Writing dialogues for e-learning: The “typical” trap

I’ve had a few e-learning writers ask me this question: What is the best way to figure out how “typical” Americans speak? My answer is “This is not the right question.”

Who is a typical American, or British or Indian? There is simply no answer to this question unless you want to open a cultural Pandora’s Box and insist on finding a mythical answer. You may find some commonalities in speech patterns in the people belonging to a certain community or living in a particular region or even a country. But try foisting these commonalities onto a “typical person” and what you get is someone who resembles no one. America and UK are countries with vast immigrant populations and none of these people speak like a “typical person”. In India we may not have many immigrants, but you cannot imagine someone from Andhra speaking like someone from Rajasthan (you may also find some things that are common). And it’s not just the difference in language (Telugu vs. Rajasthani) that I’m talking about but the differences in expression and the manner of speaking. Of course, this is not to say that everyone in a particular state speaks the same way.

You have the species (Homo sapiens), races, regions, nations, states, towns, residential areas, communities, sub-communities, families, educational institutions, factories, offices and real living individuals who belong to any of these spaces—who are different in many ways and common in some. So, instead of asking how a typical American, British or Indian speaks, we must start with figuring out our characters. What is her name? How does she look like? Where was she brought up (find the specific locality as opposed to just saying Bombay or New York)? What are some of her prejudices? How does she react when she is angry? Does she have any particular mannerism or an accent? What kind of humour appeals to her? Who does she hang out with? What is she likely to say in the context that you are building for your scenario?

A word of caution: Don’t just invent the answers to all of these questions (you can invent some but not all). The best way to do this is to spend at least a few days observing your target audience (assuming your characters resemble your target audience). But if you can’t do that, then the least you can do is to get answers to these questions from your client or from someone who’s been with them. If even this can’t be done, then go ahead and invent your characters using commonsense and imagination, and hope that your target audience will be able to relate to them! But by all means, avoid starting with the “typical” person.

Evangelical Positions

An evangelist is not a seeker of truth. On the other hand, he considers himself the privileged possessor of truth. He will not engage with anyone from other camps as a partner but either as an enemy or an object of ridicule. A greater part of the history of colonialism, the cold war between America and the erstwhile USSR, and the rise of fascism are prime examples of evangelical positions and their consequences.

An evangelist often has nothing new to say—he is constantly packaging and repackaging the same arguments, the same rhetoric, and the same persuasions in order to convert (both enemy and friend) or decimate those who hold an opposite or different view.

Evangelists don’t come only from political and religious camps—there are Darwinian evangelists, intelligent design evangelists… even Web 2.0 evangelists. There is nothing wrong with having a conviction and better still supporting this conviction with evidences, proofs and logic. But that does not provide us the legitimacy to speak from a moral high ground when we engage with people who do not hold our convictions. Because a seeker of truth, however convinced he may be of a proposition, always leaves room for questioning the truths that he holds dear.

The least we can do is to be aware of the evangelist in ourselves.

Stories and Learning (Stories—Not Scenarios, Not Branched Simulations)

If you judge learning through the lens of learning objectives and the measurement of behavioral outcomes, you might as well not depend on stories to aid learning. Stories move you. They make you think. They provide insights. They have high recall. However, emotions, thought and insight are ambiguous terms. And what you recall from a story are the things that moved you, that made you think, that laid bare some meanings. The recall is personal—not exactly what the “teacher” or “SME” wants. So, you can’t go back and tell your learners “That’s not what I meant at all. That’s not it, at all.”

Listening to or reading a story is not a passive exercise—the reader or the listener interacts with a story through the sheer act of interpretation even after the story has been told. For e-learning designers, interactivity mostly constitutes drag, click or text entry—and now game-play, collaboration and personalization. But that’s just a Web idea of interactivity. Interactivity also means interaction with characters, plot, theme, and ideas—without necessarily having to click on options and alter outcomes.

So, you can use stories to teach. But you can’t close their meanings.

The Sharpening Lines of Division

Let’s face it: there are no equal opportunities in this world order. (In fact, there’s something wrong with the phrase “equal opportunities’; it should have been “equal access to opportunities.” But changing the phrase doesn’t solve the problem because there is no equal access either.) This is especially true when it comes to education. Opportunities are defined mostly by the fortunes or misfortunes of one’s birth. In India, it means that a poor child gets to go to a municipal school (regional language medium) with a high probability of an early dropout whereas a richer child gets to join a premium international school and from there goes on to study in any of the top Indian professional colleges or universities abroad. The middle classes, depending on where they are in the middle, choose between a government-aided English-medium private school and a private CBSE or ICSE school.

In the last 15 to 20 years, these lines of division have only become sharper (with a steady increase in the number of private schools) and no governmental policy has had any impact on bridging the divide. (The current Right to Education Bill has included 25% reservation in private schools for children from low income households; the bill has not yet been implemented.) As a result, the richer schools have managed to make poverty invisible inside school campuses. This is not just about reinforcing the class divide; it has more to do with shutting out the physical presence of poverty and replacing it with the glorification of charity. (Writing cheques for charity is a way of avoiding living in the presence of the “objects of charity”.)

