Action First Learning: A Conversation with Dr. Karl Kapp

CommLab Podcast with Dr.Karl Kapp

Sherna Varayath 2:12
Hi Champions, welcome back to the eLearning Champion podcast, where we explore the strategies, trends, and successes that are shaping the world of digital learning. Today we're looking at Action First Learning. If you've been in the instructional design space for a while, you've definitely come across our speaker for today. Here's a hint. He's a most sought-after ID instructor on LinkedIn Learning. Let's welcome our speaker for today, Doctor Karl Kapp. Doctor Karl Kapp is a prominent figure in the instructional design and learning technology space, widely recognized as a thought leader on the convergence of learning, technology, and business. He's a Professor of Instructional Technology at Commonwealth University and has a worldwide reputation as a pioneer in the gamification of learning. Having authored several influential books on the topic, his latest book, Action First Learning, is a testament to his expertise in creating engaging, interactive, and effective learning experiences.

He's also a sought-after speaker and LinkedIn learning instructor, constantly pushing the boundaries of what's possible in the L&D world. Hi Karl, we are glad to have you on board today.

Kapp, Karl M 3:42
Hi, thanks for having me. I'm so excited to be here and always excited to talk about learning and development and how to make it more engaging and more exciting.

Sherna Varayath 3:53
Now, dear listeners, before we dive in, make sure you're a true eLearning champion by hitting that follow button from wherever you're listening in to us from. And now moving to the first question, Doctor Karl, Action First Learning flips the traditional model on its head by starting with the ‘’doing’’ portion. What's the biggest misconception people have about this approach?

Kapp, Karl M 4:20
One of the things that people do very often is maybe start with an icebreaker or something that's not really relevant to the content. And when we're working with adult learners, they want to get in and get out. They want to learn what they need to learn and then go back to what they're doing in terms of work or their job. So it's really important to start with something that's relevant, makes sense, and is related to their performance.

Sherna Varayath 4:47
Now you've been a pioneer in gamification. How does ‘’Action First’’ learning build on or diverge from the principles of gamification you've championed in the past?

Kapp, Karl M 5:05
I'm not abandoning gamification or asking anyone to abandon gamification for learning. What has happened is sometimes gamification carries a bad stigma about it, like, oh, gamification is dumbing down instruction, I don't want to do that. And it takes too long to do them and so I don't want to do that. People get stuck in these ruts of developing the instruction and so, I looked through the research and my experiences and said, what was the most impactful learning experience that I've ever had? You can think about the most impactful experience you've ever had. And chances are it started with engagement right away. You were doing something right away, you were solving a mystery or collaborating with someone or answering questions. You just dove right into it and then the instruction came. So that's really the impetus I want people to think about. We don't always have time to get people together online for learning. So when we have them, we need to take advantage of that. And we need to get them doing something. I've looked at gamification for decades and said, OK, let's up this a little bit, let's go to the next generation, which is ‘’Action First’. Let's get the learners doing something first. It sets the mood for the instruction. It sets expectation and the learners go, oh, this is really practical, this is what I need to learn how to do on the job or in my situation, this makes perfect sense. And so that was the impetus behind getting Action First learning out into the world.

Sherna Varayath 6:57
Your book mentions 9 distinct types of learning experiences, from escape rooms to AI powered coaching. For an L&D team with limited resources, which of these is the most accessible entry point to a more ‘’Action First’’ approach?

Kapp, Karl M 6:59
First of all, there are nine in the book, but there's a lot more than nine. Action First learning can be done at the simplest level by starting with questioning the learner. A lot of times we start instruction with learning objectives. Sometimes I call them learning objections because you say to somebody, I'm going to teach you five ways to do something and they go, I know six ways. Forget about it. But what if you ask them, hey, do you know the number one way people in our organization do this? People go, maybe I know the number one, maybe I don't. And now they're listening, they're paying attention. So that's the simplest thing you can do without any technology, just put the questions on the screen. Another really simple technology, especially if you're in the classroom and even with PowerPoint, Prezi and other tools like Enterprise Game Stack card games, is just use basic index cards with questions on them or something like that and have people trade those cards or sort or match those cards. Again, it has to align your learning. Let's say that you're teaching people to be insurance adjusters, to look at crashed cars. So you could sort these cards with pictures of car damage as damage from a front end collision or side collision or back collision. And people would sort those, rather than saying, oh, front end collision looks like this, or back end looks like that. So you're getting them to do something right away. That's it. That's a good way to think about it.

