Deliver eLearning Like Steve Jobs

January 30, 2008

I am, you could say, a bit of a Steve Jobs fan. Yes, the guy is infamously arrogant and well-known to be a real tyrant to work for. No, I probably wouldn’t want to hang out with him for a weekend (lunch maybe). And I certainly don’t have thick enough skin to work for him. The man has his flaws (as do we all).

But if anyone knows the importance of visual design, of a flair for the dramatic, of deep, human emotional appeal in a product, it’s Steve Jobs. He takes what traditionally are drab, soulless tools (the computer, the MP3 player, software) and turns them into something you desperately want. And something you desperately love once you get them.

Steve “gets it.”

And not only is Steve Jobs renowned for the products his company creates, but for his mesmerizing presentation skills as well. Watching a Bill Gates presentation is painful, awkward, slightly embarrassing (and that’s not even factoring in his hideously-designed slides). Watching Steve Jobs present is watching a true showman who has mastered the art of crowd pleasing. As many of you may know, Steve’s effect is so powerful, it has been given its own name: The Reality Distortion Field (RDF).

(”What does this have to do with eLearning,” you cry? Why, everything. Which I’ll get to in a moment. Bear with me.)

Carmine Gallo of BusinessWeek recognizes the power of the RDF, and coaches us on “wowing your audience” in his recent article, Deliver a Presentation like Steve Jobs.

Garr Reynolds, purveyor extraordinaire of one of my favorite blogs, Presentation Zen, examines the power of the Steve Jobs presentation in Gates, Jobs, & the Zen Aesthetic.

Tom Kuhlmann, from my favorite eLearning blog The Rapid E-Learning Blog, takes Garr’s praise of a Steve Jobs presentation and applies it to eLearning design in What Steve Jobs Can Teach You About Designing E-Learning.

Now, I won’t get into detail about the virtues of Steve Jobs’ presentation style and how you can apply it to eLearning, as Carmine, Garr and Tom do a perfectly fine job of that (so please read the above-linked articles!), but ultimately the point I want to make is this:eLearning is selling.

You’re selling ideas - information - applied knowledge to your learner. And your learner can buy what it is you’re selling (thus learn from it), or reject it, defeating the purpose of your eLearning course entirely. An eLearning course, like a presentation, is ultimately a sales pitch, is it not?

Visual design and emotional appeal are the critical elements to helping you make that sale. As a learner, I can often tell by the first screen or two of an eLearning course that “I ain’t buying.” And once I’ve made that subconscious decision, I’ve begun the beat-the-clock exercise of clicking the Next Page button until I reach the course completion screen. (And don’t tell me you haven’t been there too.)

Can you sell your eLearning to your learner? If you can’t, you might as well just give up and move on to a different line of work. Because there isn’t going to be much learning going on.

But hold on, don’t start typing your letter of resignation yet: all hope is not lost. You can change. You can make your eLearning into something your learners embrace, truly enjoy, buy into, learn from.

So what are you waiting for? Get going! A good place to start: the articles mentioned in this post.

About the photo: Steve Jobs doing what he does best during the Macworld keynote address (January 2008), this time introducing the new MacBook Air, a laptop so thin you can slip it into a manilla envelope. Of course at this point in the presentation, you don’t really know what’s in the manilla envelope. You just know you want it. Badly.

And guess what Steve has in the manilla envelope he’s holding…

Posted in Apple, Evangelism, Presentations, eLearning Design