Phrase of the Week: Experience Design

As we seek to move the focus in education from content to engaging learning experiences, we often have to embrace new words and phrases to describe the changes that are happening in front of us.

One emerging cross-disciplinary field which relates to what we are attempting to achieve is called experience design.

Let me quote Clark Quinn, author of Engaging Learning:

That is, experience design is about creating a user experience, not just focusing on their goals, but thinking about the process as well. And that’s, to me, what is largely ignored in creating elearning is thinking about process from the learner’s perspective. There are really two components: what we need to accomplish, and what we’d like the learner to experience.

Our first goal still has to look at the learning need, and identify an objective that we’d like learners to meet, but even that we need to rethink. We may have constraints on delivery environment, resources, and more that we have to address as well, but that’s not the barrier. The barrier is the mistake of focusing on knowledge-level objectives, not on meaningful skill change. Let me be very clear: one of the real components of creating a learning experience is ensuring that we develop, and communicate, a learning objective that the learner will ‘get’ is important and meaningful to them. And we have to take on the responsibility for making that happen.

A wiki definition can be found here.