I talk about giving learners really difficult problems, even if you don't think they can solve them. So, hey, let's start with this problem. I'm sure not everybody's going to be able to solve it. So right there you're challenging certain people. I'll give you 10 minutes and then we'll go over it. Malcolm Knowles said that adult learners learn best when they know they don't know something. I think one of our jobs is to help adult learners see, Oh yeah, I don't know that. It's a moment of need kind of thing if you can convince them that they need to know this and they don't. You can do that inexpensively, through questions or card games. You can do that really expensively through Virtual Reality or Augmented Reality, although those costs have come down dramatically. You can do it through board games. You can do it through branching scenarios, lots of different ways to do that, depending on not having a lot of money, but it's really a design paradigm rather than a technology paradigm.

Sherna Varayath 10:08
Now, how do instructional designers and L&D professionals balance the efficiency of AI powered tools with the human creativity required to design such truly engaging ‘Action First’ experiences?

Kapp, Karl M 10:24
That's a great question. So, not only is this book a combination of content that I've thought about and studied and observed through decades in the field, but it's also a combination of what I learned about writing books. So, it started with ‘’Here's some questions that you need to answer yourself, here's a case study, here's the implementation steps”. Because every time you write a book, someone's like, that's a good book, but no practical examples. So I put practical examples. Then they say nice book, but no step by step instructions. I'm like, OK, here's step by step instructions. So every book would add something. So in this, I added AI prompts, and so for every one of the 9 elements, there's a prompt in there to help you as the human approach for this particular element of designing ‘’Action First’’ learning. And the real key I found is you have to have the human in the loop to add the nuances, to do the cultural references, to bring a point that was made over here and make it relevant, to do the transitions, to really know what's important. Yeah, AI can dump a lot of content, but is it important content? Is it relevant content? Can the learner go, Yeah, I know that. I can identify with that. So our job as the human in the loop is to add that. I like to think of A I as an exoskeleton. It can make us stronger, better, and faster. But an exoskeleton by itself can't do anything. And the other thing I think is interesting is, now that content can be found anywhere and anybody can serve up content, instructional design is not about content, it's about instructional strategies. So how do you get somebody to learn this and then apply it? And that's what instructional designers do really well. We understand the human psyche in terms of applying knowledge and content and motivation and foresight and predictions and all those things that humans do that we can inject into the instruction that AI can pretend to inject, but doesn't really work unless we massage it and make it correct.

Sherna Varayath 12:45
Now in the book, you've said some learners might moan and groan when asked to take action right away. What are the best ways to manage the initial resistance and get buy in from both the learners and stakeholders?

Kapp, Karl M 13:06
So for the stakeholders, I like the expression, ‘’it's easier to beg for forgiveness than ask for permission’’. So just go ahead and do some action first learning things. I don't know if the stakeholders always have to know, but one of the things I say to the stakeholders in all seriousness is, What do you want the employees to do after this training? That's what you need to focus on. So if we want them to do that after the training, why don't we have them do that during the training? Why don't we practice that? So I always think of like, the FIFA World Cup is coming up. And those athletes, the soccer players, football players at that level, they know football, right? They don't really need to practice, but they practice all the time. That's how they get better and better. In corporations, somebody will say, Hey, I've been a salesperson for 10 years, I don't need to practice. I've been doing this job for 10 years, I don't need to practice, right? But the best athletes in the world, they have to practice.

