Opening champagne bottles is serious business. There’s the potential for eyes getting put out, and then the fun and games are over. After that the liability lawsuits start, and that’s no celebration. The champagne bottle legal department wants you to be safe.
So here’s another instructional design spotted in the wild. It’s sort of a fail though. What does it really mean? Don’t drink from the bottle? Don’t open it towards your face? No wine for you? It’s a mystery. It’s clear the makers of this champagne wanted to tell us something, but maybe the ID department didn’t find the right SME for the job. Maybe legal did it themselves. I mean, how hard can instructional design be, really? Legal ain’t got time for that so it’s more probable the SME failed to respond in a timely manner. Rare, I know, but it happens.
Turns out, that’s a screw cap, so the message may really be “don’t drink this stuff, it’s swill”.
As you’re going about your day, take a look around you at signs and pictograms you see. It’s a good lesson in taking complex ideas and delivering them in a simple, and understandable way. When you think about it, that’s what instructional designers do. But, sometimes, you don’t want to read 90 slides of bullet points, all you want to do is escape from the car trunk you’re trapped in. This course is delivered by plastic pull handle, and it wants to let you know that you shouldn’t just climb out of the trunk, you should spring out and start running. As an added bonus, it’s glow in the dark. It won’t help you if you’re unconscious for 30 minutes after being stuffed in the trunk, but somebody in the trunk escape handle department certainly did their job.
Thanks to Michael Hallberg at Hydrazine Alley for providing the photo. Go check it out, especially if you love space themed stuff.
It’s a few days after Christmas and my kids have opened all their toys and the wrapping paper has been thrown away. So of course, the kids want to get all their toys out of the box and play with them. My 5 year old daughter decides to make one of the little LEGO sets she got.
Other Set on the Left, LEGO on the Right
So here’s a picture of two of the sets, the one on the right is by LEGO, the one on the left is not. The LEGO set she put together herself, the one on the left she didn’t even attempt, but instead, asked me to do it. So what’s the difference? Instructions. LEGO instructions are exemplars of good instructional design, mainly because the adhere pretty closely to Mayer’s Multimedia Principles as much as print can. Consider these three principles:
Coherence Principle – People learn better when extraneous words, pictures and sounds are excluded rather than included.
Signaling Principle – People learn better when cues that highlight the organization of the essential material are added.
Segmenting Principle – People learn better from a multimedia lesson is presented in user-paced segments rather than as a continuous unit.
It’s common, I suppose, to think of instructional design as something that is computer based. But as someone who has a few decades of teaching experience, instructional design is more than e-delivery. E-learning has it’s roots in face to face design. In my opinion, all the technological “good practices” we use, are ways to compensate for some of e-learnings inherent weaknesses. Print has the added weakness of not being interactive, so it’s even more critical that you use good design practice.
LEGO Instructions Make it Easy.
Don’t just think of Mayer’s Multimedia Principles as something strictly for computer delivered learning. And if you teach face to face think about what works well in the classroom, and how it can be translated to e-learning. Remember, as an instructional designer your goal is to give the learner the skills or information they need in the most efficient way. And if you have to design step by step process training then take a look at some LEGO instructions.
Opening champagne bottles is serious business. There’s the potential for eyes getting put out, and then the fun and games are over. After that the liability lawsuits start, and that’s no celebration. The champagne bottle legal department wants you to be safe.
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