Is Empathy Part of Your Instructional Design Process?

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Introduction

With disengaged learners and employees everywhere, don’t you think it might be time to introduce a little bit of empathy and compassion into your learning design.?

Just the Facts...Not Cutting It

Sergeant Joe Friday, the fictitious LA police detective in the 1950’s TV show Dragnet was famous for admonishing witnesses to provide “just the facts, please.” This same sentiment is sometimes an edict related to the design of instruction with phrases like: “learners don’t have time for fun, they just need the facts,” or “I don’t care if they like the training or not, it’s mandatory, they need to pay attention if they want to keep their jobs” or “if they like their job, they’ll pay attention to the training.”

Sure, these statements might be technically true and work really well if you want non-thinking, non-caring, and disengaged employees (think AI powered robots) but they don’t cut it if you want engaged, thinking and contributing employees.

?A lack of empathy or a callus approach to learners (who are often fellow employees) is counterproductive to the learning process. It inhibits, rather than enhances, learning. Forcing someone to learn something is bad enough. Forcing them to do it in an unpleasant fashion is even worse.?

Often, a lack of empathy is not a conscious design decision, rather, it’s the result of a rush to complete the instruction because of unrealistic time constraints, overworked employees, and a mindset that focuses on facts and not feelings. It also often stems from a sense by management and executives that employees are cogs with an organization who just need to do their jobs correctly so the organization can achieve desired goals.??

Adding Empathy

Fortunately, instructional designers and learning experience designers have the opportunity to weave empathy and good feelings into the design of their instruction. The first step is to adopt the perspective of the learners. Don’t start with, “What do they need to do for this task?” instead start with, “How are they feeling about the task?” or “What is the general mood of the employee when embarking on this instruction?”

This doesn’t mean ignoring performance goals or learning outcomes, it means that we first think about the affective domain and then consider the cognitive domain of learning. We need to get in touch with the feelings of the learners before, during, and after the learning if we want to engage the employees during instruction and, ultimately, on-the-job.

Tools and techniques have been created for these purposes. One is to create an Empathy Map examining several aspects of the learner, such as: what the learner hears, sees, feels and thinks in addition to what they need to do. It’s a tool that helps you, as an instruction designer, think through the personal experience of the learner.

Word of Caution

But even “tools to create empathy” can become just another rote process and not a genuine empathetic moment. The best thing to do is to just sit with a learner or group of learners, ask them how they are doing, what are their concerns and where are they are struggling. Listen to the responses, truly listen, don’t take notes, type on your laptop, or look at your phone. Instead, make eye contact, hear the strain in their voice, and work to understand their daily struggle.?

Conclusion

The simple act of caring about the learner during the process or creating instruction will translate into your design of instruction and that may make all the difference to someone.

Bio

Karl Kapp is a professor at Commonwealth University (formerly Bloomsburg University). He is a learning experience designer and a learning game designer who works around the global helping organizations create engaging and meaningful learning experiences using an evidence-based approach.

He is founder of the?L&D Mentor Academy, a members only group that explores the technology, business acumen and concepts required to take L&D professional's careers to the next level and help all members to become a bit wiser.

Additionally, Karl is co-founder of?Enterprise Game Stack, a serious games company that creates digitized card games for learning ranging from interactive role-play games to sorting activities and everything in-between. Find out more at?Enterprise Game Stack.

He is also the author of the?“The Unofficial, Unauthorized History of Learning Games” and a LinkedIn Learning author.