An Unpopular Opinion on Learning Experience Design with Heidi Kirby

Once you're done listening to this episode, be sure to subscribe to the Science of Personality podcast powered by Hogan Assessments. Available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or at thescienceoffersonality.com. Hosted by Hogan's Chief Science Officer, Dr. Ryan Sherman, and Hogan PR Manager, Blake Lett. This podcast explores the impact of personality on life, leadership, and organizational success. Trust us, you'll love it.

Welcome to The Accidental Trainer, a podcast where you'll hear firsthand stories and tips on how to start and grow your training career. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Accidental Trainer Podcast. I'm your host, Alexandria Clapp, and today we have with us the lovely Heidi Kirby.

Heidi is a customer education manager, a PhD candidate in instructional design and technology, and the host of the Block, or Building, Learning, and Organizational Culture podcast for L&D professionals. Welcome, Heidi. Thanks for having me, Alexandria. Yeah, of course. Thank you for making time for us today. And before I forget, I wanted to give you a shout out and thank you for being a volunteer on our program advisory committee board for ATD. 23 conference. I'm so excited.

Yeah, I'm excited to meet you in person next week. It'll be really fun. I want to remind our listeners that it takes a very long time to review all of the submissions. And we have a whole team of volunteers that help the ATD team to do that. So we really appreciate you sharing your time and your subject matter expertise with the community for that conference.

Absolutely. It's such an honor. Cool. Okay. So I reached out to you because I saw you post about learning experience design once upon a time. You reminded me that that might've been several months ago. I've really gotten into a time warp this year, 2022. I'm usually good with time. I felt like I was fine with 2020, 2021 with the pandemic. I know it's really messed with everyone, but this year I'm like, I don't trust myself anymore. I'm like, was that last week or was that two years ago? Yeah.

Yeah, that post was four months ago. Okay, so I had it in my... I had like made a mental note. I'm like, I want to talk to Heidi about LXD, learning experience design, because it's an interesting topic. Okay. But before we get there, there's a couple of other things I wanted to talk about.

Well, first I want you to share your origin story. And then depending on how that goes, another thing I really want to talk about, and I don't want to forget is transferable skills that you have in customer education. L&D, but that might come up in your origin story. And I might've just been leading the witness and priming you to talk about that. I totally will now.

Okay. Okay. But those are things I want to make sure that we talked about and touched on and made very explicit for everyone. Okay. So yes, tell us how did you get here to be where you are today? What was accidental? What was purposeful?

Yeah. So the accidental piece was that I started like many in education. So I was actually a college professor, an adjunct college professor. So for any adjuncts out there listening. you're probably aware of what I like to call the adjunct shuffle where you're teaching at four or five different colleges and trying to smush together some kind of full-time schedule of courses.

And so while doing that, I had gone back to school and pursued a master's in curriculum and instruction with the goal of becoming a full-time professor. Unfortunately, there weren't a lot of full-time jobs where I live in Cleveland and I became pregnant. And so like all of these things happened at like the same time, all of these things kind of came together.

where I was like, I can't be teaching at 10 to noon and then have my afternoon free and be paying for daycare, right? Like it just didn't make sense with that adjunct schedule and not knowing how many classes you're going to get every semester.

how much money you're going to get. And so it was through my curriculum and instruction program that I learned that instructional design was its own field. And it was super appealing to me. And I was like, you know what, this could be somewhere I could end up to you know be able to send my son to daycare to be able to get out of the adjunct shuffle and so in in one of my more harebrained ideas that i've ever had um i started my

instructional design phd program when my son was six months old and so that was the purposeful piece of it um and then again another accidental piece was a couple semesters in i was like I think I can get a job in this field before I'm done. I originally thought I'd have to wait until the PhD program was over. And I was like, I'm already doing so much of this. There's just some different areas where I need to like.

learn the tools and you know learn some of like the business acumen and like performance consulting pieces so there was things that I was missing that I had to intentionally kind of like fill those skill gaps But it was really easy to listen to things like L&D podcasts while playing with my son in his nursery or, you know, reading while he's taking a nap.

After like upskilling and building what would probably not be a possible portfolio nowadays compared to all the other amazing people that are out there. I actually landed my first instructional design role at NASA of all places. So that was really great. And that just kind of started my whole kind of job hopping through instructional design. So I worked at NASA for a bit and then I worked for a health insurance company.

