Do you see how I see?

One of the first major e-learning projects I worked on (way back near the beginning of this century) was aimed at training oil sands personnel to run a plant that didn't exist.

The facility was under construction and every day several thousand trades people added new parts and pieces to the multi-acre project. As soon as everything was completed, the operations team had to be ready to start turning everything on.

Yep, the operators had to learn how to run the plant before they could put their hands on much of it.

Enter our team and the e-learning project, including proposed 3-D models of the facility so operators could see the finished system as part of their training. This was the best way, it was reasoned, to deal with training on a structure that didn't exist yet.

Beginning with introductory-level learning topics we started creating 3-D models for almost every learning experience we designed, from sky-high viewpoints for locating fire equipment locations to inside looks at the various reactions taking place as heavy oil was converted into product ready for the refinery.

About a third of the way into the project, we started crafting the process operations modules, the real meat of how the plant was going to run. I was reviewing design notes (one of the collaboration features of the dominKnow LCMS) submitted by the client team leader as part of an early module review. One particular note caught my eye; it said something like "These pipes don't look anything like this. Let's get rid of the 3-D."

I called the client to catch up on this. He said the 3-D model we had created in this case looked more like household plumbing than the piping found at an oil processing plant to him. If the images didn't look right, the learners – in this case, experienced operators – would be skeptical of the validity of the information overall. So, let's just get rid of the 3-D images.

Ummm, okay. But how are your learners going to understand how the oil product moves through the unit? Why don't we just use the P&ID diagrams?

What?

In the earliest stages of the project's design, a set of Piping and Instrumentation Diagrams had been created. These were line and symbol-based diagrams, like a logic diagram or a flow chart, that outlined the design specs for the project, such as how different pumps were to be connected in sequence, what the operating pressures and temperatures were expected to be, and which types of valves were needed along the way, for example. The P&ID diagrams had almost no direct relation to the physical layout of the facility or actual dimensions or distances or practically anything relating to the eventual physical appearance of the facility – but they were a visual language that made sense to the operations team. The P&ID diagrams were a very precise way of explaining how product moved from point a to point b.

I won't even begin to explain why we could have made it several months into the project without understanding this critical piece of the client's culture. But the upshot was that for process operations we were able to use simple line drawing approaches instead of 3-D models. And although the visual design was no where near as cool as the 3-D models in the other modules, the learning still happened because it used a visual language the learners were comfortable with and trusted.

The lesson? Not everyone "sees" the same way, especially when it comes to making sense of information in a visual medium like e-learning.

Needless to say, our needs analysis process was quickly adjusted to include identifying such issues when we start working with a client on a new e-learning project.

And our clients get to "see" better learning results.

Chris Van Wingerden is Vice President Learning Solutions at dominKnow Learning Systems.