Designing Minimalist Instruction

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Carroll, John, M. (1990).The Nurnberg Funnel: Designing Minimalist Instruction for Practical Computer Skills. Technical Communications, MIT Press, USA.
Quotes

• Less is more
• Our strategy in developing training designs was to accommodate, indeed to try to capitalize on, manifest learning styles, strategies, and goals. We were struck by the obsercation that training material itself often precipitates learning problems. We became commited to minimizing the obrusiveness to the learner of training material –hence the term minimalist. Three aspects of our minimalist instructional approach are: (1) allowing learners to start immediately on meaningfully realistic tasks, (2) reducing the amount of reading and other passive activity in training, and (3) helping to make errors and error recovery less traumatic and more pedagogically productive. P7
• New users are not inclined to read training material. As one person we observed put it while flipping pages in a manual: This is just information. People seem to be more interested in action, in working on real tasks, than in reading. We found that learners were given to plunging into a procedure as soon as it was mentioned or of trying to execute purely expository descriptions. Unfortunately, executing a preview may alter the system state and therefore make it impossible to execute the previewed exercise. Learners also often skip over crucial material if it does not address their current task-oriented concern or skip around among several manuals, composing their own ersatz instructional procedure on the fly. P8
• Even something as mundane as an index can be a source of additional reading complexity. The learner has t guess the index term before searching for it. Nevertheless, the presence of an index is often seen as a requirement Sandberg-Diment (1986) once qualified considerable enthusiasm for a product by observing that the manual was flawed somewhat by the inexplicable absence of an index. P9
• The key idea in the minimalist approach is to present the smallest possible obstacle to learners’ efforts, to accommodate, even to exploit, the learning strategies that cause problems for learners using systematic instructional materials. The goal is to let the learner get more out of the training experience by providing less overt training structure. The approach does not solve the learning paradox; rather it compromises in the direction of accommodating the learner’s desire for meaningful interaction at the expense of providing a less comprehensive curriculum. The nine principles listed below expand this orientation in terms of specific learner needs and problems we have already considered. P78 (training on Real Tasks, Getting Started Fast, Reasoning and Improvising, Reading in Any Order, Coordinating System and Training, Supporting Error Recognition and Recovery, Exploiting Prior Knowledge, Using the Situation, Developing Optimal Training Designs P78-94)

They use a methodology called Learning by Exploration or guided by exploration
Alberto Ramirez Martinell