Malone’s Theory of Intrinsically Motivating Instruction
Hi, Today I’m going to be talking about Malone’s Theory of intrinsically motivating instruction and specifically how we might apply it in the context of e-learning.
So first, a little bit of background. It was published originally by Thomas Malone, who is an organizational theorist at Sloan’s Business School. So very credentialed academic there. It was based on a 1981 paper where he actually studied video games. And if you can imagine video games in 1981. It was like the very early, earliest day of how when video games are being introduced and so on. And I think you’ll find, actually, that his study here holds up remarkably well. And it’s quite fascinating how we might be able to apply this, obviously in gaming, then, of course, in the learning space, which is what we’re looking to do here. If you’re interested to learn more about Thomas Malone, he published a more recent book in 2004 about the future of work. So you might find that reading quite interesting as well. So back to the instruction theory here there’s three major components.
First of all, we’ve got Challenge. Challenge is broken into three areas. The difficulty of the goal, making sure that they, that the learner or the game player has goals that are difficult but achievable, then making sure that it’s clear what they need to do so they’re nothing uncertain about what they need to learn, what they need to achieve and son on. And then, of course, we want to give them feedback as well. So this is, this is vital, you know, for any learning, but especially we’re looking to apply these principles, making sure that people, if you want them to improve and grow, that we’re giving them feedback on how well they are actually performing.
This is the three components that make up the challenge part in this theory. The next gets a little bit more esoteric and where we can be quite creative as well. And that is in fantasy. So the fantasy, this one is broken into two areas. There’s an intrinsic where might have learning content that helps the learner see relevance of the application. Thinking about applying it in their specific workplace. You might have general learning principles, but allowing them to think about and consider applying it to their own specific use case.
And then we have emotional involvement. We’re getting them to, I guess, really engage with the content. Making them, making it feel realistic for them and making them see, making learners see how they might actually apply it in what they do day to day. Now, we’re not going to be able to apply this in every single type of context for learning. But when we can, this can be a very, very powerful way to engage with the learners and get them to, to really try and get the most out of what we’re delivering to them.
And lastly, probably my favorite, curiosity. Curiosity, I think is key for any learning initiative in this type, we’re bringing into sensory and cognitive. So sensory, we’re going to talk about e-learning in a moment, but sensory is making their senses come to life. Often in leaning this is going to be visual, but we can also be creative and have interactions and so on, which we’ll talk about more in a second, but cognitive as well. We’re not only visually engaging with senses, but we’re engaging their brains. So this curiosity can really, I guess, the appetite for the content that we’re talking about and that we’re delivering to them. Giving them different types of interactions or activities to really spark that level of curiosity for the learners.
Now we’ve introduced those three areas, let’s see how we might apply it in e-learning. Starting with the first in challenges, so in the difficulty for the e-learning, we want to make sure that, and this is learning in general, but particularly in e-learning where it’s often self paced, is we’ve got progressively more complex tasks. We’re building upon a framework or pyramid of learning where we maybe start at a certain level, we know where they should be, and then we build upon the complexity there. They understand when they build upon their skill sets and they always feel a little bit of challenge there as well. We want to make sure that what they’re learning is clear. They know exactly where they’re supposed to get to. We outline the objectives at the beginning of the module. We revise the objects at the end of the module as well. And so the learners know exactly the path that they’re going to go on and that they’ve just been on as well.
And finally on the feedback. Now we can even be more creative here than what you might be able to do in a classroom. So we can give them assignments, we can implement things like AI Tutors, we can give them immediate feedback and aggregate this at scale as well. We can get performance feedback to individuals and we should be doing that as a part of learning anyhow. But then we can scale that. If we got larger organizations, we can get overall performance feedback using AI tools in order to help at a macro level, improve organizational performance too. So taking it to another stage, I think fantasy in one of the most exciting parts where we can look at this.
So role playing scenarios, stimulations, we can do a lot of that in learning in our metaverse solutions. We’ll, that’s where we can get so very creative in the spaces that we build. So, we can really, really tap into that, the intrinsic fantasy build around the content that we’re delivering there as well. So, the metaverse is incredibly exciting, a space where we can really tap into this. We can do it in standard e-learning as well, of course, but this is where it really comes in and then finally, emotional involvement so we can build up storylines. So, on of my favorite examples is where we, in a cybersecurity module where we say that people, that they’ve been hacked and that they’ve got to go through and secure the database, and we take them on this learning journey where they feel invested in what they’re doing there as well. We can apply similar concepts in teamwork exercise using the metaverse as well. So, there’s a lot that can be done there, particularly using some on the more, I guess, recent teachnologies tied in with this is the cognitive side as well. Sorry, the curiosity side. So, the sensory input, naturally, we can use different multimedia approaches, multi sensory approaches, where we’ve got various tactile exercises and so on that we do inside the e-learning, inside the metaverse and so on.
And then we can really, you know, tap into this curiosity component. Now, these puzzles can also be brought there. So, we’re really, I guess, enhancing the way that the learner can engage with the materials and we can make this as interactive as we possibly can using the e-learning, digital learning tools that we’re able to develop. So, hopefully that gives you some idea about how we might apply Malone’s Theory of intrinsically motivating instruction in that e-learning context. It is very interesting theory. I particularly love the idea about sparking curiosity, engaging with this notion of fantasy and how we might be able to apply that in digital learning, in e-learning, the metaverse and so on.
I hope you enjoyed this brief introduction and if you want to learn more, then of course, feel free to get in touch.