A decade ago, state-funded schools, despite their deficiencies, enabled different economic and social classes to mix and learn from each other. These schools also placed more or less equal privilege on regional language—the language of local people and literature—and English—the language of commerce in today’s world order. However, today it is exclusive education (a stiff fee, posh infrastructure, teachers trained in the UK or the US, and little stress on regional language literature) that appeals more to the middle class parents, who as children most probably attended state-funded schools. Naturally, mainstream films, TV and the press are so interested in playing up these middle class aspirations that constructive debates around the growing divide are looked down up on as old fashioned debates of the 1970s.

Even the so called alternative schools that pride themselves on innovative curriculum and teaching methods have priced themselves so high that they too ensure that the vast majority of children from low income households are kept out of their premises.

Basic education is a right and not a commodity to be purchased. It’s not about making education accessible to all—it’s about ensuring access to well-trained teachers (who are capable of not only transmitting knowledge but who can also enable students to question what they learn), sound educational curriculum and content (which includes technology-supported learning), a decent infrastructure (clean toilets, working libraries, well-maintained playgrounds, and easy access to the Internet among others), a sensible student-teacher ratio, and access to a social network (school mates) that cuts across different economic classes. I’m not advocating the nationalization of all schools—variety in curriculum and teaching methods can make the field of education richer. However, providing variety in educational experiences is not an excuse to strengthen class divisions (the fee structure of elite schools automatically excludes the poorer sections of society).

Implementing 25% reservation in private schools for economically disadvantaged children will be a good start. However, all schools—be they private or government funded—need to address the issue of bridging the class divide and ensure that the field of education remains a level playing field. I know this sounds naïve in the absence of workable alternatives, but I believe that alternatives can only emerge if we start seeing education as part of the collective, public space and not just as a means for individual success stories.

Corporate E-learning Rules for 2009

1. Don’t bring down your prices; rather, strip down your solutions.

2. Think about how stripped-down solutions can produce the right outcomes. (Therefore, innovation in 2009 will be about coming up with price-sensitive solutions that produce results.)

3. Focus on outcomes before thinking about formats (a multimedia game is only a format—the outcome is performance).

4. When you select formats and develop methodologies, focus more on workability than on packaging. (Packaging is a kind of mask. In times like these, we need more honesty and fewer masks. In fact, one of the reasons for the current crisis is the use of too many masks. Remember collateralized debt obligations (CDO)?)

5. Test your solutions and see if they work. What doesn’t work doesn’t have the right to exist. We have a collective responsibility to ensure that the money spent on learning produces the results that it is supposed to produce. If everyone in the learning profession had insisted on this aspect at all times, we wouldn’t have witnessed learning budgets being cut drastically even during lean times.

Computer Penetration in Schools in India

“Despite India being an IT superpower, barely 14.25% schools have computers, with a huge gap between states. In Karnataka and Andhra—seats of big IT companies—only 11.44% and 13.46% schools, respectively, have computers. In Delhi, Chandigarh, Kerala and Puducherry, computers are available in 60%-70% schools. In Bihar, the figure is less than 1%, West Bengal 1.79% and UP 3.3%.”

As reported in The Times of India on Jan 16.

Shouldn’t educational technology professionals in India be talking something more fundamental than games and gadgets?

Plans, Challenges, Predictions

Response to LCB's Big Question for the Month

Plan

Avoid going with the flow of trends. When a new trend or a new tool is being announced almost everyday, it is something to be skeptical about. So much has been written about the changing use of media and millennial preferences that we have probably failed to see what was really changing. Web 2.0 cannot wish away formal learning in the foreseeable future—the idea is to make learning richer using technology, not poorer. (It’s a poor strategy to play the wisdom of crowd against the wisdom of specialists—both have their place).

A question to think about: Why do people leave corporate jobs to join graduate programs when they could have just picked up those skills informally at the workplace?

Challenge

Finding answers to the following questions:

1. What are we in this profession for? Are we genuinely interested in helping people learn or are we just peddling our beliefs and pet fads as what constitute good learning? Or, is it just about sticking to the client brief even when we instinctively know it's an ineffective solution? If we are genuinely interested, how much do we push our clients to figure out whether people really learn from our solutions, how significant those learnings are for them, and whether they get to apply that learning at work?
2. Do we really matter as a profession? What happens if our kind disappears and we are not replaced?
3. At a very practical level, what impact will the R word have on us?

Prediction

Opportunities to sell learning will reduce. However, opportunities for learning will increase.

On Collaborative Learning

Collaborative learning seems to be a much misunderstood term. This is how I’ve misunderstood it: Collaborative learning is not about achieving mastery in a certain subject; it’s about learning to collaborate. The topic or project for learning is only the context within which collaboration takes place.

If learning is only about processing information related to a specific subject, retaining this information and being able to apply the principles of the subject in multiple contexts, then probably collaborative learning is a distraction. Because what you get in collaboration are multiple foci, active and passive players, relevant as well as non-relevant conversations, dominance and reaction, and the many things that group dynamics bring to the fore. Therefore, in a sense, even collaborative learning helps one process certain type of information, except that this information may not strictly be about the subject in question but about how each person in the group was approaching this subject in the presence of a group.

In short, the focus of collaborative learning is on collaboration rather than on “learning” in the brain science sense of the term. And because collaboration is a critical life skill, students will need repeated and spaced practice, context (which is provided by the learning topics and projects), practical application (instead of learning about collaboration in textbooks, collaborate in real situations), and a greater understanding of peer groups.