CREATING PASSIONATE LEARNERS

As co-creator of the award-winning Head First series of programming how-to books, Kathy Sierra has spent years examining what inspires "passionate users" -- research, she says, that has produced some "surprising, counterintuitive, and immediately usable results" for training professionals. Sierra will share those results in a keynote address at Training magazine's upcoming Training Directors' Forum conference, which is slated for June 11 to 14, 2006, in Palm Springs, Calif.

Here's a preview of what she has to say:

TDF E-NET: Can you tell our readers a bit about the Head First series? What's its purpose, and how is it different from other books that teach users how to master programming languages?

SIERRA: Learning a new programming language (or other tough technical topic) is something most people dread, even when they really want to learn. My co-author Bert Bates and I were fed up with our own struggle to learn new languages -- both as software developers and technical trainers.

We both had a background that included artificial intelligence, game design, entertainment (film and radio), and advertising, combined with an interest in cognitive science. We recognized that these other non-teaching domains had a whole lot to offer, and that perhaps we could synthesize an approach to learning hard topics in a way that readers/learners would find more effective and less painful.

Our real goal was based on a rather obvious assumption: "People won't learn unless they actually read the book." We all know how rare it is for someone to read all -- or even half -- of a technical textbook. So, that was our job, to answer the question, "How can we keep them turning the pages?"

We asked, "How can we motivate/seduce/entice them into being curious about what happens next?" And the answer came from advertisers, filmmakers, and game designers (with some help from cognitive scientists). We knew we could use learning theory to make sure they were learning the content, but the best learning in the world would be meaningless if we couldn't keep them turning the pages.

We were also especially interested in the phenomenon where both kids and adults will work like mad to learn something they're passionate about. They'll spend hours with a book on gardening (or airplanes), but can't stay awake for five minutes with a textbook. And people reading about their passion aren't just "reading" (or taking a class), they're learning. In other words, they're applying and retaining it.

So, we did the geeky thing. We "reverse-engineered" passion. We wanted to see what the common characteristics are across the things for which people have a passion, and how people behave when they're passionate about something. We wanted to know what you could do to take advantage of that kind of passionate drive to learn even when the topic is not something that learners are already passionate about. And at the very least, we wanted to reduce the amount of time and pain it took for people to learn a normally painful technical topic. We had a lot of detractors in the beginning. Two publishers turned us down before O'Reilly agreed to publish the first book in the series three years ago.

The first book (Head First Java) has been in the top 10 of all computer books each year since its release, and we usually have at least five in the top 30 best-seller list. Half of O'Reilly's top best sellers today are Head First books. Each book in the series almost immediately took over the top slot in whatever its category is, so we know that given a choice between a traditional book and a Head First book, the majority of people buying books in these categories are choosing a Head First book.

Nobody, including us, expected this. We all thought that the format would appeal to those with a particular learning style, but we did not imagine that this would reflect the majority of people. Unfortunately, the format is fairly difficult to produce ... it doesn't scale well, so the pace of new books in the series will always be really slow.

It's been a great research project, though -- almost a quarter-million of these books have been sold, and we've received thousands of reader e-mails. What we have learned from the feedback is that there is an 80/20 effect -- that is, about 20 percent of the things we use in the format account for most of its effectiveness. If we'd known that earlier, we could have created a format that was much easier to produce.

TDF E-NET: How does your ongoing research into what inspires "passionate users" tie into the series?

SIERRA: Nobody can truly have "passionate users" unless the users are learning and becoming better and better at whatever that thing that you offer is, whether it's a product, service, or cause. Nobody is passionate about something she isn't good at. We associate passion (as in, "He really has a passion for gardening ... ") with a person who is always trying to get better and meet the next challenge, whether through learning new knowledge, practicing a skill or both. In other words, where there is passion, there is always a user kicking butt. Being better at something gives you a better experience with doing it. So, part of our mission with "creating passionate users" is to help companies become better at helping their users LEARN.

We're helping these companies apply some of the principles we used in our books to whatever it is they're doing -- from product design and documentation to marketing. Small companies and start-ups, especially, love the idea that they can beat their well-funded competition by being better at training their users. When it comes to marketing, if you can't out-SPEND your competitors, you can out-TEACH.

Our advice to most of our clients who want passionate users is to stop thinking about marketing and start focusing on helping their users get better (and better leads to "more into it") more quickly.

TDF E-NET: What do most organizations typically get wrong when it comes to creating "passionate" learners? What SHOULD they be doing instead?

SIERRA: Sun Microsystems asked me that question: "If you could change just one thing about our courses that would make the biggest difference, what would it be?" My answer was, "Cut the course content in half, but keep the training time the same." Learners are "exposed" to a lot of "covered" content, but they don't get the chance to learn the key things at any deep level.

And that means learners never get to feel that they have nailed something. They never get to experience any of the pleasure that comes from solving the puzzles, meeting a challenge, and putting the pieces together in a creative or useful way. They never get anywhere near the "kicking butt" stage.