We decide, oh, we don't need to practice, but we actually do need to practice. Otherwise, you're practicing on your clients if you're a salesperson, or you're practicing on your employees, if you're a leader. And maybe you're not doing the right thing, maybe you're practicing the same incorrect thing over and over and over again and it's hurting. So good practice is important. I say to stakeholders, let's have them practice what they need to do on the job. And to the learners, what I found is if you have them do something right away, they don't really think about it. If you start a learning experience, maybe e-learning experience and you show in this course, you will learn the following boom, boom, boom. By the 5th slide people are like yeah, this is boring, click, click, click, click. But what if you're like, here's the dilemma. One of your colleagues has just embezzled $10,000 and they ask you what to do about it. What should you say? Then you're engaged right away. Like, oh, I got to take some action, I got to make a decision, what am I going to say? Hey, this client has called you up and said that their car crashed, but it looks suspicious. What are you going to do? So now you have people doing things right away. If you frame it like that, it gets them involved right away. They don't have time to be bored or think I don't want to be in this training once it's going to be over. But if you have them doing something right away, Hey, here's a piece of machinery, it's not working, troubleshoot it, you have 10 minutes. All those things get people taking action and then they can't troubleshoot it, because you want to set it up for them to fail. So then you say, OK, now let's talk about how would we troubleshoot that. You've been frustrated for a few minutes, let's solve the frustration. So those types of things I find the learners enjoy. Actually, they like problem solving. They like doing things that they can see direct implications to their job. And that's really cool.

Sherna Varayath 16:17
Now ‘’Action First’’ learning emphasizes that learners should do something like you just said. How do you measure the success of these type of experiences beyond our standard metrics like completion rates?

Kapp, Karl M 16:35
Let's say you're in the classroom and you do something with Action First learning. I've had people like, Hey, it's time for lunch. No, we're not leaving until we do this. Well, wait a minute, you got to go eat. No, I got to do this. People staying after. That's one measure. The ultimate measure should be on the job performance. So when they leave this Action First learning experience, are they able to go to the job and do the action that they're supposed to do? That's really the number one criteria. What that means is that as a learning and development professional, we first have to take a baseline. What were people doing before this ’’Action First’’ learning? And give them the “Action First’’ learning and then measure what they're doing after the Action First learning and see if there's a difference. Hopefully there has been a positive difference and they're able to do that and that's what we want to do. We want to measure pre-performance, then do the learning intervention, measure post-performance. If you truly want to be a researcher, you will train some of the people with Action First learning and some of the people with more traditional learning and then compare the two. But organizations don't have that kind of time, effort, or even will. So you just want to say, OK, does this training make a difference in performance, the metrics, KPIs, or however you're measuring that? Are they making a difference to the business? And you have to complete it, so maybe you keep track of that, but what's really most important is, is it impacting the business in a positive way?

Sherna Varayath 18:16
What's a common mistake you see that L&D teams make when they try to implement an Action First strategy? And what would be one piece of advice that you would give them to help avoid it?

Kapp, Karl M 18:20
I think there's a couple things. One is they think it's going to take too long to develop. So they're like, no, I'm not going to do this, it takes too long. And second is what I alluded to earlier. They say, OK, I have to do action, so we'll just have them do this exercise. It doesn't really mean anything, but we'll have them do this exercise. We'll keep them busy, right? So “Action First’’ learning does not mean just keeping the learner busy. Action First learning means purposeful intent of action. One mistake you make, and subject matter experts like to do this a lot, they will tell you what you need to know to do the job, but not what you need to do to do the job. Sometimes, like in my past we've been doing computer training, and they said, in order to understand what's happening, they have to understand the history of the computer. I'm like, no, they don't. They have to understand what anarchy is and how to hit it and how to write a password. So we really got to get away from what the learner needs to know to what they need to do. And the interesting thing about knowing is that if I need to do something, I'll figure out how to do it, and then I'll do it. Because humans are pretty smart like that. We'll Google it, we'll look it up, we'll look in Bing or whatever. But how to do something is a little bit harder, right? So we actually want to get to the point where we have people do things in the learning situation, then they'll figure out, OK, that's how, I want to know that. The advice is on LinkedIn, and I'll send you the link for the show notes. I created a whole free mostly if you have LinkedIn or other courses or access to YouTube of a whole curriculum for the book. So if you started the curriculum, you could go through that and understand how to do it meaningfully. And I think that's really important. I don't want people to go, well, we put this exercise in because Doctor Kapp said we had to have an exercise. No, no, no, he's saying have a purposeful exercise, one that leads to action, that people need to do on the job. So that's my advice. Figure out when you talk to subject matter experts, what people need to do and then design the instruction around what they need to do.

