What Is Learning Experience Design (And Does Adopting It Require You to Leave ADDIE and SAM Behind?)

Saul Carliner, Concordia University

Volet: Conception des expériences d’apprentissage / Track: Learning experience design

Type: One-hour Innovative Topic Discussion

Over the past few years, the term “learning experience design” has crept into the instructional design lexicon. But what is it really? This session provides an overview. Specifically, taking a design-sprint approach, this session engages participants in performing some the essential practices of learning experience design, including the development of use cases and personas, learning journeys, and prototyping; explains the benefits of these practices; explores the benefits of learning experience design to the overall effectiveness of instructional programs; and suggests how these practices integrate into existing instructional design processes. 

More about the Topic (for reviewers, not the published program): Although the concept of instructional design has guided the design and development of educational programs since the middle of the last century, a new concept, learning experience design, has emerged as a possible alternative. This experiential session provides participants with an opportunity to experience and contrast the two, and suggests the implications to research, theory, and practice of the two approaches. 

Instructional design emerged from work that began during World War II. Throughout the war, US defense forces introduced increasingly complex technology into the battlefield, technology that required special training. Cognitive psychologists were engaged to find ways to design effective instructional programs that could be launched as quickly as possible and that would be effective, so US forces might benefit from this technology as quickly as possible (Reiser, 2001). 

The resulting approach, eventually called instructional design, is effectively comprised of these main components:

• Instructional design theories, which offer “explicit guidance on how to better help people learn and develop” (Reigeluth, 1999, p.5.) 

• Instructional-design, which refers to strategies for structuring educational materials to ensure that they most effectively teach the intended material. The choices should be rooted in empirical research on effective instructional techniques (Reigeluth, 1999).

• Instructional systems design, a process that professionals should follow to prepare instructional programs and that, in its most generic form, consists of five broad tasks: analyzing a need, designing a program, developing a program that conforms to the designs, implementing the program, and evaluating the effectiveness of the program. This generic process is known as ADDIE, a acronym created from Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, and Evaluation, though no one knows the true origins of ADDIE (Molenda, 2003). The goal of the process-oriented approach is to ensure that professionals ask key questions before making important decisions regarding the educational programs.

Instructional design emerged from research and academia; several concerns with instructional design exist such as the inflexibility of its process and it is more focused on analysis and evaluation than on the actual deign and development of programs. 

In response practicing professionals responded with their own concept: learning experience design. According to the Online Learning Consortium, a nonprofit organization that offers a digital badge in learning experience design, learning experience design “utilizes well-established user experience (UX) design, service design, and design thinking methods to focus the design of synchronous and asynchronous learning experiences on those who matter most: the learners” (2019). Niels Floor, a Dutch user experience designer, claims credit for coining the term and now runs a consultancy that offers learning experience design master classes and conferences. As currently conceived by people with user experience backgrounds, learning experience design is a relatively new concept rooted in principles of user experience. For example, a Learning Designer Manifesto calls designers of online learning experiences to “transform learning into a more personal and profound experience” (Learning Experience Design, 2019). The manifesto invites learners to tell designers “what drives you so I can truly meaningful learning experiences that have a powerful, positive impact.” 

Since the training of that manifesto, formally trained instructional designers have tried to link learning experience design to instructional design through an open access book on learning experience design (Schmidt, Tawfik, Jahnke, & Earnshaw, 2020).

Learning Objectives:

• Contrast learning experience design with traditional instructional design.
• Use these experience design techniques: personas, use cases, and user orientation. 
• State how you can incorporate these techniques into your own instructional design practice.