Pragmatic Learning: It's not "fun"

By Roger Schank

In the mid-nineties Microsoft invited me to see what

they were doing in education. I looked at what they had
built and laughed. They had animated some chemical
equations. They thought that would make chemistry
more interesting to kids. (They never asked why it
mattered that kids balance chemical equations but
knew that if they were animated the experience would
be much better somehow.)

I was reminded of this the other day when a

pharmaceutical company asked us to do work for them
and insisted that whatever we built had to include
animation. I asked if they wanted to show a whale
eating a planet or something that one could only show
through animation, but they said no, they need their
training to be fun. Of course, this animation thing is
just part of a larger problem. Most training is boring.

In general, training is not fun. Actually, it is quite

unusual when any formal learning is fun. When I think
about learning and adjectives to describe good
education, I think of profound, exciting, insightful,
thought-provoking, but not fun. Are games fun? This
is an important question for people in training because
not only animation but now gamification is a new
trend. But are games fun? Winning is fun. Interacting
with others with whom you are playing can be fun.
Games can be entertaining and sometime they are fun,
but when we think about making training more
effective, we need to think less about having fun and
more about what it means to learn. These are odd
ideas I know, but actually very important ones, so let
me explain:

I play softball. Learning to hit involves many years of

trial and error. I have been playing softball for more
than 60 years. I am not an expert at hitting. I am not
bad, but there are always people better then me. When
I happen to hit a ball so well that it gets by everyone
and I can get a triple or a home run, I am very excited. I
am pleased with myself. People cheer for me. Is it fun?
No.

It was the result of hard work, and I am psychologically

invested in doing it. But as any softball player will
admit, the fun part is a come from behind win in the
last inning or laughing about the game with friends over
beers later on. Hanging out with friends and laughing
is fun. I don't learn much in those circumstances
however. When I learn, it is because I have a goal and
have worked hard towards achieving it. It is satisfying
to succeed. Of course, I enjoy whatever victory might
come, but fun? NO. It is the wrong word and the wrong
idea. We are confused about what learning is really
about. So we create silly words, like nano- learning, or
make absurd references to neuroscience and lose the
forest for the trees.
When parents raise children before they go to school at
5 or 6, what do they teach them? Nothing that looks
like something in a course or a classroom.

Parents dont put kids in classes or courses when they

are little (unless, of course, they need some day care.)
They do not sit them down for lessons. Nevertheless,
in early childhood, children learn to speak their
language, navigate their house and their neighborhood,
get along with other children, operate within the family
rules and structure, and they learn whatever might be
of interest to them from how to play with dolls or trucks
to how build a city with blocks. No lessons. No
courses.

Teaching? Mostly it occurs when they need help. My

daughter said to me after coming upstairs to ask me a
question one day when she was 5, I will be back when
I need you again. (She has been coming back ever
since.)

My purpose in writing all this to make a clear a

controversial point. We need to stop thinking that
delivery of learning is about creating courses.

Really? Always? No more courses ever? How will we

train people?

I dont mean that we should never build courses, let me

make that clear. So, let me start with which kind of
courses should be saved and which should go. I
started helping Andersen Consulting (now Accenture)
with learning and training in 1989. They knew what
they had wasnt very good. They made trainees read
green books (referred to by one and all as FGBs.)
They made people attend courses who were clearly
sleeping through them. They knew they needed help.
They told me that they would choose to offer a course
on something in say March and that the attendees
would include people who had been working on that
thing for six months already and some who wouldnt be
working on that thing for six more months. But they
could only hold the course once a year. They figured
that building an online course might improve the
situation, but this kind of issue was endemic at
Andersen and speaks to the first real problem in
making people take courses.

The people who take the course may not need what
they are being taught at exactly the moment the
course is offered.

In college this is nearly always the case. We are so

used to it that we expect when we take a course that
we may not use what we have learned for years or
ever. We make kids take algebra because they will
need it later" when hardly anyone ever does. Corporate
training people ought to be smarter than that, but oddly
they are not. (They all went to school so they think
training should be like what they know.)

Why does this matter? Lets think about children again.

We wouldnt offer a course about the past tense in
English to our child who just said taked instead of
took. We would simply correct them. Courses are
often offered because companies cant teach at the
exact moment of need. Well, I am here to say that they
can. One issue in improving training is to convert
courses offered every now and then into experiences
that include just in time help. This is very important
because people forget what you teach them when they
cant immediately put it into use. A child will say took
as soon as they are corrected. An employee will not
remember what they were taught if they cant use that
information immediately.

This leads us to a simple idea:

Eliminate the majority of courses and replace them

with experiences that contain just in time help
when that is possible.

Now lets think about other kinds of courses.

