Frances Kleven: Welcome back to The Learning Signal. I’m your host, Frances Kleven. For this episode, we’re joined by Dr. Kris Alexander, Associate Professor of Educational Technology and Serious Game Design at Toronto Metropolitan University, Director of the Red Bull Gaming Hub, and a TED speaker known around the world as the “Professor of Video Games.”

In this episode, Dr. Kris and I talk about creating learning experiences that people really want to engage in. We explore what it means to bring genuine energy to the learning experience, why the idea that our attention spans are getting shorter is a myth, and how game mechanics can help learners build skills and reach mastery. Let’s dive in!

Welcome, Dr. Kris, to The Learning Signal. We’re delighted to have you here. 

I know you’re going to kick off with an intro, but I wanted to share why I’m excited to be here, not just because it’s a Friday, but I have been looking forward to this conversation since you came to our LearnUpon customer conference in May. And lots of takeaways there, but one thing that you said probably three-quarters of the way through your talk was: “The most important thing in teaching or education is that your learners or your students believe that you want to be there.” And that struck me immediately. I wrote it down, and it’s been sitting with me ever since, because it is the key principle to any time you’re designing a learning experience, both because you owe that to your learners—whether those are learners in the classroom or learners at work—but also you owe it to yourself. This should be something you want to be doing. You should want to be in front of a classroom. You should want to be creating learning experiences. And if you don’t feel that, something’s not right and something’s off. So I hope we can talk about some things that make people feel excited to be in a learning space, to be delivering learning to people, to be in front of a classroom. 

 

So, so excited, so many things that we can talk about, but I’ll turn it over to you to give your intro.

 

Dr. Kris Alexander: Thanks so much for having me, Frances and LearnUpon. I thought I would show you exactly what I mean with my introduction. Let’s go!

 

Dr. Kris Alexander: All right, so my name is Dr. Kris Alexander. Both Google and Bing refer to me as the Professor of Video Games, but what on earth does that mean? I break my research up into three core areas:

1. Serious Game Design: That’s how we create, shape, and make an experience for at least one person other than ourselves.
2. Solo Production: I help CEOs, corporations, and students jump from 0 to 50,000 subscribers in just five weeks using these tools and on-screen elements you’re seeing right now.
3. Evolution of Education: The evolution of education through artificial intelligence.

To expand on that just a little bit: when we’re looking at building video games—serious games—I actually just launched my first video game called Sleep Train. It’s the story of one dad’s journey—this dad’s journey—of sleep training two babies separately in one night. That’s a helpful game. We also just released another game called ASHRAE HVAC Hero, which is a training and simulator for students to learn how to do building inspection.

 

And we do that in Open Broadcaster Software—that’s how we’re presenting those elements. And when it comes to artificial intelligence, we’re using that in the background as a co-pilot, not as a replacement. That is the brief introduction I will give, otherwise I will get into longer things. Just some notes about how we can show up, and how we can show up well. If you’re teaching online, for example, what I do tell students is: how you show up is how you show up. How you maintain eye contact, and even things like live subtitles in the middle of a Zoom call so that people can see what you’re saying in real time. Over to you, Frances.

 

Frances Kleven: Excellent. Well, given we have 30 minutes, I know we’re not going to get through everything, so there’s so many places that I wanted to start. But I did want to add just that—because I want people to still take away that you need to want to be here, and your learners need to know that you want to be there—where did that come from? You probably don’t start out that way. Where did that come from, and why did that stick with you? Because I know it stuck with me.

 

Dr. Kris Alexander: Yeah. So one of my mentors, Bernie Monette, when I was teaching in the college system, he came to attend one of my classes. There were rumors about me when I arrived at this college, and he came to attend one of my classes and he said, “Man, you know the secret.” I said, “What’s the secret?” And then he told me that the only thing that matters in the classroom is that you want to be here.

 

And one of the ways that I like to embody that is by how I show up online. For example, using an iPhone to bring your message out to folks in high quality, or using an Android device to show on-screen elements up above if you’re working with your hands. All of these things clearly show that I want to be here, because who would take the time to set up phones and a camera to connect with students online?

 

Frances Kleven: Yeah. It’s interesting. I don’t want to call this a pet peeve because I think that diminishes it, I think it’s actually something almost criminal that people do in workplace learning, but I actually mostly saw it in higher education, too: recording lectures or recording Zoom calls that were meetings—so not recording it for online delivery, but recording a live session and then delivering that recording as a learning event.

