Hey Megan, let's do a podcast.

Great idea. What should we talk about?

We're talking about LSX or Learning Science and Experience. It's our way of blending the rigor of learning engineering with its systems thinking, data informed design and program performance driven outcomes with the care and craft of exceptional learner experiences. So, Megan, why on earth do we need another model for the learning process?

Well, I'm not sure that we do. In a way. This actually isn't another model. Right. At Torrance Learning, we work really hard to create learning experiences that genuinely make a difference. Right? That's our goal. So they're built on learning science, they're thoughtfully designed, they're focused on very practical and meaningful results and really job connected. Right.

We partner very closely with our clients to try to understand what their business needs are, what their team dynamics are, what their challenges are, and then we deliver learning solutions that meet those needs in ways that honor individual learner strengths, that make sure everybody can participate, and that really respect the uniqueness of every learner. And this is what we've always strived for, always worked for in our whole history, every. And I like to think of it as something we are constantly doing. Right. It's not a destination, it's a journey, it's a process, it's a goal, a vision. Right. In the last year, we've really given this very human centered, constant striving a name, right. And we call it Learning Science and Experience or lsx.

And it's how we help organizations and their people flourish.

Yeah, I remember when we were forming this in our minds and thinking about it as what do we do, how do we do it? What is our approach here and what's the framework? Can we create a framework around it? I remember one of the things that you were wanting to bring forward was learning engineering as an approach as well. And this has pieces and parts from that. But learning engineering is also. It's heavy, like it's. There's a whole textbook about it, which. It's hard to bring a textbook to a conversation with a client. We need something a little bit more lightweight.

It's a great textbook.

It is a great textbook. There's so many great textbooks, so many good things in that, that learning engineering toolkit that, that was created by Jim Goodell. Jim Goodell, et al. And yeah, so yeah, I think, right,

there's the learning engineering toolkit. There's all sorts of learning design and learning science textbooks and cognitive science and lots of different frameworks and ways to think about learning and it wasn't that we wanted to create a new one, but we didn't want to. Well, what we really wanted was to have a coherent way of explaining it to people. That didn't feel heavy, it felt usable. I think that was the biggest thing, all this stuff, but we can geek out of it. And it was something, though, that our clients struggled with. So here's the thing I took. When we first came up with our 10 design commitments, I made a little graphic for them for my Zoom waiting room, and I put it up there.

And to be honest, I did it in a hurry and I kind of forgot about it. And it was there, but I don't see my own Zoom waiting room, so I totally forgot that I had done it. And I had a client meeting, and the client came a few minutes early. So they were just hanging out in my Zoom waiting room looking at the 10 design commitments. And I, as soon as the call started, he said, this is everything I have always thought learning should be. I'm like, oh, we kind of nailed it. That felt good. Now, 10 is a lot, right? 10 is a lot.

Cognitive overload and all this. Right? So not all these things are equally important all the time, but it does give us a way to talk about what is important for any given learning experience with any given project.

All right, so let's talk about what's involved in the framework. Let's talk about those. Those 10 design commitments. And we can preface it also with the fact that, like most of these, they're not rocket science. Any learning professionals are going to be like, well, yeah, duh, but. But that's. I mean, they're. They're not rocket science to us.

But for many of our clients, like that, it's helpful to, like, just have them stated almost like ground rules.

Almost like ground rules, right? Because, yes, they're going to look very familiar if you're familiar with the durable learning principles, if you're familiar with performance cults, these. These are not going to be surprising. So let's. Let's go in, let's jump in. And. And we chunked them up because we're learning designers chunk them up into. Into four buckets, right? So the first bucket really is around designing for business and behavior. Workplace learning, right, has a purpose, and it works best when it's aligned with what people actually have to do on the job and what the business needs to achieve.

So we have three design commitments here. Learning is a catalyst for competitive advantage. Shout out to Will Telheimer and some of his thinking there. Learning is a Journey, not an event. And the experience matters. Actually, I did a whole webinar with Hoda and Shima Salati, who are UX designers, and really helped dig into this one a little bit more.

Yeah, you're right. It's not rocket science. But I can definitely see why we're calling all of these out as being helpful. And I especially like the second one. Learning is a journey, not an event. Reminds me of like, you know, if we, if we think about learning as being more than a course and elearning, you know, it's like it's all the things that are helpful to get people to a destination rather than a single single product. So what's next? Next is designing for human connection. Let's talk about that.

Yeah, I think where we're going with these two are, is that people learn best when that feels shared and meaningful and relevant. And especially in this world where people are often very separate from each other, both physically, geography wise. I guess that means geographically would be the word I really wanted there or just in their work. Sometimes our work can be very isolating. So this connection opportunity is really strong. So the first one is story, emotion and connection. Enhanced learning and social connection Deepens learning and, you know, the work of Mark Britz comes to mind right around that social engagement and connection. And those are things that we can bring into our learning design.

I love this. Yeah, I love the human piece and always thinking about and including that, you know, a learning experience is definitely a chance to build that human connection. Especially when you think about ilt vilt coaching, mentoring. It's a little harder in elearning mode, but that's where, you know, story and emotion can still come into play in there as well. Okay, so next chunk. Also about people. Real, real people.

Real people. Yeah. I think there's the groups of people, but then we start thinking about individual people. So when we're looking at designing for real people, effective learning really honors the complexity of real lives and real learners and their own experience. Accessibility. It's about access. It's not about just compliance. Right.