There are a many courses that attempt to teach the

impossible. Leadership courses are a good example
of this phenomenon. How exactly would you learn to
lead from a course? Should we talk about the ten
principles of leadership? Should we read books on
leadership and discuss? All the talk in the world does
not make someone into a leader. But companies do
have this problem. They want to train leaders. What
should they do? If they stop thinking that they want a
course, it would help.
How do children learn to be leaders? All through
childhood there are kids who tell people what to do and
there are kids who listen to them. How does this
happen? It happens very simply, actually. It happens
naturally. Some kids want to lead and some kids want
to follow. Some kids want to lead but no one listens to
them. Others lead and are followed. So, I am skeptical
about leadership courses. On the other hand,
managing a project is complicated and it would be a lot
better to manage a few fictional projects in fictional
situations than it would be to learn project management
on the job and possibly screw up something important.
Leaders do learn to lead better over time. Project
managers learn to manage projects better over time.
The difference is between what I will call natural skills
and artificial skills.

Speaking is a natural skill. Some people are good at it

and others arent. Anyone can get better at it over time,
but I wouldnt be a big fan of a how to speak course.
Having someone who criticizes speeches you give is a
different story however. When I was just starting out,
someone I respected said to me, right after he heard a
speech I gave: if you try to say everything you know in
a hour, Roger, you dont know much. I didnt need to
take a course in speaking. I needed to be critiqued just
in time. As you can see, I still remember that lesson. It
wouldnt have meant much if I read it, or heard it in a
lecture, or in course, but because his advice was about
me and what I had just done, it stuck with me. This is
how we learn not through courses but through
experiences. And, that experience is much better
understood when we have someone giving us some
good advice about what we just did.

So, another problem in building courses is this:

Dont build courses that attempt to teach

something that no one has ever learned from a
course in real life.

Then what should we do? To foster leaders, an

organization needs to look and see who is leading.
Then the job of the training organization is to help
people who are natural leaders lead better. But
sometimes we need our employees to do something
that might not be entirely natural to them. What do we
do then? We must build a situation that they can try out
and help them get better at it. You can call this a
course if you like, but it really is something quite
different from what passes as a course in school or in
training.

There are courses that are worth building. These

always have the same property. Everyone is on the
same page at the same time. If an airplane
manufacturer needs to teach people how to operate or
repair a new piece of machinery, a course is just what
they need. It should be a learn-by-doing course with
lots of practice and just in time help. No one will learn
to do this without a course, and individual instruction is
not important to focus on when many students are in
exactly the same situation and all can be handled
simultaneously. Notice this means they can all practice
immediately. This is what learning by doing is all about.

But, and this is an important point, this does not justify

building algebra courses, or chemistry courses, or
history courses. No student needs to learn algebra at a
particular time. There could be a need to learn certain
aspects of mathematics within the context of doing
something that requires it. A short course in, say, an
aspect of statistics to help someone understand how to
interpret data who is actually needing to interpret data
is the right kind of mathematics course. We have
gotten caught up in the school model of courses where
everyone has to take a course whether they are
interested in learning the material being taught or not
and the material must completely cover the subject
area. The fact that this goes on in corporations is
nothing short of insane. Schools provide courses
because the structure of the school has only so many
teachers, students who need to be kept busy all day,
and government regulators who like to make rules and
tests. Corporations do not have this problem,
especially when the material can be offered online.

Courses need not be administered to multitudes. One

can have a course that is for one person only and can
be used when needed. Such a course must be online
since we cant expect teachers to show up just when
you need them. The reason to build an online course is
not so you can have 10,000 attendees. There are two
very important reasons to build online courses
however. The first is that is possible to do things in
simulation that are not possible in a classroom. Air
flight simulators are a very good way to learn to fly, for
example. We need simulators for everything. These
need to be on computers so people can practice all
kinds of skills when they want to (or when their
company needs them to). The second reason is that
teachers are very important for learning, not ones who
lecture you, but ones who notice what you just did and
can give helpful hints or answer questions. In an online
world these teachers can be readily available, If you
want to design an airplane, the beat teachers may be
in Seattle. It just shouldn't matter where you are. Online
courses that contain simulations and give one the
opportunity to try things out, learn from ones mistakes,
and practice, are the future of education in school and
at work.

We can also build simulations using no computer at all.

We can create simulated experiences amongst a group
of people led by experts who create realistic situations
and help trainees profit from those situations. The
computer might very well be irrelevant. The real issue
is having real experiences, and conversations about
those experiences directed by an expert.

Just doing a course all by yourself may not be the best

idea. We do need help when we are learning and we
do need people with whom we can discuss new ideas
or problems. So, we can, and should, build courses for
people who will take them when they want to, but we
must provide, and this is not hard to do in an online
world, connections to other people who are taking the
same course, so that ideas and lessons learned can be
discussed. We dont really learn without practice and
part of practice is conversation. Practice includes
talking about what we are thinking.

