As long as I’ve been in the eLearning space, I’ve heard and participated in both sides of an ongoing debate.
On one side, people put more emphasis on our software. We’re always looking for the next great thing. We invest in multiple tools. We compare; we search; we demand more. We want our tools to do more, faster, better. Authoring tool vendors tend to cater to this set; promising amazing results, beautiful content, and lightning-fast ways to create interactivity—or, sometimes, “interactivity”. They sometimes even push this perspective so far that they sideline the instructional designer.
On the other side, people put most of their emphasis on design skills. “It’s not about the tools!” is our battle cry. We hold up David Byrne’s incredible PowerPoint creations as proof that beautiful things can be made with basic software. We say it’s a poor carpenter who blames their tools. We invest in our design skills and our knowledge of effective instructional techniques, and sometimes we even go so far as to say the tools don’t matter. Books can be just as effective as eLearning, after all, and YouTube just as effective as an in-person experience.
Both of these perspectives have value, but neither are correct when taken to extremes.
If your authoring tool still outputs only Flash, no amount of design skill can make it useful, period. And let’s face it, the fact that it’s possible to make masterpieces with simple tools doesn’t mean it’s reasonable for every instructional designer, every project, every day. It shouldn’t be necessary to be a miracle worker in order to make effective learning experiences. Tools do have features that differentiate them from each other, and it’s okay to demand a lot from them.
On the other hand, there’s no tool so “advanced” that it can replace an instructional designer’s expertise, skill, empathy, effort, time, and creativity. Designers will create experiences that are more effective when they’ve honed their own skills, when they have time to create a quality solution, when they’ve had the proper access to research their users, and so on...and those differences will shine no matter which tool they’re using.
As an instructional designer, I no longer question whether tools or design skills are more important. I’ve accepted that unless I’m hand-coding my own HTML pages and animations, I’m using tools that impose—to varying degrees—their creators’ ideas of what makes a good learning experience. And so I limit my toolset to ones that are both powerful and easy to use, and when possible, software that paves the path toward creating the kinds of learning experiences my learners need.
Having transitioned to product management over the past year, that philosophy of tool selection has turned into a philosophy of tool creation. Now I ask: How can authoring tools support solid, evidence-based instructional design, for the creation of truly effective learning experiences? What should we expect from the authoring experience itself? What should we expect from the learning experience that this tool is designed to create?
In her research report on Learning Experience Design[1] , Dr. Jane Bozarth referenced Peter Morville’s seven facets of user experience: usability, usefulness, desirability, accessibility, credibility, findability, and value. These less-tangible factors apply to both the authoring experience and the learning experience, and they distinguish one tool from another every bit as much as features like 508 compliance checking, single-source cross-platform authoring, actions and variables, or xAPI reporting.
So it’s not about the tools…but some are more focused on paving the way toward instructional effectiveness than others.
It’s not about the tools…but some have highly unusual capabilities, such as integrated learner collaboration features, that distinguish them from other software.
It’s not about the tools…but given the many demands on an instructional designer’s time, if there’s a tool that makes our workflows quicker and easier without sacrificing quality of output, why wouldn’t we choose it?
Instructional designers make heroic efforts to deliver experiences that are delightful, memorable, relevant, and most of all, effective...and we don’t need software to do that for us. What we need are tools that we can spend less time “working around” and less time supporting on the learner side, and tools that make it easier to execute on our knowledge of what our learners need.
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