Passion requires a certain amount of that "I Rule!" feeling. Most learners we see coming out of a training course are either overwhelmed, or they're feeling good but in a temporary way. (If they had fun but didn't REALLY learn to do something useful, the good feeling wears off quickly.) The only "good feeling" we want learners to have is the feeling of real accomplishment, which comes from meeting a challenge.

For some topics that simply take a long time to come up the learning curve, it may not be reasonable to think that in a day or even a weeklong class the learners will "kick butt" by the end, but they should at least be able to "taste" it.

Learners should leave with a picture in their mind of how cool it would be if they "were" really good at whatever they're learning. The lessons learned about "passionate users" apply here. If organizations want "passionate learners," they need to focus on helping their learners achieve that "I Rule!" feeling, and that comes only from real accomplishment, not from exposure to material.

There are many, many ways to help make this happen, but it often looks very different from a traditional classroom experience (or book). Game design has a lot to teach us here, but one big misconception is that we need to create or USE games in order to make the learning as engaging as a game. We don't; we just need to apply some of the same underlying principles that make games so compelling.

TDF E-NET: What are five "surprising, counterintuitive" results from your research that training professionals can put to immediate use?

SIERRA:

1. When it comes to learning, the "brain" and the "mind" are usually at cross-purposes. The brain has no idea you're living in the 21st century. Your BRAIN wants to scan for tigers or potential mates, while your MIND wants to pay attention to the textbook so you can pass that crucial exam. The brain spends a great deal of biochemical energy making sure that you do NOT pay attention and retain these non-life-threatening things like programming languages and phone systems and server configurations.

We must trick the brain into thinking that learning Java, for example, is just as important as watching for tigers! Thus, we must realize that no matter how inherently interested learners are in a particular topic, if they are a flat line on the emotional Richter scale, the brain never gets the message -- which means that regardless of the topic, if we can't spark a feeling in learners -- just about ANY feeling can work -- their mind is in for a huge fight with their brain.

Perhaps one of the biggest mistakes we make as trainers is to assume that if the learner is inherently interested in the topic, we don't have to worry about keeping their interest and motivation.

But it doesn't matter HOW strongly they care about the topic if we can't get that message to their brain as well. So we look for ways to communicate with their brain as well as their mind, and sometimes those look very different.

2. Being "nice" to learners is not helping them. By warning them in advance of all the pitfalls, problems, and tough parts, we're just robbing them of a much more powerful learning experience: the one where they bump into these things like brick walls at 70 miles an hour. We actively seek out garden paths we can take the learner down, knowing that when the big explosion comes, the learner will never forget it.

We see too many trainers (course developers, tech writers, etc.) who think that this makes learners frustrated and angry. But if done correctly, it makes the learning not only more memorable, but a lot more engaging.

3. Learners don't need to be explicitly "entertained" in order to make the learning experience engaging. Learning doesn't need to be "funny" in order to be fun. Chess players find chess highly engaging and "fun," but there's nothing "funny" about it. In order to create fun that's based on being engaged and in flow, rather than by offering entertainment, we have to apply the principles of game design.

4. The most logical ordering of topics is often the "least" effective for creating compelling experiences. A more organic, often "messy" flow of topics can make it much more engaging, so we design learning around a kind of "hero's journey" model.

5. "Establishing credibility" at the beginning of a course often does more harm than good. In fact, the less a trainer describes his background and bio and experience up front, the better learners' experience can be. Starting a course off with the trainer's background sets the tone for the learning experience (no matter how friendly and approachable the trainer is), and the tone is wrong -- it makes it more about the trainer than the learners in a very subtle but important way.

We did a study at Sun, and the less the trainer introduced himself, the higher his post-class ratings were. In the extreme, we had trainers not introducing themselves at ALL -- just launching directly into learner introductions -- and giving their name only by writing their e-mail address on the board. There was no point at which we went too far in reducing the trainer's bio.

Related to this, we found that the less the trainers said to "establish credibility," the higher the learners rated them on credibility scores. The less they said about their real-world experience, the more likely it was that the learners rated them as having real-world experience.

TDF E-NET: What makes for a killer learning experience?

SIERRA: When learners are "getting it," and they KNOW that they're getting it, and they believe the thing they're getting was a challenge. When they're having a genuine "I Rule!" experience. This can't be faked by dumbing down the content or giving them the answers. The learners must be meeting a challenge that is continually just beyond their skill and knowledge level, but which they believe they have the tools (their own ability combined with the course resources and tools) to keep acquiring new levels of skill and knowledge.

A killer learning experience is one that offers the most opportunity for the learner to spend time in flow, kicking butt. And when that happens, it doesn't much matter "what" the content is. Solving a puzzle is inherently pleasurable to the brain, and the best learning experiences tap into that natural reward system.