I worked for a tire distributor and a pre-seed startup. And then I pretty quickly decided that as much as I don't mind.

the design and development pieces i really liked like the big picture stuff and doing the needs analysis and managing the project and the strategy and just like working with people and growing people and so i decided pretty quickly on that i wanted to become a leader in the space and was able to kind of leverage my skills to get my first official management role, but actually in customer education rather than traditional L&D.

The biggest difference between customer education and L&D that I've noticed is actually it's a lot easier to sell what we're doing in customer education because there's usually like a dollar amount associated with it. We're serving an external customer rather than the internal team. So it's a lot easier to track and see progress and collect metrics and data because there's so many other people collecting data on customers as well.

The base concepts are very much the same, like figuring out the problem that you need to solve and figuring out how to create a curriculum around that. And my team has two instructional designers and a trainer. and so it's very much an lnd team it's just a little the focus is shifted right so that's where i'm at today i love it and thank you for talking about the your experience as a customer education manager. And wow, you started a PhD program with a six-month-old. You are very...

I I'm so glad I did it though, because he will be six in two days. And if I had waited, like he's already, he's in karate and soccer and it takes up five nights a week. And I knew that. Right. Like I knew if I waited until he was like school age, it wasn't going to happen. So I'm glad because I'm defending my dissertation this semester. Gosh, that is some very good planning. You must have some good executive functioning skills to metacognition skills there. Maybe.

Okay, so let us talk about learning experience design. And I'm so excited to talk about this with you because... You are doing a PhD in instructional design, and there's a lot of different definitions out there, which I always think is kind of fun comparing what different people are saying. It's showing up in different job descriptions.

I remember Melissa Millaway was talking about at Amazon, they have people who are instructional designers and learning experience designers. It was a couple of years ago, but still. The fact that organizations will differentiate what that is. So I have about a million questions and I should really just pass it over to you. Maybe we can start with trying to define it because I see it's... maybe it's interdisciplinary and i

I used to use this term like, oh, it's an instructional design trying to rebrand itself. And I've been corrected like, no, it's an evolution. So I'm just going to pass it over to you with this very loaded, very heavy question of...

What is learning experience design? Yes. So people may not like my answer to this, but I do think it is a re... brand slash evolution of instructional design and here's why um if you are familiar with the term instructional systems designer um that was the term that was more popular before instructional designer right so if we look back at the history of instructional design which goes all the way back to world war ii

um when we hit like the 60s and 70s where like bf skinner is doing his thing with behaviorism and like the dick and carrie model of instructional design is being created and a ton of other models are being created the 70s they're based on systems thinking right and so they're looking at the organization more holistically and like looking at all the pieces and parts before they decide like

you know, back then you still would have people that would come and say, Hey, we need a training on X. And they would look at, you know, the entire, you know, do the needs analysis, look for the root cause, look for the gap. And so. The emphasis on the system as a whole or like the organization as a whole is where this idea of like instructional systems designer came along. And so.

If you look back on some of like the older literature, they call them ISDs instead of IDs. And how do I know this? Because my role at NASA. and in government and military still quite a bit they call them still instructional systems designers because that's where the name got its origin and so they've continued that even though the rest of the world and I loved working for NASA, but government's a little bit slow. They're a little slower moving than tech startups, right? It's the nature of it.

So everyone else started using instructional designer while they're still using ISD, right? And then we have this evolution and... I think it's a little bit misplaced because I've met some really great instructional designers who do all of the things that LXD is claiming. But I think LXD is how we're trying to take the focus away.

even further from the system back to the learner, right? And so, but I think that good instructional designers do both, right? They look at the system and they look at the learner within the system. And so... I have yet to see anything in writing that defines LXD in a way that I can say, I've never met an instructional designer who did that. You're right. That's a difference.