It's how do we make sure that what we're building is available. And it's both disability accessibility, but also just variability accessibility. And how do we reach out and connect a wide variety of learners. We then have different perspectives, make learning stronger. One of my favorite activities is to, at the end of a lesson, have a learner go find someone who may disagree with them or find altering perspectives on what they just learned and really wrestle a little bit more deeply with that topic. And that wrestling will both bring some richness and nuance to what they have learned, but also help cement what they've learned. So I'm excited about that one. And then the third one in the design for real people is every learner deserves the opportunity to grow and succeed.

And it's really our effort to reach out to learner populations that may be more marginalized, that may have greater barriers to access, and to make sure that we give them the opportunity to grow and succeed along with their peers.

I love this. We're looking at, like, the connections between people, but also thinking about the individuals themselves and what their needs are, but also what they can bring to the experience to make it stronger. What I love about LXX is it doesn't end when the learning ends. There's more designing for what happens next.

That's a big piece and it kind of connects to the journey, but it takes that learning journey and it extends it into the workflow. Right. So we have two. Two chunks here to two design commitments here, because learning isn't complete until behavior actually changes and that change sticks and we know whether or not it sticks. So the first design commitment in this section is measuring the impact strengthens learning. And the second one is lasting behavior change requires a sustainment ecosystem. And by that I'm thinking about performance support. I'm talking about peer support.

I'm talking about preventing skill decay. There's lots and lots of sustainment considerations that we can be making that if all we're doing is making a piece of learning and plopping it out there, whether it's a class or an E learning or a job aid or a video, we are missing out on an opportunity to make that stick and be really meaningful.

Yeah, yeah. We've talked about how we use this with clients to elevate some of these design considerations in the process with them. And we've done some things to make this real for our team, too. Ways that we've worked it into our process. So we've got it sort of set to scale in different ways as we bring it out into our work. And that way anybody on our team has the tools to implement LSX thinking in their own work.

Well, that's part of our process that we use for sustaining any change within our own. Our own work. Right. The more we can bake it into just the everyday, I call it kind of making speed bumps. The more you bake it into your everyday, the easier it is. So I should explain the speed bump metaphor. When you think about it, you're Driving down a street and there's a speed bump. And it's by going over the speed bump, you generally, many times, hopefully, hopefully, usually slow down.

Right? That's the message. And so it makes it easy to slow. We haven't told you to slow down. You didn't have to remember to slow down. You just kind of naturally slow down because there's a speed bump there. The other thing about speed bump is you don't have to slow down if the situation doesn't warrant it. Say you're racing to the emergency room or there's a tsunami and you are driving. You know, you have to drive away from it very, very fast.

I'm getting very overdramatic here.

Right.

You don't actually have to slow down for a speed bump. There are consequences. You might damage your car, you might spill your coffee, you might get a speeding ticket. So you don't have to. But those speed bumps do help. They make it natural to slow down. So how do we make LSX a sustained part of our work? We've put it in our kickoff template with our learning project ignition template with our clients. So there's a section in which we talk about the LSX, the 10 design commitments.

We talk about which ones might be most salient here, which ones really resonate for this particular program or project. It's part of the skeleton and the strategy document. It's part of the review checkpoint. At the part of our alpha draft, our first iteration, we have design jams that help us bring in the LSX thinking into our collaborative kind of post ignition process and confirming different checks along the way with our client. We also have a library of original articles and techniques and examples are aligned with each one of the 10 commitments in order to support our team as we go. So it's easy to learn. It's really simple to a lot of the tools that we make in our various project processes, we make it easy and efficient to do the right thing so that our team can then focus on the creative and the strategic parts of our work and keep our brain cells focused on that.

Excellent. So a few things that I'm kind of taking away from our conversation about lsx first is like it's about creating some structure, putting some, I guess, speed bumps in the way to help us slow down and really think about what we're doing and also to have an intentional conversation with our clients about all of these 10 commitments that we have. The last takeaway I have is that, you know, something, something easy, simple, lightweight can be still really powerful and effective for what we do.

Yeah, it's opened up some good conversations.

Yep. All right, Megan, any. Any final thoughts you want to leave us with?

I would love for folks to take this and run with it, riff on it, share back what you come up with. I'd love to use this as a conversation starter industry as much as it's a conversation starter with our clients and on our. Our team. It's. It's not some sort of etched in stone thing, and it's. It's really less about any specific solution and more about the conversation. So let's have a conversation about lsx.

All right, Megan, how'd that go?

That was kind of fun. I'm. I'm interested in exploring LSX and sharing more about our thoughts there over the coming year. Maybe two more episodes, more webinars, more examples. I think that there's, there's, there's something here, but also it's, you know, as we talked about it, it's a distillation of many other really, really good ideas. So it's not like we're pretending it's something new.

You're right. Yeah. We've sort of picked pieces from many others that have come before us and beside us in the industry, so. Excellent.

Thanks, industry.

Thank you. This is Meg Fairchild and Megan Torrance, and this has been a podcast from Torrance Learning. Tangents is the official podcast of Torrance Learning, as though we have an unofficial one. Tangents is hosted by Meg Fairchild and Megan Torrance. It's produced by Dean Casteel and Meg Fairchild, engineered and edited by Dean Castile, with original music also by Dean Castile. This episode was fact checked by Meg Fairchild.