Sherna Varayath 20:59
Now for a company that would have traditionally relied on passive or content heavy training, what are the first two or three conversations they need to have to begin their shift towards an action first mindset?

Kapp, Karl M 21:07
One of the first ones we'll say, OK, we're giving our learners a lot of content, is it making a difference? So I would ask, is the content, is our current instruction making a difference? If it's not making a difference or if it is, where are the points of friction? Where are the areas where our learners struggle, our employees struggle, where they are having problems? Then I would hone in on those problems and figure out what kind of instruction needs to do that. So I would say, we're going to try an approach called Action First Learning. It's one where employees practice the skills they need on the job and we're going to make them better at what they're doing on the job. And people say, Wow. Line managers are going to say, Oh, you're going to make my employees better, that's awesome, how are you going to do that? We're going to configure the training to laser focus on their performance, let's look at that. And oftentimes when you talk to a line manager or supervisor or whatever about performance, their ears perk up, OK, let's improve. So I would talk about performance, not talk about training. I'm going to say, Hey, we're going to rebrand this experience that the learner has as performance improvement instruction and we're going to focus on that. And a lot of times that really resonates because they're held to performance measures, performance metrics, quotas. And so if you do that, it can help you position the training to be as effective as it needs to be.

What I find too is that not a lot of designers of instruction want to focus on all this content, but they're kind of forced to. The subject matter expert or the manager says you need this or whatever. And it kind of gives you a shield to say, Hey, I know the history of the computer is interesting, but it's not how you log on. So we're just going to the performance of logging on. We're just going to focus on that, and we can make it supplemental if you want about the history of the computer, but let's just focus for now on what it takes to log in. That can be very helpful in making that argument.

Sherna Varayath 23:41
Now your work often focuses on hands on and interactive learning, like you said, Action First. How can instructional designers apply the principles of Action First learning to fully remote or asynchronous training programs?

Kapp, Karl M 24:03
That's a great question. I was just teaching a course last night on the creation of branching scenarios, like how do you create branching scenarios? One of the things that I had learners do was just a little bit of a scavenger hunt. So online, I broke them into teams, and said OK, here's some information. I want you to go out, find it and tell me how this applies to branching scenarios. And so they went out, found the information, came back, we debriefed and talked about it and had that experience where they were taking action, which was going and searching and then thinking critically about how this information can be used for branching and then doing that. Another thing I do in that class is, every week we take a branching scenario and dissect it. What did you like? What didn't you like? What was good? What was bad? So instead of saying, Oh, just go through scenarios or here's how you create a scenario, let's experience one and then let's figure out what was good or bad about it. So you could take any content and have learners deconstruct it. You could have content where you say, OK, you need to construct this content so you can create those online experiences. You could use branching software, say, hey, we're going to start this class having everybody go through this scenario and then let's debrief the scenario and talk about it.

Or we're going to have everybody log on to the system and where did you find trouble logging on? You can have segments of instruction that are very focused on what the outcomes need to be.

And you asked before, what mistake do instructional designers make? I think microlearning is a symptom of this. For some reason in our minds, we measure or think about learning as a timeframe like, Oh, this is going to be an hour, or this is going to be a half an hour, this is going to be 5 minutes, or this is going to be whatever. We don't think in outcomes. It might take me two hours to learn something, it may take you 15 minutes to learn something. Why are we saying the training is a 2-hour training or a one hour training?

