Boredom is failure

- I'm soon going to do my best to persuade you that learner boredom is totally avoidable. I recognize, of course, that there are many forces that contribute to boring instruction. But we really can't justify boring learners just because, "Well the content that we have to teach "is just totally boring in nature." Or, "We don't have time to make it interesting. "That we can't afford to do better," or, "My team and I are just not that creative "and we don't have the skills "to build more engaging things." And sure it's easier, it's quicker to just to present content but active learning requires more. When I wrote my first book on eLearning, my publisher asked me to come up an edgy title. After some contemplation and generating a list of, what I thought were pretty edgy titles, I came up with, "Boring is bad." And the book publisher was disappointed, he said, "I thought we were going for edgy. "Michael, everybody knows that boredom is bad." To which I said of course, "Apparently not in the structural designers." You know, eLearning has advantages and the disadvantages. One disadvantage is that we don't have an observing, nurturing, face-to-face instructor. In face-to-face instruction, learners keep their engagement and focus with the support of a responsive, charismatic person with a personal relationship to the learner, at least ideally. Learners don't worry if the computer is looking at them like they do when a teacher has her eye on them. So why is it so is critical to avoid boredom? Well, let's look at a model of how people learn. The only way we get new information, new skills even, to sit in our heads for a long period of time is through practice. And so we have perception, we have short-term memory and then we have long-term memory. If people are bored they're not paying attention, that puts up a roadblock right at the beginning of the process. And if they're not paying attention, it stops the whole thing. Nothing gets into our brains if we're not attending to new information, it's really as simple as that. No learning means no benefits, you know, from all the efforts one might put in to presenting information as logically and clearly and concisely as possible. Just no benefits from all that work. But the effects can even be worse than not achieving learning outcomes, as devastating as that sounds. Consider that, as learner attention drifts in and drifts out, confusion and frustration can set in. Learners can decide they aren't cut out to be managers, writers, salespeople or whatever skills you're trying to teach. Even from just one bad learning experience people sometimes form a lasting and limiting self-concept. When people have a frustrating time learning, especially as they see themselves failing. They may easily begin to think that they just aren't capable of developing the skills being taught. And they may decide they're just no longer interested in the subject. Their frustration can translate to their job, resulting in their looking for other employment and all kinds of cascading negative consequences. The list of lost opportunities, of course, as well as direct expenses to the organization providing the training, can be very long and damaging. It's as simple and crucial as this. If your instruction is boring, its ultimately worthless. It's a failure and it's a failure on many fronts. So let's endeavor for greatness. Perhaps we need a Hippocratic oath for us as instructional designers. Let's commit to waste no learner time, neither frustrate, bore, nor disenfranchise any learner.