Right. So I've seen arguments like that instructional designers don't do needs analysis. Right. That they only do design and development, but that LXDs do the whole thing. And maybe that's true for like. Amazon, right? Like maybe that's true for organizations who hire those roles differently. But in every single role that I've had as an instructional designer, I've done needs analysis. So, you know, all the different arguments that I've heard or that.

you know, learning experience design is a bunch of different fields coming together. And that's what differentiates it. Instructional design is a bunch of different fields coming together, right? So the waterfall, Addy. Right. It's based on the waterfall method from software development. Right. We borrow from marketing. When we talk about learner engagement, we borrow from neuroscience and psychology and education and all these different fields. So the idea of like.

cross-functional like cross-industry coming together is also like not a good enough argument for me so you know it's really And then the focus on like UX, right? UX, UI, user research, user experience design. In my PhD program on design, we learned about UX and UI and talked about, we read. the design of everyday things by dawn norman and and looked at those the design thinking aspects so yeah okay there there's a there's a lot to impact there and it's it's still confusing to to people i think

So I'm going to back up to my personal experience, which is psychology. My background is psychology and cognitive psych. I worked at an organization where we taught the science of learning and I was qualified because my background was in psychology. That's what I knew. I wasn't a teacher. I wasn't an instructional designer.

And our director had gone to business school. So I think he influenced us with some like rapid prototyping and user experience, like Six Sigma background, things that we had, but it was... It was certainly learning focused, but it's funny when I started to make this transition into corporate learning and it was because we were benchmarking and looking to scale our programs. So we went to ATD and we used ATD.

master trainer and like expert coach and creating leadership development programs. We kept going and getting the instructional design certificate. We would keep getting their certificates, ATDs. learning some of this terminology. And it's funny because I sort of had this thought, well, you could be a good designer, like whether you're going to call it instructional designer or learning experience designer. without having a PhD in instructional design. Absolutely.

But I want to talk about that, your PhD, and what that includes. You and I were talking about this before. I always think it's so interesting. You don't need a credential to be creating learning.

and development solutions get hired so many people are accidental instructional designers and where are they getting their education from where where are they starting to upskill and build that skill set and build that knowledge and could there be gaps and if they got a more and this is not to say oh you you I'm not trying to say people should get a formal education. I just wonder if a lot of formal instructional design educations do incorporate.

some of the learning science. And you mentioned learning science. So it's funny, like that is an interdisciplinary. Yes. That is mixed with cognitive psychology and graphic design and cognitive science. Cognitive science is its own interdisciplinary. field that includes like AI and there's all these different things. So is LXD that? Is it okay? Like I remember thinking at one point, I asked Connie Malamed, I'm like, okay.

If we have a Venn diagram and there's learning science and structural design and learning experience design, what does that look like? Is that how I should think of it? Where do they overlap? Where do they not? And I really appreciated her walking through and she helped, she wrote a blog for ATD and was like, learning science is the foundation and this is an evolution. And then talking about some of the technology and like accessibility. And it's funny because.

To me, accessibility, I think about, okay, neurodiverse learners, when you're learning about the science of learning and how people's different learning profiles, learning. you know, if you have like a weaker working memory or attention deficit, how that's going to impact your overall learning experience is just, you can come through it with a different background.

that's maybe not necessarily called one thing or another. So do you think it's confusing for people? Yeah. And I think that there is like a lack of really like authoritative definitions. in the field too. So, you know, ATD and a couple of other organizations define things, but it's not like, but people still are like, yeah, but that's just their definition. Here's mine. Right. Like they don't, you know.

they're like oh no i'm defining it this way right and it it almost becomes like um like leadership right like there's enough definitions of there's a definition for everyone there's enough to go around and i think that that's kind of the same thing. But I think you're right. I think there is an evolution to move away from instruction as we kind of think of it in terms of formal traditional education.

And like having an instructor talking at people and getting like the learners more involved. But again, the good instructional designers I know were already doing that, right? They didn't need the title. to do that. Right. And in fact, my advisor in my PhD program has done a ton of research and a ton of work on what he calls empathic design in instructional design, where just like you're saying you.

examine the learner you see do they have accessibility needs what are they like what are their what are their hopes and dreams even right and it's about you know kind of creating those learner personas right and personas are very much from ux ui and the design thinking realm so but his work is specifically empathic design for instructional designers so again it just it's one of those things where it like it depends on who you talk to um

I've also heard that learning experience design centers more on design thinking, right? And again, it just depends on where you've learned about instructional design, right? Because... I think there's also a lot of surface knowledge floating around out there, like on LinkedIn and whatnot, where there's a ton of emphasis on the development and the tools.

go learn this tool and make a portfolio and you're a poof designer. And without all of that other good stuff, the cognitive psychology, the learning science, the design thinking, system thinking. it's just not as, it's not as effective, I think. And so, yeah, I think that When you don't have the formal education, you might miss those things, but you also might pick them up on the job too, depending on who you work with. I keep thinking of this theme as I'm talking to people on this.

