The Learning Experience: Is it a Product?
I recently had to get a wall repair puddy from the store. I was reorganizing some things on my walls, and I wanted to fill in the holes I created with the nails. I purchased the repair puddy, followed the instructions on the container, repaired the wall, and then I was done. I should have thought about using the puddy again or the experience I had with it. It's just a manufactured product to meet a need I had.
During my tenure as a technology teacher, I often emphasized the concept that the content we deliver to our students is a valuable 'product. The company created and developed the curriculum and experience, ensuring that the students would undergo a transformative journey to achieve their desired outcomes in professional development. This curriculum, much like the wall repair puddy, is a product that can be developed and sold to a consumer for a price.
The big difference, though, is that repair puddy costs less than ten dollars at my Target. A college course when I taught at Purdue was over a thousand dollars, with a full 3-4 month boot camp course at Fullstack Academy ranging between 13k-20k, depending on the time. I'm also spending a whole 3-4 months in either environment learning, while with a product, you usually consume the product almost instantly after it's done. Unless I decide to put holes in my wall for fun, I don't need to use the surplus of purple repair puddy anytime soon. The whole experience using it was done in ten minutes. That's different with education.
Education is not a product sold at your local grocery store, consumed within a week, and never thought twice about. When a student registers for any course, they are not just picking out a gallon of milk to throw on their cereal for the week. They're making a conscious choice that will hopefully change their life, especially for the amount of time, effort, and money being spent on the course. Heck, registering for a course is more complex than buying Cheerios at my local Kroger.
Education is an experience, not a product.
Sure, somebody could argue with me. Yes, education is a manufactured artifact that is sold, no different than the milk, cereal, and ad repair puddy I've mentioned so far in this read. The idea here, though, is that, especially in a corporate education setting, you cannot just think of education as another box of cereal. If the experience of consuming the product could be more memorable, then why bother consuming it at all?
Zingerman’s Deli is found in Ann Arbor. It's got many different places located across the city, including a roadhouse and cafe.
I relate this to the experience of getting food at a restaurant. I frequent Zingerman's Deli, a local deli in the Ann Arbor area. It is incredibly pricey for a sandwich, but when you go, the experience of ordering is great, and the restaurant is clean, has cool art on the walls as well as even the bag the food comes in. Heck, the food is incredible. Its such a memorable place that I continue to go every once in a while, and I bring visiting friends there from out of town to have that experience. Again, the experience front to back is amazing. It created many memories that, from me first moving to Ann Arbor to taking friends there during my birthday to having a few dates with my girlfriend as well, made some fun memories, and it wasn't just the food. The food sure is the core product I'm paying for, but the experience around the food is what keeps me coming back.
When it comes to instructional design and creating any curriculum, the product you're serving is knowledge. However, students are not just there for the knowledge you're delivering to them, everything around the delivery of knowledge also has to be observed. If those parts of the experience are detrimental to the delivery of knowledge, it sours the experience, even if the quality of the product is perfect. I went to a restaurant recently, and while the food and vibe inside the place were great, the service was poor. It took too long to get the food out, we were not being checked on by our waiter, and other odds and ends that made it where I did not know if I ever wanted to go back there, even if the main purpose of going there was "food."
You have to view your course as someone going to an amusement park. Everyone has different wants and desires for what they are getting out of the course. Some folks like water rides, and others want those super fast rollercoasters that make you vomit afterward. Some folks just want to pass the class; others want all the knowledge that they can get their dream job. Some folks want the park mascots to make them feel like they're at home, while others could care less, and the sae could be said about courses. The teaching staff is the mascot cheering everyone on, but some students could care less. What happens if you do only some of these things? You're lessening the experience overall and feeling as if the product being delivered is of lesser value. If I do not clean up my amusement park and have trash all over the place or broken bits all over, does that lessen the value of the park experience even if all the rides work? Of course, it does. It's why fast food restaurants still exist. You're paying for quick, cheap food where you do not have to leave your car. You do not care about all the other parts of what goes on behind the counter because the experience of getting the product makes up for any in-quality dips of the product you're purchasing.
What I'll end this article with is this: How do you view education? What's the most important part of it, the experience of learning or the knowledge itself? When you work on your next course project, think about what your goal is and if education is really just a manufactured product with no experience around it. The experience of learning is just as important as the knowledge gained from the learning. That knowledge can be the most valuable out there, but if gaining it was the worst experience possible, fewer and fewer folks may be willing to tolerate it to get to the product you want to deliver.
