Michael Horn argues online courses rely too heavily on video when storytelling is more effective. Strayer University builds courses by defining learning outcomes first, then crafting relatable narratives around them. Cognitive science shows narrative boosts motivation and self-efficacy better than audio-visual overload.
In the Spring 2019 issue of Education Next, I wrote a piece called Online Learning Goes Hollywood. And it's one of the most fun pieces I've gotten to work on in the last couple of years because it really allowed me to geek out a little bit on the learning sciences about how do you construct good learning experiences for students, as well as pierce through what I think are some of the dangerous practices that have really grown in ascendancy in online learning, particularly in startups in Silicon Valley over the last several years. The basic idea was that online learning has obviously grown a ton. Roughly a third of students in higher education now take at least an online course. More than a quarter of all master's students are learning exclusively online. But helping keep students engaged, learning stay through an entire course has been a pretty tough nut to crack. And one of the hypotheses that has emerged is that could we use the power of stories to much better engage students in these learning experiences? This notion of using students, excuse me, using stories in online learning really actually was first put on the Myradar by Paul Friedman, the founder and CEO of the Entangled Group. So he's a colleague of mine, but this was back when he was running Altius and he came out with this new learning management system called Helix. And his basic contention, as I wrote about it at the time for Forbes, was that if stories were the oldest way for humans to communicate information and to help others learn material, because the. And the human brain as a result, is naturally wired to absorb in stories. And it turns out that there's a fair amount of research behind this as well. Dan Willingham, the noted cognitive scientist, writes about this a fair amount. And then Brewer Saxberg, the chief, excuse me, the vice president of learning science at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, I quote him in the piece saying, 5,000 years ago, storylines and learning were totally tied together. They were literally inseparable. If you think about myths, for example, they're all about learning. They're full of rich, evocative material that happens to carry with it a lot of information at the same time. So this notion was, could you use stories to create much more engaging online experiences? And in the story, I get to dive deep into how Strayer University is doing just that. They've created an entire studio around how they very clearly, when they architect a new course, for example, through this methodology, they identify the learning outcomes that they want students to have, and then they build storylines of around it that are relatable to students such that they can actually really engage them and so forth. And they've had some very promising outcomes that I talk to talk about in the story itself. Now, one of the things that I think is really important to acknowledge is that this is not just about video. Just taking online learning and making it video like I'm doing right now. In fact, just because a lot of students who are younger Generation Z and so forth love learning through video, it can often be a very clunky way to learn. Video is really good at showing you how to do something. It can motivate learners by introducing real life characters and the storylines that we talked about from what Strayer is doing that students can find compelling, they can relate to, they can internalize to believe that they can accomplish something and overcome negative associations. But. But video has a whole bunch of downsides. It can really overwhelm and undermine learning in some cases. One of my favorite books is Elearning in the Science of Instruction. And the authors, Richard Meyer and Ruth Clark there show that if you overload students working memory with excessive audio and visual elements, you can really hurt learning. And as Burr Saxberg said, when things are simple cognitively, then you can put in a lot of rich media. So if you're an expert in a certain topic, video can work really well. But if you're a novice learner and then, and something is really complicated for you, then simplifying learning, stripping out a lot of the video and audio elements that sort of walk over each other, for lack of a better phrase, is really important. And so it's not just important to think about relevance in its own sake or video for its own sake, because that can actually do a lot of negative things for learning. It's much more important to think about the focus not being on video, but the focus being on stories, because stories can really help motivate students. In the piece, Brewer Saxberg refers to three specific ways that it can help. First, a student may not value learning on its own, but being entertained or enjoying the learning. Wanting to see what happens, for example, to the characters in a story can make the learning experience intrinsically motivating, even if the topic itself isn't. And so therefore it can make a student much more likely to stay engaged with something. Second, a student may have low self efficacy about a certain topic. And if you can show them characters that they can relate to, it can really help show students I can do this too and help them counter negative perceptions or biases that might suggest to them I can't do this. And third, negative emotions can block students from engaging in learning. And this goes to this notion of we can't just think about learning in a vacuum. We really have to think about the social and emotional contexts in which students learn. But Hollywood writers, of course, make a living by inspiring emotions in their audiences, and it can really help people remember things as well, if you use it correctly. And so using the power of Hollywood to tell stories that really spark the right types of emotions from students and engage them in the learning to make the experiences more memorable and sticky can be a pretty exciting thing. Not just to help a student persist through a course, but but actually then remember the content and the learning objectives in an experience as well. So I thought it was a really neat opportunity to dive deep into. This goes against one of my favorite pet peeves that I think video is used way too much in learning experiences and there's not that nearly enough storytelling or coherence in course design that could create far more engaging and exciting experiences. And so definitely check it out on Education Next for the full story and see what Strayer University is doing. And check out some of the information from Dan Willingham, Boris Elearning and Science and Instruction and other resources to think about how to design really good learning experiences.