podcast about intentionality and making things explicit versus implicit maybe this is just a good like life theme too you know you think about like communication and the things that you think are clear to someone but They're just clear inside your head and you actually haven't explicitly said them. Just maybe sort of think of that for creating learning experiences where there are things that may be.

obvious or it's implicitly implied yeah but maybe that sort of the process of learning experience design is ensuring that it's more intentional, it's more explicit that you're doing this task-centered and performance-centered approach to your design and that you're... bringing in the human person aspect as a focus, as you said, instead of the instructor focus. Yeah.

Yeah, I would love that if that was like the widely used, like widely accepted definition of it, because I think it would be helpful to provide more like, you know, intentionality, like you said, right, because we all talk about. the accidental instructional designer but i think there's something and that's how most people come to instructional design or learning and development in general right like you were the most sociable trainer or you were you know

you came from education or psychology or wherever, like we come from all over the business. Right. And I think that once you. turn from accidental to intentional, something really powerful happens. And so if LXD is going to be saying like, here's the intentional things that you should be doing.

as a learning experience designer, as an instructional designer, like that would be a really good definition, but I'm not seeing it defined that way in practice, right? Oh, it made me also think of another thing. So thinking of your PhD, there's also technology in the title. Yes. Technology component. And that's a big component of...

And again, I'm seeing all these themes. I hope our listeners are seeing these themes where virtual, forcing everyone to be virtual. Like we were, I was just talking about this with Matt where you can't get away. And I hate to say it that way, but maybe folks were getting away with something in person. It's just easier to facilitate or to design or to navigate that suddenly you have extra things that you need to take into account when you're in an...

virtual setting, when you put someone into something into an LMS course, there's just a whole new set of experiences that you have to account for. Yes. My mom. is I won't give her actual age, but she's near retirement and she's a high school teacher. And so when COVID happened, she had to take everything she's been doing in the classroom for the last 20 years.

And now put it into a virtual setting and she did not have the chops for it. And like, I was offering to help. Like, I'm like, mom, I know how to do this. I do this for my job, you know, but it, there, it.

different deliverables require different skill sets, right? Creating an infographic is totally different than creating a short form video. It's a completely different skill set. And somehow... um ids or lxcs whichever one you want to choose are responsible for doing all of it right yeah so okay so we know that it's um it's sort of there's sort of a messy definition to it

What do you have as recommendations for folks out of this conversation? What would be a good takeaway after listening to us try to think out loud of defining or differentiating? these two I think that one thing that's incredibly important is to consider the source Right. So there are a lot of very smart people talking about what LXD and ID are. And then there are a lot of people who.

are smart but have ulterior motives. Like maybe they're trying to sell a program or sell an idea or sell, you know, a service, right? Like even the people who are like selling. And services, like learning services are like, oh, well, we have all the LXDs and you don't want anybody but them because they're going to give you the best experience, right? So I think it's important really to consider that source.

And to see if there's value behind it. When I posted my original post saying that I didn't see any inherent difference in ID versus LXD. um someone had commented that like of course i didn't understand because i'm an id and if i was an lxd i would understand but then didn't give me any information about

the differences from their point of view, but they're, you know, they're like a self-proclaimed thought leader in the LXD space. Right. And so I take all that with a grain of salt. Right. But there are. really super talented scholars and researchers in ID and LXD talking about what the differences should be or what the differences are or how the field is evolving. And I think what's more important is that the field is always evolving.

right we're not doing things with um you know we're not doing things like we did in world war ii where we are training the military right things have changed we have so much more technology. We have so many, we know so much more about neuroscience and how people learn than we did even 10 years ago, right? So even if you've been an instructional designer for 30 years, or you've been an ISD and then an ID and then an LXD for 30 over the course of 30 years, like there's still.

so much more to learn and you always have to upskill because we're always adding other disciplines and other disciplines knowledge to what we're doing. So, and I think that that's really important because we're responsible for. learning in our organizations, right? And if we're not continuously learning, how can we expect the people that we serve to be continuously learning, right? It's making me think of if folks are looking...

