I just attended two educational technology focused conferences back-to-back with notably different audiences. The first, AECT, was primarily faculty members, PhD students, and instructional designers in academia. While there were a few corporate and K12 perspectives, most of the focus was higher education and the “learners” referenced were typically students enrolled in for-credit courses. The second conference, Dev Learn, was primarily instructional design professionals who work in the corporate sector and educational technology vendors who provide the tools used in those settings. As with AECT, there were exceptions, like me and my role in higher education, but most of the Dev Learn presentations referenced “learners” who were adult employees taking company trainings or professional development short courses.
It wasn’t surprising that the academic conference had more emphasis on research, theory, and scholarship while the corporate conference had more emphasis on application, tools, and examples of practice. What I did find intriguing, though, was how visually different the eLearning course examples were across the two conferences. To put it bluntly, the examples demoed at Dev Learn seemed to pay more attention to aesthetics and user experience than the examples shown at AECT. Additionally, the Dev Learn examples had more diversity in what the learners saw (e.g., extremely realistic high quality 3D renderings of cars for a sales training course, 360 images of a house for a real estate course), heard (e.g., pleasant sounds to indicate correct responses, ambient noise of a coffee shop to pair with visuals of a coffee shop), and did (e.g., answered context-relevant questions, navigated 360 spaces, clicked hot spots for location specific content). In contrast, the AECT courses shown were typically more text-heavy and while multi-media was certainly used it was often shown as a highlight of the course rather than something expected throughout the entire learning experience.
In a discussion later, I debriefed with a colleague also from a higher education institution and commented on my observation. He asked if I felt like “we” (higher education) were going to fall behind if we didn’t do more to implement the technologies and advanced media techniques commonplace at DevLearn. While I can easily jump on the “higher education is SO behind the rest of the world” bandwagon, when I thought critically about it, there was a more interesting difference at play.
The motivation of the learner populations and the attendant burden that learner motivation placed on those designing and teaching the learning experiences was a significant factor in why the course examples were so different.
Most higher education students are taking courses for the knowledge, skills, and/or credentials they expect to gain. What this means is that they will often tolerate “boring” layouts and didactic presentations of course content. Additionally, a lot of the cognitive engagement that is designed into the examples shown at Dev Learn (e.g., scenario-based learning) in contrast for the academic courses take place through assignments and assessments.
This does not mean that higher education professionals shouldn’t do more in terms of user experience design for our learners (we certainly should!) but instead that the burden on corporate instructional designers to keep learners engaged through the design itself is much higher. This is certainly not the only difference between the two settings (e.g., professional development trainings are rarely as long or intensive as semester-long for-credit academic courses–just that as with many things I reflect on here, context and learner specifics, especially why they are participating in your educational offerings, are key factors that should be considered.