One thing I’ve noticed over the last couple of years user testing eLearning activities with kids, is that the present adults tend to underestimate their kid’s abilities. I’ve watched adults play through the same activity and become hopelessly lost or stuck, not because the activity was broken, but more like their way of thinking had long settled into its routine of adulthood. When a kid gets stuck I’ve seen them do everything from randomly click everything on the screen, to socializing with a neighbor, collaborating to find out the answer. The adults just tended to give up or bottle in their frustration.

I really feel that fear, and more specifically, fear of consequence is a learned skill that a lot of adults grow to accept, and for good reason. When I was a kid I enjoyed setting things on fire… you know, cups of gasoline, WD-40, it was great fun! As an adult, understanding fear and consequences I now know that playing with such materials could have blown off my hand or burnt down my house. Now I am extremely responsible around such materials, and actually take the time to read warning labels. How boring! It’s like I’ve learned my place, had my fun and have settled in for a long and mundane ride.

That semi-analogy compares to adults in most eLearning environments. Because you are an adult expectations have been cut in half. Kids get to run wild, experiment, destroy, fail, grow, learn and all without judgment, while adults get straightforward courseware with little entertainment value and the understanding that management was in the next room basing your pay scale on the results of the learning exercise.

What exactly is the big difference between eLearning for kids and eLearning for adults? The most obvious I can think of is the following:

eLearning built for kids is usually going to end up being sold, and in return will make a profit. It is the developer’s job to make their “product” as enticing as possible so schools, parents and kids will buy into their ideas and purchase the game or software. It’s also a general rule that when developing for kids you need to have movement, sounds, interaction and in other words fun! If the kids are bored, you won’t sell your product.

eLearning for adults is more of a means to an end. You’re not exactly trying to entertain the adults, just simply train them by getting to the point quickly as possible in a specific budget. For the most part eLearning courses for adults are developed privately for intranets, by the companies with the employees. They deal with budget restraints, management teams of 10 different people all wanting to input their ideas, that in turn create a learning experience with all the excitement of reading a 500 page user manual. Simply put, adult eLearning usually isn’t intended to directly turn a profit, so why spend all that extra money on creativity and interaction?

For kids, the experience is the experience. They do it for the sole fact that there’s no reason not to.

For adults, the experience is generally forced. A manager was sued for sexual harassment, now everyone in your department is forced to take a two hour long ethics course with 50 threatening questions at the end to make sure you get the point.

I used to teach on the side, six hour days where we’d cover a single program like Excel, Word, Flash or Fireworks, (this was for an adult technical training company) and you could always tell when people were sent in by their managers or bosses against their will. Lack of engagement, boredom, dirty looks; it was all present and aimed at me because it was a forced learning situation. My high school had a physics teacher who once or twice a year would take his students to an amusement park to show them physics in action. Sure they had to bring their calculators and notebooks to work out some problems, but the solution to the learning experience wasn’t to force some form of regurgitated learning experience, it was to physically have fun in a real world environment while learning.

In the end, I think it all comes down to kids having no expectations, and adults having low expectations.

Or, it may just be that management needs to understand that their adult learners need to have a little fun, too, and that the little bit of extra creativity, experimentation and budget might pay off in big ways with a happier more educated employee.