if they want this evolution for themselves in their careers, if they're evaluating and saying, I'm doing more of the instructor focused. delivery right now or design. And I want to move towards whatever the name of the role is. What are your recommendations for getting there or for being able to... advocate it can they could let's say you're an instructional designer and your organization and you want to it's almost it would be helpful for you to rebrand and suddenly go to

a sponsor stakeholder and say, I want this new role. And this is how the focus is going to be different. Can you start? What do you think about that? Sometimes it's as easy as asking, right? And maybe it's not even that because, because I did this at NASA when I had the title instructional systems designer, I told my supervisor, I said, Hey, is it okay if I just put instructional designer on my resume?

and she was like why and I'm like because nobody calls us instructional systems designers anymore and if I want to find another job one day like can I just put that and she was like yeah I don't see the big deal right So I think sometimes it's as easy as asking, but sometimes it's, it requires, depending on like who your, your leadership is too, right. And their background, it requires some teaching of, okay, well.

You know, for instance, in my current role, before I came on board, the people who are creating our materials were called curriculum developers. And when I came on board and we had some personnel switches, I was like, okay, we're hiring technical instructional designers because they're doing more than developing your curriculum, right? So sometimes it's just reworking those responsibilities.

you know, providing different tools, changing the method of delivery, you know, and as those things evolve, you can make the case for changing titles too. But it's really more... Like if someone would rather be called an LXD than an ID, like I'm not going to suffer them, you know, for that. Like, I'm not going to say, oh, well, there's no difference. You should just call yourself whatever. Like if the title is important to you, then.

that's important to you, right? Like, especially as somebody who's going through my PhD program, who used to think, oh, people are so like elitist when they want to call themselves doctor after it. But after five years of this grueling life. You may refer to me now as Dr. Heidi. Absolutely. People can absolutely call me doctor after this, right? And so I think that.

you know if it if it's for you and your growth and your development like yeah find the title that's most comfortable for you cool as long as it incorporates some of the the good elements that we were talking about it's called totally okay i like that recommendation so let's talk a little bit about what your learning goals are how i mean

assuming this is going to be connected to your PhD, but maybe there's other things. Maybe you seem to be ambitious. So maybe you have a whole bunch of other things going on. yeah my so my current big learning goal is to um defend my dissertation this semester but that's not really like everything's done right like the whole thing what is your dissertation did you tell us no i didn't um so i interviewed 25 instructional designers or

A similar title. So I interviewed both instructional designers and LXDs and everything in between. I think I had a couple ISDs in there too. About the competencies that they need to lead design projects. So I'm specifically looking at leadership skills that instructional designers need to complete projects successfully. So yeah, that's been really fun.

i'm always looking at i've done enough research on leadership that i'm always looking to grow as a leader um and so i'm doing like a little it's like a pilot For Campfire, my friend Megan Galloway is the head of community at Campfire. And so I'm doing a pilot peer coaching thing in return for feedback. So I'm always looking for little opportunities like that.

to grow leadership skills, but then also between hosting the block, my podcast that I host, and starting the Useful Stuff newsletter with my L&D bestie, Matt Smith. And just like learning things, writing things, talking to people. My second learning goal is always just to like keep up with the trends, like keep up with what's going on. That's a big, big goal in and of itself, right?

Totally. Yeah. There's always something new. It's hard to keep up. Okay. And where... Can folks follow along with your activity or get in touch with you? I know I mentioned briefly, you have a podcast. So remind folks of all of your different. activities and things you have going on your newsletter yeah so the easiest way to reach me is through linkedin um you can go ahead and send me a connection request and you can also access

the podcast and the newsletter from my LinkedIn. So that's probably way number one, but the block B L O C podcast is on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, Spotify, wherever you consume your podcast, you should be able to find it. And then if you go to useful stuff dot email, you can sign up to receive the useful stuff newsletter. Useful stuff. Great name. It took forever to come up with. It was a days long process. Yep. I love it. And it's so simple and fun. So worth it. Cool. Totally.

Well, thank you so much, Heidi, for making time to chat on a fun little topic. kept going forever but hopefully we scratched the surface and answered a few questions that i know have probably come up a lot for folks on learning experience design so thank you again thanks for having me Thank you to our sponsor, the Science of Personality podcast, powered by Hogan Assessments.

Thanks for listening to this podcast from the Association for Talent Development. Be sure to check the show notes for resources mentioned in today's episode. And if you found the show useful or insightful, please be sure to like, subscribe and share it with a colleague.