 

And I think about that so often because we are doing that over and over again in the workplace. “We recorded a meeting, and here’s this recording as a learning material.” And the truth is that probably if I was running that meeting, I wanted to be there in that moment. I showed up with a lot of energy, I showed up with enthusiasm to interact with my colleagues in that meeting. If I then send that to someone and say, “Watch this, and this is your learning,” they don’t feel that I want to be there because I wanted to be there in that moment in that live session. But that was not designed for someone to feel like I wanted to be there when they’re consuming it.

 

And we did this in classroom teaching as well—a large lecture hall—and you look at students and they’re not paying attention or they’re doing other things, but you look at the person in front of the room, too, and you think: “What are they communicating about how much they want to be there?”

 

Dr. Kris Alexander: Yeah, that all makes perfect sense, and I have some live examples to show you of that as well, which I probably did mention during the talk, but I’ll go over here for those of you who absolutely weren’t there at the time. And that is this: I happen to teach a giant class of students called Introduction to Game Design. What’s important to note about this class is—fun fact—this is the actual classroom. It is 864 students across 21 disciplines. It’s university-wide, and the most important thing is that this class is non-mandatory.

 

Meaning, every single one of these students that you see funneling into the classroom have chosen to be here, and that goes back to the mantra. Who is deciding to take a class? Well, you can see very clearly. But the thing that I wanted to show you about this was people are often like, “Kris, how do you handle this class?” And the answer, I will show you right here.

 

I use a piece of software called Coconote—artificial intelligence—to transcribe my three-hour lectures and break it down. This is the actual LearnUpon Connect keynote, my keynote, that I transcribed. And what you will see is an overview of everything that I said on stage, the key concepts, the classroom examples, everything. All of what I said on that stage is here from the keynote, broken up into tables. But the option for students to listen to the entire lecture—in this case, keynote—play study games, create quizzes… and this is a service that I pay for so that the students can connect with the learning. If they can’t be there, I can have alternative ways.

 

And as I mentioned, those classes are also live-streamed on Twitch, and I have students that are commuter students. If they’re late, they’re joining my class on their phones on the way to class because they’re so excited to be there. So we say how you show up is how you show up, and that goes for instructors as well as learners as well. And they know that I want to be there, so they’re like, “Well, I want to see what he’s going to do today.”

 

Frances Kleven: I think that’s a nice lead-in to… and I think we’re both aligned here, but around… so much buzz about attention span, and everyone’s attention span is, you know, minimizing every second. I will say one thing: I think the younger generations get a bad rap for this, as if they’re the perpetrators of this, but if you’re looking at who’s on their phone, or who’s watching videos on a train, or who is looking away from conversations at their phone, that’s multi-generational. I yell at my mom about that, my nieces and nephews clock me when I do that, so we’re very unfair to younger generations about that.

 

But it seems like the wrong place to start, even if we agreed with it—which I think you and I both would have questions about that—but if we believe that our learners, whether they’re students in a classroom or employees, don’t have an attention span, we’re starting from a place of, A, incredible disrespect to learners of “there’s nothing that you’re interested in,” and also we’ve defeated ourselves. “There’s nothing that I can do to get the attention of my learners.” So talk a little bit about unpacking that myth, and sort of the place that you start from for your teaching and your learning materials.

 

Dr. Kris Alexander: So I’ve had teaching evaluations, as you know, you have them every year. And one of the comments that I typically get—and I’m not even joking—is: “I’m surprised that in your classes, nobody’s on their phones, nobody’s on their laptops, they’re all paying attention to you.” I don’t notice this. I am so excited to be there that I don’t notice that this is the case. And I think that that’s the point.

 

If you want to be there, the people are going to be excited about what it is you’re trying to do. If you think about cooking, becoming a chef: when your chef is there actually showing you how to put the ingredients together, you’re not going to be on your phone. If you’re connecting with your learners in a way that’s portable to them—and what I mean by that is they can take it out of their space to apply to their own lives—that is the advantage.

 

But the other thing I will say about the myth that you described: as you may have heard, the first TED Talk I gave was about how video games can level up the way that you learn. And most people thought I was talking about the fun bits of video games, but I was not. I was talking about audio, text, and video. And all the studies will say when you have two or more of these layers, learning gains can be higher. But I was arguing in my dissertation that there’s a fourth layer that video games provide, and that’s autonomy via interactivity. Meaning, once you’re in control of your learning, that’s something very different.

 

Now, you’ll see in my classroom—there’s some clips on Instagram—of students raising their phones up and down like this. We were doing a live class play of 50 students online against 50 students in that classroom, doing competition games in a Nintendo Switch game called Everybody 1-2-Switch! when we were talking about networking protocol and how to think about that from a design standpoint. So even when folks are watching this, they’re going to be like, “What?” That’s what I’m talking about. When you want to be there, it’s infectious. And people can see it even in your text, in your prose, and the technology that you’re using within the learning environment.

