“No bombs, no knives, no sticks, no small dogs”

Dominic Mason tackles the tricky business of setting boundaries for learners

I am privileged to be attending a talk by the manager of Sparta Prague. He’s pleased that more and more ‘rival’ fans are coming to his club’s ground to watch his team play. He’s certainly financially overjoyed to be entertaining the likes of Chelsea, Moscow Dynamo and Celtic, but he also seems genuinely happy that one of Europe’s smartest, most forward-looking cities is, at least as far as he is concerned, pulling together and putting certain issues – i.e. rampant football hooliganism – behind it. However, he strongly believes that everyone needs boundaries, and that people need to know where the barriers lie. Hence the large sign at his club displaying four rules, reproduced above.

Indeed, in the world of e-learning as in the footballing sphere, it’s easily proven that everyone does need certain boundaries. Whilst you can deliver training in a myriad of forms and functions, the learner’s experience of your bounded experience is central. If you independently concentrate on the technology, the information, or the data recording, you are probably not going to be as effective as you would like. The learner is a human being, just like you and me, and they want to operate by a few simple tenets:

Where am I?

What am I doing?

What’s next?

Why?

The last one may not look very impressive but it’s actually a tough, highly subjective analysis. Don’t judge the worth here by the number of letters in the question - behind the ‘why?’ you might have just heard:

The sole voice of dissent

The voice of the silent majority

A true, expert opinion

A plea for guidance

Hesitate when dealing with ‘why?’ and you may just lose a learner. Digging behind the ‘why?’ is potentially solo-engaging, time-consuming and energy-sapping, but you have no choice but to understand the learner’s requirements for knowledge of the barriers around their learning exercise. If you can help them understand you and dissect their ‘why?’, then maybe they will aid you in delivering barrier-breaking e-learning.

So, back to “no bombs, no knives, no sticks, no small dogs”. The inevitable question came: “Why?”. The manager grinned: “We got the fans together to work out the best way forwards and this is the list they came up with. So, I asked them the same question you just asked me, ‘Why?’, and they replied, ‘It’s because no-one likes small dogs’”.