L&D innovation brought to you by executives at under-13s gymnastics meet
With IE 8 and Flash a not so distant memory, L&D is about to get a major upgrade with a revolutionary new initiative straight out of — wait, what? Ok, confirmed, Marketing and Finance (of course).
"I was having a meeting with some of the C-Suite lads - at my kids gymnastics carnival," said Chad, a CMO for a company specialising in points based reward programs. "Brad, a CHRO buddy of mine, was sharing some feedback he'd gotten from his safety team. There'd been a serious spike in RSI claims due to the number of clicks and double-clicks to access content in their eLearning."
"I said to Tad, a mate of Brad's who is a CFO for a profitable gaming company, are you thinking what I'm thinking? There's a real opportunity here right?"
It turns out Tad was indeed on the same page, (eventually, after a bit of back and forth about moving this conversation to include some chicken wings and beer). The three dads promptly left the carnival to go to the pub and hash out the idea (Chad missing his daughter's first landing of a double pike vault).
"It's really quite simple", explained Tad (or was it Brad). "The way it works is for every click in an eLearning module, 0.003 cents is added into a learning reward pool for the learner. We call it 'learning engagement optimisation with value capture'."
"Users are already clicking anyway. Why not offer rewards to stimulate a thirst for learning?" explained Chad, whose daughter now refuses to speak to him.
The pilot program was rolled out to four departments initially, with mixed feedback.
"I had to click through 47 accordion buttons in that compliance module," reported Emma, an administrative assistant. "My hand hurt for days, but I earned $1.41 for my learning rewards program. I just need 39,530 more clicks to get a Nespresso machine."
Early results however show concerning patterns emerging.
"We've noticed some employees developing obsessive clicking behaviours," admitted Brad's assistant. "One guy in Accounts clicked through the same module seventeen times in one day. He said he 'couldn't stop, claiming he had to get the trampoline.' His wife had to pick up their kids from the pool because he was still clicking at 7pm."
The program has also created revised incentives for course learning designers.
"My KPIs are now based on total clicks per module," explained one instructional designer. "It started slowly, building extra clicks into menu buttons, next arrows, accordions, flip cards, and the particularly lucrative 'click to reveal' interactions. But now I've started adding clicks for literally everything. Click to reveal the next word. Click to see a comma. Click to acknowledge you clicked. I've got a condo in Noosa now though."
When confronted about the similarities to problem gambling mechanics, the trio seemed unconcerned.
"Look, you're focusing on the wrong thing here. Sure people can't control their clicking, but why can't we celebrate the learning engagement scores instead," exclaimed Chad, "they've never been higher!"
How DID WE GET HERE?
Design decisions should always serve learners, and it’s important to keep your eyes peeled for unintended behavioural consequences.
While absurd, this story shines a light on what happens when ‘engagement’ gets measured as ‘a click’ instead of capability. We can see not only the hollow primary outcome, but also the behavioural shifts that are often not anticipated to ‘game the system’ so to speak - the designer chases the KPI, the employee chases the Nespresso machine, and the executive trio gets to celebrate ‘record engagement scores’ without ever considering whether capability uplift has happened.
Metrics that reward attention instead of understanding will always find someone happy to cash in on the difference - the win for engagement statistics is a hollow one.