We should say the outcome of this training is being able to do this and that's it. And so here's the tools that you can learn how to do it. Here's some practice elements for you to learn how to do it. Take as long or as short as you want, learn how to do it. I think that's something we as designers think about as we do something online. I think breakout rooms are great. I think polls are great. I think whiteboards are great. I've done exercises where I've said to students, OK, you don't know anything about instructional design. I'm going to put you in groups of four and I want you to create an instructional design model. And they'll be like, well, Doctor Kapp, we haven't studied this yet, we don't know about. That's fine. I want you to think about the model. And once they think about that and then they show them what the models actually are, then they're like, Oh, I was wrong about this, but I was right about that. So what that does is, it creates that scaffolding into their brain of where things fit and now they're going to remember it more effectively. They're going to retain it for longer. They're going to be able to apply it. So putting the onus on the learners or employees doing something is where the learning sticks. And far, far too often, we throw content at people and think they're learning, but they're not. They're just getting content. So that's how you can do it in an online setting.

Sherna Varayath 28:05
Now looking ahead, what emerging technologies excite you the most as tools for designing even more immersive and impactful Action First learning experiences?

Kapp, Karl M 28:19
I think AI is going to be doing some really cool stuff. For example, I have branching scenarios on my mind because one, it's a chapter in the book, and two, I just taught it last night. But what if there are tools that are coming out now? There's a company actually, I think in Finland, called WeLearn, and there's one called Near Life and there's a bunch. One of the problems always with branching scenarios was you get 4 choices. And the learner goes, I wouldn't pick any of those, so this don't make sense to me. Or a trick for those of you who want to know is look for the longest answer, that's the right one, right? So it doesn't matter what it says, it's the longest answer. But now?

You can say, OK, what would you say to this person? And you would just say into the microphone. An AI will interpret what you say and then on the background say, well, if you say these kind of words, then branch in this way. If you say these kind of words, branch in that way. But it's not an exact answer. It's you just talking like you would in a natural situation. I think that’s really exciting because it's going to allow branching scenarios to be more and more realistic.

The other AI thing that I think is cool is, and this is going to come back. It's so interesting to me, the ebb and flow of technology. Virtual worlds were really big way back when I wrote a book on them and I always joke the day the book came out is a day like Second Life crap like nobody cared about anymore.

Then Meta came out with Horizon. Everybody cared about that. And then AI came out and that disappeared. But they're coming back at some point. But it will be a generative virtual world. So if you're learning how to respond to an emergency as a first responder, you'll be able to type in a situation, and it'll create the avatars or the characters. It'll create the situation. And then you go into that situation, and it will be very realistic, and it will help you understand what you need to do. It might be classroom discipline, it might be fixing a piece of machinery, it might be negotiating a contract. There’s an interactive world, learning what to do right before you go and do it. I don't think AI by itself is really that whatever, but I think AI combining with the tools that we already have is going to make the learning much more personalized, immediate and engaging compared to what it was just 5-10 years ago.

Sherna Varayath 31:13
Like you said earlier, if we consider AI as an exoskeleton and build up on it, there's so much more that we can do.

And this actually brings us to the end of another action-packed episode of the
eLearning Champion podcast. We've covered a lot from designing with purposeful intent and so many innovative ideas and thoughts from Doctor Karl Kapp. I hope dear learners, you're walking away with some fresh ideas and actionable steps to elevate your eLearning programs. Thank you so much, Doctor Karl, for all your thoughtful stories and insights.

Kapp, Karl M 31:54
Thanks for having me. This has been a great conversation.

Sherna Varayath 31:57
Oh, absolutely. I'm sure our listeners will love it.

So dear listeners, do take a moment to share, follow, comment and connect with us on a platform of your choice. Find CommLab India on LinkedIn for the latest trends, insights and all things eLearning. Thank you so much for tuning in to the eLearning Champion Podcast. Until next time, happy learning.