 

Frances Kleven: And I think that autonomy around learning… but if you think about workplace learning, and I’ll get to completions in a second because we just need to get that word out of our vocabulary, it just doesn’t mean anything. But any workplace learning, whether you’re training your employees or your customers, you want them to master a skill. That’s ultimately what you want them to do. You want them to learn to give better feedback to colleagues, you want them to learn to use a new feature in your software better. And video games really… like, this is what they do. And so how have you used that theory to say, “Hey, what I’m asking you to do is not remember facts and figures or regurgitate that back to me, I’m looking for you to master a skill”?

 

Dr. Kris Alexander: So one of the ways that I did that was by incorporating the achievement systems from video games into my classroom instruction. What do I mean? This idea of putting concrete goals into learners’ brains in terms of “when you do this, this will be the outcome.”

 

I’ll give you an example: one of the assignments that I used to have was an essay where students had to write an essay about a concept that they were wanting to explore, or another concept from a different organization (there are two different video assignments). In the first one, you have to research externally who your competition is. This used to be a paper. I told students: “You still can write the paper, but the only thing I will accept is a one-minute video that summarizes.” And if you look at the rubric—which, of course, I can show you because I have those examples from LearnUpon… give me a second to pull it up.

 

We have it right here. It was called a Trend Analysis, that was the assignment here, okay? And in the trend analysis, they were supposed to, instead of an essay—in addition to an essay, because I knew everybody was going to GPT that—create a one-minute video analysis that showcases critical research skills and trends for a commercially released video game. All right? This is one category of four, but the way that the rubric is structured is there are four categories. This one is called Research & Analysis. But if you can see right here, it says in order to achieve 7 to 8 points, you must incorporate five or more—not five, five or more—credible industry sources. And this is on top of the other areas, which I will show you later on: Skillset Categories, Proficiency-Focused Headers… don’t worry about all of this.

 

I’ll show you these categories here: Research & Analysis, Technical Execution, Visual Presentation, and Professional Innovation. What am I doing here? Well, with Research & Analysis, I’m teaching them the foundations of becoming an actual researcher in academia. With the Technical Execution, I’m getting them into understanding video production and how to edit and put on live screen subtitles, for example, transitions, and the like. Here, Visual Presentation is about making things clear. And then over here, Professional Innovation, because part of what I have students do is, once you’re done your assignment, tag me in it and post it online.

 

I’m not saying this is going to be a hidden assignment. I say—and I say this publicly every single year—there are people in my class that get hired based on assignments that happen in this class. And it’s true, it happened this year as well. So students know that and they’re like, “Yo, this guy wants us to be so proud of what we’re doing that we’ll tag him in it so he’ll share it with his followers, and that will bring more attention to me.” It’s a very different classroom experience. I’m not trying to give you a class and you go later. I’m saying right now, I will brag about what you’re doing to everybody that I know when it’s good enough. And that’s a very different stance to take, but I believe that these students are ready right now.

 

And that, to your point of believing in students and thinking, “Oh yeah, there’s no attention span,” I believe the complete opposite. I think these students are ready to go right now, and I tell them that. And many of them don’t believe until somebody goes into the DMs of one of my students and asks me to connect them with them to hire—and that was Catherine that happened to this year. So that’s a very specific example: achievement systems, and directly connecting students to their futures inside of a classroom environment via the assignments.

 

Frances Kleven: And I think that leads directly into what workplaces are looking towards or struggling with now: what are the skill sets that we need as we’re thinking about what role AI plays in our organization? And it’s exactly those things, right? It’s presentation, it’s analysis, it’s innovation. But I bet if you asked most workplace learning programs, “Do they have content that teaches that?” No. They have… those are things that they want from their employees, but I don’t know that we’re actually teaching that in the workplace.

 

Dr. Kris Alexander: Yeah. So, disclaimer: my PhD is in Educational Technology, and that is how we use technology to engage and galvanize folk. I also am a classically trained pianist—the art of performance is there. So this idea of understanding that that’s part of it as well, I think is part of what’s missing. People only see the output, but they don’t often think about the process.

 

For employees to understand what they’re needing to do, they’re going to have to see some kind of process. They’re going to have to see a chef on stage cooking the ingredients to believe, “Oh! Like that!” You can’t just say, “Oh, these are the trends, do them.” In my view, that’s not how my classrooms work. I can’t say to students, “You should build video games,” and I don’t build video games myself. It’s not going to work. So when it comes to engaging employees, I think it’s the same approach. You’ve got to show that you know it for people to grow with you.

