove the design of Authorware.  In the research for that work, Allen explored other creative fields, such as architecture, sculpture, choreography, etc. to understand the process used in developing new works.  He found that they all shared common elements, some of the primary ones being: trial solutions executed in a cheap, easy to change medium that approximates the delivery environment; early review in the process before too much psychological and monetary investment has been made in a solution, balanced attention paid across the breadth of a project.  These same principles apply almost directly to designing effective e-learning: build rough online interactive prototypes to approximate interactivity with minimal investment, seek user input early, and design with an eye to the global picture rather than just tearing a linear path through a body of content.

I am continually surprised how difficult it is for this method to become the standard; but I’m pleased each time I become aware of another creative field that has grappled with this same problem and come to the same resolution.  I’d like to share an example of this that I just discovered.

Some of you may know I have a great interest in musical theater both as a performer and observer.  As a Christmas gift, I was given a copy of a new book titled Finishing the Hat, which presents the collected lyrics of Stephen Sondheim from 1954-1981 along with his personal commentary.  I found the following passage in his discussion of the creative process used during the writing of the hit show A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.  (I apologize for the length of this quote, but it is all so relevant to this discussion that I think it is worth including the whole thing.)  This begins in the middle of a discussion of how Jerome Robbins was brought in to help conceive this musical early in the development process.

“[Robbins] hemmed and hawed and finally suggested that since he had a number of questions about both the script and the unfinished score, it might be a good idea to assemble a group of actors and have them read through the show while I played and sang whatever songs I had written.

“This was a startling and seemingly needless idea at the time.  In the early 1960s the process of making a Broadway musical was usually, as it had always been, a simple chronological one:  first you wrote it, then a producer decided to produce it, then it was cast, then it was rehearsed and then it was presented to the public in an out-of-town tryout. (Storyboarding, Project management, Development, Content Writing, Beta Testing…I hope you see the parallels) In other words, no one tested it, no one knew what the animal was until the first day of rehearsal made it come alive.  Nor was there any need to—after all, conventional wisdom had it, there would be plenty of time to fix the show during rehearsals and subsequently in New Haven or Boston or Philadelphia or Washington or any combination thereof.  But there never really was.  The hours and days it took to write, rehearse, stage and orchestrate new scenes and songs and then incorporate them into the show were never sufficient, what with the vagaries of union restrictions, the difficulties of putting in and taking out new dialogue and numbers every few days, along with other, unforeseen, problems.  By the time most of the shows in what is referred to as the Golden Age of Musicals (ca. 1925-1960) opened in New York, the first act of each was far better than the second because there hadn’t been time enough to fix the second.  Producers and writers accepted this as a necessary evil, and Jerry [Robbin]’s notion of assembling a group of actors to read an unfinished piece, especially ones who might not eventually be cast, would have struck them as a waste of time and money.  Nevertheless, to indulge him, Hal [Prince] rented a large room with a piano, and the actors and I fumbled our way through the show to a small audience:  Hal, Burt [Shrevelove], Larry [Gelbart], Jerry, and a smattering of Hal’s office staff.

“The reading, of course, turned out to be a revelation.  Unadorned by scenery and costumes, unrehearsed, sung (by me) with no refinement and only approximate pitch, the show was stripped naked, plain for all of us to see at both its best and worst, as well as the dangerous territory in between.  In the usual course of events, this would never have been possible, even on the first day of rehearsal, for by then many of the adornments would have already been inflexibly in place: the cast would have been chosen, the sets and costumes in the process of being built, the orchestrators already at work.  But in that large, empty room we could see the show for what it was; the scenes and songs that worked were greeted with enthusiastic guffaws (actors and authors are great audiences), the ones that didn’t with pained glances, the in-between with tolerant smiles.  So much that had to be rewritten or filled out or cut down was suddenly clear.  And, best of all, it was still malleable.  The rawness of this ad hoc reading, this unprotected headlong plunge into the unknown, and most of all the knowledge that there was time to fix things before going into rehearsal, gave us all a burst of energy and confidence that eventually made the show as good as it turned out to be.  What we had effectively done was to save ourselves large amounts of time that would have been spent fixing the show in the customary rushed, exhausted late-night ambience of out-of-town hotel rooms.”
Sondheim, S, Finishing the Hat. New York, NY: Knopf; 2010: 81-82

Sondheim goes on to describe how this method went on to become a popular way to develop musicals—that most of his greatest pieces were written in this way.  He also goes on to say that in recent years, this “Workshop” process has been harmed by an interest in polishing the presentation for the workshop…so now there are actual workshop rehearsals, sets, costumes, and many of the original problems the process was meant to avoid are being reinserted.

The parallels to e-learning development are striking.  Rather than my taking more space to spell them out, I encourage readers to draw comparisons and comment. It takes boldness and confidence to put one’s unfinished work in front of others for review, but the challenges before us are so great, and the possibility of getting it right are so specific yet so rewarding, it is really worth taking the risk.  I guarantee your work will be better for adopting this design approach.