Active Learning for Software Products

INTRODUCTION The steady stream of new software products into the workplace creates a continuing demand for user-training and support materials. What makes the problem particularly difficult is the requirement that these materials be successful with adult learners—highly critical, task-oriented learners who are often empowered to say “I quit” whenever they feel like it. Technical communicators are often drawn into service to meet this demand (either as employees of the product provider or as employees of third-party training companies), partly because of their knowledge of the products they document, partly because of their ability to create professional materials, and partly because of their skills in analyzing user requirements. As technical communicators, we know to take a task-oriented approach in our writing, and when asked to design instruction or produce instructional materials, we apply these same skills, often employing Dick and Carey’s (1996) model of Instructional System Design (ISD) or intuitive models closely related to it. Figure 1 shows the ISD model. Based on my experiences as a student, teacher, practitioner, and manager of instructional design, I have found that two stages in this model seem to be particularly difficult for designers: conducting instructional analysis and writing performance objectives. First, it is sometimes extremely difficult to translate abstract and complex problem spaces into neatly decomposed instructional and performance objectives. Second, once high-level tasks have been broken down into their constituent, often hierarchical performance objectives, the resulting instructional strategy is often a bottom-up, lock-stepped sequence from entry-level skills to targeted outcomes. For example, if an analysis that produces statements like “When shown the word processor’s tool bar, the student will be able to identify and describe the function of each tool icon,” the resulting training all too often has an instructor (or a tutorial or a manual) saying, “Before you can get started using the word processor, you first need to understand the tool bar and what each of the icons do. Please follow along with me and don’t click on any of the icons at this time.” For reasons discussed in this article, this approach to training is often rejected by goal-oriented adult learners. But must it follow that ISD will result in bottom-up, context-sterile instruction? In his book on Minimalism, The Nurnberg funnel, John Carroll (1990) notes, “There is no reason in principle that an analysis of learning objectives cannot be coupled with a synthesis of those objectives into a variety of realistic tasks for learners, but in fact we found that this did not occur” (p. 7). I am convinced that an ISD approach can generate goalcentered training that incorporates realistic activities for adult learners. This article discusses an instructional paradigm called situated learning and shows how to combine some of its precepts with a structured, ISD approach to develop effective, classroom-based software training for working adults. First, I discuss the special attributes of adult learners; then I present principles for designing task-centered programs; finally, I offer specific examples of such materials that were designed and used in an actual training situation.