 

Frances Kleven: And it’s interesting, my team is our Customer Success Managers, so they work directly with our customers. But for 20 years, a huge part of the role of a Customer Success Manager has been your ability to take notes, because you needed to present those notes back to the company to say, “This is what’s happening with this customer.” And there was some analysis in that, but most of it was, “My job is to take notes about what is happening on this call with this customer and bring this information back to my company.” That is no longer needed. There’s no need to take notes, there’s no need to summarize notes—that’s all done.

 

But it means now that the skill set needed is your presentation skills, your communication skills, your consultative skills. But we have to be able to provide learning experiences for people to show them what good looks like.

 

Dr. Kris Alexander: I absolutely agree with you. In my class—the one where I teach students to jump from 0 to 50,000 subscribers—I’ll show you an example. Something called Lookup Tables (LUTs) are something that I’ve applied to this camera to make the colors pop. Are you ready? I’ll show you an example. Okay, here we go.

 

So… without a lookup table, this is how I would have come into this Zoom call. And you can clearly see that there’s a difference. But I will show folks that the general color that we correct for is red—the color of blood, our common… and so once you learn about how to help colors pop, lighting in the back, depth of field, it’s a huge difference, right? I don’t even feel comfortable… that was close. I don’t even feel comfortable leaving that up here like, “Yo, who is this guy?”

 

But now, think about when I came into the call, and you see the subtitles, how immediately things transform. This idea of what I’m teaching students is that this is a camera, but you’re over here—I think you can see that—you’re over here, and I train myself in Zoom calls that when I’m listening to you I look this way, and when I’m talking to you I look at not a human, the camera. That simple skill has people feeling like, “Oh, they’re looking at me!” But it’s not something that’s intuitive because you’re used to looking somebody in the face when they’re talking. So we talk about these kinds of things in the classroom, just to your point. I agree with you wholeheartedly, but these things need to be taught. And that’s literally why people have me around!

 

Frances Kleven: It’s so interesting. Why do you think that… it was just making me think about a kindergarten or first grade classroom. And you walk into that, right? Colors everywhere, words everywhere, and that the interaction with a teacher there is very much you make eye contact, you show enthusiasm—like, very deliberately and very scientifically, right? This is what people learn when you’re teaching five and six-year-olds. But where… why do you think that fell off? At some point you get to, I don’t know, seventh or eighth grade, and now your classroom is blank and you have somebody lecturing to you. Something… we sort of got… we understood it with kids who are five, but somehow we thought that’s not important for somebody who’s 37.

 

Dr. Kris Alexander: So that’s a very interest… I can’t believe you asked that, that’s remarkable. I’m just about to publish a paper on a philosophy that I think… you just also published that philosophy! I coined a concept called “Digital Bravado”. And this is people’s perceived confidence with technology simply by owning the most recent device.

 

And I think the answer to your question is—I’ll give you an example that I’m not very proud of: my 10-year-old daughter came home one day and she said, “Daddy, at lunchtime I turn away from the front of the class.” And I said, “Baby girl, why are you doing that?” She said, “Because you’ve taught me a lot of things, and my teacher is putting on YouTube Shorts at lunchtime.” Exactly that face, exactly Frances! I’m like, “Yo, what?” She’s like, “I know all the things you talk about, Daddy, I know that’s not good for me, especially at my age. So I turn and I get all my friends to turn, and we socialize.” I’m like, “Yo! Where did we get to that people think that just by tossing tech equals useful tech?”

 

Right? And so the answer to your question is, you mentioned a kindergarten teacher: I have not in my lifetime met a kindergarten teacher that didn’t want to be there, science aside. They’re getting down to the kids’ level, they’re putting… they’re going to want to see… I’ve never not seen an excited kindergarten teacher. I don’t even know if it exists!

 

Frances Kleven: But do you think it’s because the consequence of that is you have no… like, kids are going to be running out the door, kids are going to be… like, to command the classroom, you almost physically need to embody that? Where at some point as people get older, we can sort of get into this  act of “we’re just going to be in this space together and be disengaged”?

 

Dr. Kris Alexander: What I love about that—and I never thought about this until you brought it up—maybe it’s because kids won’t lie. Kids won’t mask. They are not… right? And we learn the social contract that you described. We learn to, in a meeting, go like this. But a kid will visibly… in a meeting. And maybe that changes the dynamic. You are knowing that these kids will be showing you how they’re feeling.