The real issue having an appropriate vision of the

online world in which education and training will
eventually completely reside. Classrooms will
disappear. You Tube, and TED talks, which look like
the kind of replacement I am talking about, are still full
of talking heads. MOOCs are still classes and lectures
but without the physical room.

So we need courses it seems, but really do we? What

could we have instead? Lets return to thinking about
small children. What children have, if they are lucky, is
a parent who is always around. Some kids are sent off
to day care as fast as a place can be found for them.
Then, they are in classroom- like situations all their
childhood and are always treated as part of a mass. My
main problem with courses is, of course, exactly that:
Massification. This has become one of the in buzz
words in the training world, sending exactly the wrong
message. Little kids who do have a parent around also
have toys, games, and trips to the park, or zoo, or
store, or parties. In other words, their parents provide
them with experiences, and it is within those
experiences that they have questions and can initiate
conversations and get help.
What this tells us is that real autonomous, motivated,
learning happens when you are in the middle of doing
something, and questions arise in your mind about it.
This is exactly what we need to build into corporate
training (and into school if they could possibly change
their models.)

I learned what I have just said from an experience (of

course). In this case, we were building sales training
for one of the phone companies. They were selling
Yellow Page ads. We built a learn by doing course,
going through many different experiences and issues.
But the sales trainees were smarter than we were.
When they were about to sell an ad to a doctor, they
found the selling a yellow page ad to a doctor part of
the course we had built and took it before they called
on the doctor. When they were selling to florists (who
behave very differently than doctors,) they took the
florist part of the course. My team learned that we
could build training in pieces, meant to be delivered
just in time.

We learned this again when we built a coaching course

for IBM. People werent going through the entire
course. They would use it when they anticipated a
difficult coaching session and would find a similar
scenario in the course to go through prior to their actual
coaching session. You might well forget what you
learned just in time, but that would be fine because you
could always practice it again. One would assume that
after a while one wouldnt need to keep re-learning, but
what would be the harm in brushing up on the way to
making a sales call or coaching session?

Would that be fun? Suddenly fun is important in the

training world as is bite-sized nano learning",
gamification, badges and many ways of all saying
the same thing: Most people think that doing training is
boring. And of course, they are right. But the opposite
of boring is not fun or a game or nano.

To understand this we must think more about fun and

think more about learning. I used to ask my
undergraduate students, (just for fun) to tell me what
they had learned that day. I never heard anyone (not
even once) respond with something they had learned
in a classroom. They had learned something about
their friends, or about life, or about themselves. Course
work was never mentioned. The stuff they told me was
never fun stuff. It might be that they had learned what
their girlfriend needed from them, or that they shouldnt
order the hamburger in the cafeteria ever again. On a
daily basis we learn a lot about the world we live in. It is
rarely fun to learn it, but is often important to learn it.

What does this tell us about training? If you have to put

something in a game format in order to make someone
learn it, you are teaching the wrong stuff in the wrong
way. If people wont take your course because it
doesnt have fun animated characters, it is because the
material is boring, and more importantly, because the
trainee has deemed it to be irrelevant to his or her
success.
On the other hand, it is inherently interesting to learn
something that you think you can put to immediate use.
We need to understand that interesting and useful"
are not the same as fun and badges. We need to
make sure the training itself is interesting and useful,
and not worry about the trappings we surround the
training with.

So how do we do that?

Lets think about small children again. What do they

need in order to learn?

1. something they are trying to do

2. someone to ask when they need help

It is really just that simple.

In order to make learning in childhood work, we create

or enable situations that are interesting or appeal to
some intrinsic goal (like eating). And then we make
sure help is available. We also enable discussion and
approval: (Look at what I just did. Did I do it right?)

With this simple idea, I have told you all you need to
know about training. Because if we can build on-
demand online training, we can change the world of
training significantly. This is what we have to do:

1. We need to anticipate the needs of trainees

 2. We need to provide a way for them to satisfy those
needs
3. We need to provide people for them to discuss
things with

This means that we should have:

1 experiences to try out virtually, available on demand

2. online mentors, available on demand
3. co-workers with whom to discuss experiences

Can we do this? Of course. We need to stop building

courses and provide an over the shoulder autonomous
entity that knows what you are working on and can
offer help. That help would range from just-in-time
advice, to just-in-time practice in a new environment, to
more prolonged course-like material when there is
something complex to learn how to do. This is what
important AI would look like. We should not have
courses that provide information. We should have
courses that provide experiences. And we need to
provide mentors and peers with whom to have
conversations. Those mentors should be people until
we can build good AI mentors.