Does this help someone learn? – David Hopkins / Education & Leadership

One of the phrases I hear most often when discussing (digital) learning is that we need to make our content “more engaging” or “more exciting”. It appears in project specifications, conference presentations, team meetings, and strategy papers. It has become one of those statements that nobody really questions because, on the face of it, who would argue against interesting or engaging content?

The trouble is that “exciting” or “engaging” has become shorthand for something much narrower, more interactive, visually rich, media-heavy, or using new technical ‘wizardry’. Somewhere along the way, we seem to have developed the expectation that good learning content should compete for attention in the same way as the rest of the digital world. If learners spend their evenings watching YouTube, scrolling social media or playing games, surely our learning content should do the same.

I’m not convinced, and it’s not because engagement doesn’t matter. It does. But I wonder whether we’ve become so focused on making learning look engaging that we’ve stopped asking what learners actually need.

Not every learning experience should feel exciting. Imagine reading the instructions for updating a team spreadsheet or a financial case study; you probably wouldn’t think those instructions need to be wrapped in animations, hidden interactions, and playful discovery. You would want them to be clear, accurate, easy to follow, and appropriate. Their purpose isn’t to entertain you. It’s to help you do something correctly.

The same is true across education. Sometimes learners need to wrestle with ideas through discussion, experimentation and collaboration. Sometimes an interactive simulation can achieve something that text alone never could. At other times, however, what they need is simply a well-written explanation, a carefully constructed diagram or a concise worked example that allows them to understand a difficult concept without unnecessary distraction.

The keyword there is unnecessary; good learning design has never really been about adding more, it’s about deciding what can be taken away. Every additional click, animation, video, activity or interactive element asks something of the learner. It consumes attention. It increases cognitive effort. Sometimes that will be what we want. There will also be times when it isn’t.

There’s a tendency in educational technology to assume that because a platform lets us build something, we should; we create branching scenarios because we can, we embed videos because they’re available, we add interactions because the authoring tool makes them easy. Yet every design decision should really begin with a much simpler question: Does this help someone learn?

Sometimes the answer is yes. Sometimes the answer is no. One of the most overlooked qualities of good learning content is that it almost disappears. Learners aren’t thinking about the interface because they aren’t fighting it. They aren’t trying to work out where information has been hidden or deciphering elaborate navigation. They find what they need, understand it and move forward with confidence.

That isn’t boring, that’s good design.

I think accessibility has something important to teach us here as well. We often think of accessibility as a separate consideration, something we remember after the exciting parts have been designed. In reality, accessible learning is frequently better learning for everyone. Clear language, logical structure, meaningful headings, consistent layouts and straightforward navigation reduce unnecessary effort. They allow learners to spend their mental energy on understanding the subject rather than on understanding the resource or interface.

Ironically, some of the content we proudly describe as engaging creates the greatest barriers. Complex interactions, unexpected behaviours, hidden navigation and overloaded screens can make learning harder rather than easier. In trying to capture attention, we sometimes make it more difficult to achieve the learning itself.

The real distinction isn’t between engaging or unengaging content at all; perhaps it’s between appropriate and inappropriate design. A laboratory practical, an ethics seminar, a mathematics revision guide and an induction module shouldn’t all look the same because they don’t ask learners to do the same thing. The design should reflect the purpose, not a fashionable idea of what digital learning ought to be.

The longer I work in education, the more I find myself admiring simplicity. Not because it’s easier to produce (it isn’t), but because it takes confidence to resist adding features simply because they’re available. It takes experience to recognise when a single page of carefully written text will achieve more than a polished interactive package.

Instead of asking, “How can we make this more engaging?”, perhaps we should be asking, “What does the learner need to succeed?” Sometimes the answer will be immersive, collaborative and interactive, and other times it will be text and a chart/diagram. Both can still be excellent designs; the difference isn’t how exciting they are, it’s whether they help someone learn.

Photo by Adam Kring on Unsplash

Related