Every learning designer needs an editor
Every learning designer needs an editor
Taste is subjective, but that doesn’t mean it’s not valuable.
The Mind Tools Custom team recently completed a mini experiment.
During one of our regular stand-up meetings, we each spent 15 minutes quality-assuring the menu and first page of an e-learning module that Ross G had developed several years ago.
Having received many ‘notes’ from Ross in the past, I approached this task with a measure of glee.
The purpose of the exercise was to uncover how different members of the team approached QA, and to test our process for consistency.
What we found was that, with some minor variations, the team generally ask themselves the same questions when reviewing each other’s work. These questions include, but are not limited to:
🤔 Learning design — Is it clear why the learner is being asked to do something? (WIIFM?)
🖊️ Copywriting — Is the copy grammatically correct and free of typos?
🎨 Graphic design — Does every image serve a purpose?
📱 User experience — Does the module perform as expected across different devices?
🔍 Accessibility — Have you added alt text, ARIA labels, and captions/transcripts?
While it’s reassuring that the team take a similar approach to these issues, our review of Ross’s module also uncovered individual preferences and idiosyncrasies.
Given my background as an English teacher, I tend to focus more heavily on copywriting and narrative flow than some of my colleagues.
By the same token, Tracey’s experience as a graphic designer naturally makes her more mindful of how and why imagery is used in a course. (She also has a pet hate for the phrase ‘In this section…’.)
On the one hand, these discrepancies could be interpreted as flaws in our QA process.
If my comments on copy and Tracey’s notes on graphics reflect our subjective tastes, should this feedback be given less weight than the more technical issues outlined above?
I don’t think so.
🧑🎨 Learning design is both a science and an art.
While learning design is a science, it is also an art. And great art generally requires editing.
In movies, literature and journalism, the job of an editor is fundamentally to exercise their taste.
Sometimes this will involve prescribing a specific solution; other times it will merely involve bringing something to the artist’s attention. But the goal is always to get the work from where it stands to where it needs to go.
🐼 Find an editor who looks at your work the way Ross G looks at mine.
Since I’ve worked at Mind Tools, my go-to editor has been Ross G. He’s been doing this job for longer than I have and, while I hate to admit it, he’s quite good at it.
As I alluded to above, he’s also not shy about sharing his opinion. (Amongst the team, we refer to Ross as ‘the interfering panda’, for reasons I can’t remember.)
Whenever Ross reviews my work, he’ll typically call out things that are objectively ‘wrong’ and need to be fixed. But he’ll also offer subjective feedback, based on his instinctive reaction.
I act on the first type of feedback because I have no choice. I act on the second type because I respect Ross’s judgement.
If this week’s newsletter seems uncharacteristically kind to my fellow Dispatcher, just remember — Ross G edited this, too.
Interested in working with the Mind Tools Custom Team? Want to share your thoughts on this week’s Dispatch? Then get in touch by emailing custom@mindtools.com or reply to this newsletter from your inbox.
🎧 On the podcast
In learning and development, we typically want people to do something that they are currently not doing, or to stop doing something that they shouldn't be. One obvious approach is training, but there are in fact a broad spectrum of interventions that we can deploy.
Following up on our last Dispatch, this week’s episode of The Mind Tools L&D Podcast explores what behavioral science is, what interventions can help change people’s behavior, and how the COM-B model can help structure discovery conversations.
Thanks to Wil Procter, Strategy and Innovation Director at Nazaré, and Jessica Holt, Senior Behavioural Science Consultant at Inizio Engage XD, for taking part.
Check out the episode below. 👇
You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Spotify or the podcast page of our website. Want to share your thoughts? Get in touch @RossDickieMT, @RossGarnerMT or #MindToolsPodcast
📖 Deep dive
In no small part, this week’s newsletter was inspired by a recent episode of The Ezra Klein Show, featuring the renowned magazine editor Adam Moss.
As we’ve already addressed, editing is fundamentally about taste, which can make it a difficult skill to hire for.
When asked how he interviews potential editors, Moss responds:
‘I would ask them to try to form story ideas on the fly of whatever happened that day in either news or their own experience. And in part, that question was to see how alert and well-read they were, but also how fast their mind worked in formulating the raw data of experience into story, into narrative, into essay.
And then I listened to my own reaction. Was I excited by this person? Did I want to be in their company? It’s not really unlike you’re sitting in a dinner party and someone’s interesting to you, or they’re not.’
In learning design, it can be easy to downplay these kinds of emotional reactions, or to dismiss them as subjective and unscientific. But they can be just as valuable as more objective measures.
Whether you’re editing your own work or someone else’s, ask yourself — ‘How would I respond if I were the audience for this course, this article, or this workshop?’. If you aren’t excited by it, how can you expect your audience to be?
You can listen to the full episode below. 👇
👹 Missing links
Last week, The Atlantic announced a partnership with OpenAI, which will see excerpts of its content sourced and surfaced in tools like ChatGPT. It is the latest publisher to strike such a deal, and could help address the trust and credibility issues associated with generative AI. On the other hand, previous collaborations with tech giants haven’t worked out all that well for the publishing industry, and the New York Times is currently suing OpenAI for copyright infringement. However this collaboration works out, The Atlantic is, for now, staying true to its ideals by publishing a critique of its own deal.
🛳️ Crying myself to sleep on the biggest cruise ship ever
Another Atlantic article I read this week was Gary Shteyngart’s reflection on his time aboard the ‘Icon of the Seas’ — the world’s largest cruise ship. Joining the likes of David Foster Wallace in documenting the strangeness of cruising, Shteyngart spends seven days at sea trying and failing to understand the appeal of spending a vacation on a giant shopping mall.
🃏 Lessons from the Final Table
After leaving FiveThirtyEight, statistician and writer Nate Silver started a newsletter, Silver Bulletin. Now, he also has a podcast, Risky Business, which he co-hosts with writer and psychologist Maria Konnikova. The show is about making better decisions in everything from politics to poker, and it’s become part of my weekly podcast rotation.
👋 And finally…
For whatever reason, perhaps inspired by the breakneck pace of change in AI, I’ve had Weird Al’s ‘It’s All About The Pentiums’ stuck in my head all week.
So, while your computer’s crashin’ this week, just remember mine’s multitaskin’, doing all my work without me even askin’.
Listen here. 👇
👍 Thanks!
Thanks for reading The L&D Dispatch from Mind Tools! If you’d like to speak to us, work with us, or make a suggestion, you can email custom@mindtools.com.
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