By Billy Wilson
During a recent interview [1], Elon Musk outlined his basic engineering process. The first step is:
Make your requirements less dumb. Your requirements are definitely dumb. It does not matter who gave them to you. It is particularly dangerous if a smart person gave you the requirements because you might not question them enough.
Elon Musk
In the Learning & Development space, those requirements are called Learning Objectives (LOs). They’re usually provided by Subject Matter Experts (SMEs). And SMEs are often pretty smart people, but they’re not Instructional Designers.
So, I must ask: do we question SME-recommended LOs enough? I’d suggest that we don’t… and while that may not make the LOs “dumb”, it rarely makes them “smart”.
Assuming that we actually need some kind of training, “smart” would mean stating a useful performance goal for the learner. But that’s not how SMEs tend to think; their focus is usually on information (the more the better).
But more information is not necessarily better. So, we need to help our SMEs recalibrate their sense of what’s useful, good, and smart in this area.
I suggest trying a very simple tool that’s used in Agile software development: the User Story [2]. In our case, though, we’re going to call it a Learner Story. We can use it in our discussions with SMEs to help them understand what we (and the learners) actually need. It has the following basic format.
As a __(a)__, I need __(b)__ so I can __(c)__.
(a) is a role identifier. This helps a SME understand that different people need different things.
(b) is the information bit… what the SME already has (and wants to provide) too much of. What the learner needs seems obvious to the SME until they look at it in connection with (a) and (c).
(c) is what the learner (who will be a performer) actually needs to do with the information.
Working through a few of these with a SME should help them understand the Learner’s Objectives better. And with those, we can create much better Learning Objectives.
Note: This article was originally published on HTP Treasures and has been republished with permission.
References
[1] Video of Elon Musk interview by “Everyday Astronaut”
[2] User Stories article at Interaction Design Foundation
About the Writer
Billy Wilson is currently an eLearning designer, developer, and analyst working in the nuclear power industry. He started as a nuclear engineer doing reactor physics work, but it grew tiresome after a few years. Then he spent 0.15 centuries on other things like performance improvement, root cause analysis, human performance… minor stuff like that. He’s been doing this eLearning thing for at least 2000 days now. Special interests include adaptive learning, interaction design, smart use of performance data, and too many other things to list here.
Fun fact: he once fell asleep during a job interview and still got the job.
Read more of Billy’s articles at HPT Treasures.