 

I see it all the time. I know that many students are tired. I say you can sleep… I actually say to my students: “I’m not concerned if you’re on your phones or playing video games.” My TED Talk had me playing Tetris because I couldn’t handle text and teacher reading text. I had to figure out a way to cope. I think people need to be taught these things, but also I think that dynamic you described is because kids will let you know. They’re not joking around. If it’s not fun, a kid will just get up and run. Like, they’ll say, “Ah, this is not fun!” It’s very… you know? So I think that’s why it happens. I’ll pause there, over to you.

 

Frances Kleven: No, and I think we have built some bad habits, or just become complacent. We’ve all been on Zoom calls, both as a participant, but certainly as a presenter. If I’m on a Zoom call, I let myself not pay attention to what other people on the call are doing. I let myself present as if I were presenting into a vacuum, in a way that I wouldn’t do in person.

 

And I think we do that with digital content as well: “I just need to deliver this, and I’m not thinking about the experience of the person on the end of this. Are they going to feel like, again, ‘I want to be here’?” Similar to the recorded Zoom calls, we are still delivering PDFs as training materials. A new employee joins the company and we say, “Here, take this training course,” and it is: read a PDF and do an e-signature that you read it. That is not an indication that you wanted to be there for that learning event. That is very transactional at best.

 

Dr. Kris Alexander: Interesting. So one thing I think that boils down to education: if folks knew, for example, that “I’m going to show you how to use your phone to set up your actual phone—whether it’s Android or Apple device—and the goal of these trainings is to have you all show up as employees in the next training video to show the world the kind of work that our folk are doing,” that changes the conversation incredibly differently! Because folks will go, “Hold on a second. Okay, I better… All right, let me change my background and make sure… What, I can do this with my iPhone? What? Oh my gosh!” And if I don’t want to show up, I can do something with my hands to show folks from above.

 

It’s a very different conversation when you empower somebody on how to use their technology for their career and their movement forward.

 

Frances Kleven: Yeah. Yeah. It is… and I think that we let ourselves believe that that can only be achieved in person. And partly I think… and we talked about it earlier, but it is a—maybe not dirty little secret of higher education especially—there are plenty of classrooms you could point to to say, “This professor does not want to be here.” And these students recognize that, and you can feel that in the classroom.

 

But that feeling of “I belong here, I am welcome here, I’m excited to learn this, the person who is delivering this content is excited for me to be here”—that doesn’t mean it’s a live interaction. That could be a video, that could be an assignment. It doesn’t… we have so many opportunities to deliver that outside of what we think has to be a face-to-face interaction.

 

Dr. Kris Alexander: Yeah, you see that in volleyball coaches who used to play the game, they love it so much they want to coach. You see it in chefs, you see it in teachers. Even you, your superpower, you’re transforming your learning superpower into this new role to show people how important this is. But you also know that this is not necessarily an inherent thing. Having a fancy phone doesn’t automatically mean you know how to set it up. You don’t know which apps to use, you don’t know how to use free software.

 

So this idea of—again, Digital Bravado—people understanding, acknowledging gaps is how we bridge that. And of course, there’s a need for a use of technology if you’re trying to connect with folks technologically. These videos… I got sad, I actually blocked it out when you said people are using Zoom calls as training material. Inside, I was like, “Yo, what? People are still doing that, yo?” That’s disrespectful, yo! To me, I’m like, “Yo, no no no, we’re not doing that.”

 

Because—you can’t see it—you can use your phone as a teleprompter and read anything, short-form content. You can use… even I’m using the CreateUpon platform to build scripts that I could read as trailers for every single unit inside of the online courses that I’m building. Like, there’s so many tools to make it cool… I just made that up, that’s not a real thing. But yeah, there’s so many tools to show that you want people to learn what it is you’re trying to do. And it’s very clear. It’s very clear.

 

Sorry, we could do this forever!

 

Frances Kleven: I know, I know! But it also… but it fundamentally translates into results. You’re a business and you’re looking to upskill your employees, you’re a business looking to train your customers to use your product better—obviously you want results from that. But that is only going to come if people feel like you want to be there in that training. It is part of your bottom-line metric that you need to start with.

 

Dr. Kris Alexander: I agree. And our introduction was at LearnUpon Connect. That whole event was “we want to be here.” Everybody was dressed up, everybody had their fancy cameras out, everybody was there to talk, deliver… that level is how you show people that you want to be there. And I think that people lose sight of that because that extends beyond conferences into Zoom calls.

 

People are going to watch this recording and say, “Yo, Kris said that my phone can be used as a webcam.” Yes! It can. And your phone camera, especially if you have any Pixel device or an iPhone that’s above 11 where they started with the depth sensor—don’t get me started—you can access with a free piece of software better ISO or depth of field, and that will exponentially change the way that you show up. But again, as I mentioned, how can you know that? When people see—because I’m going to provide you with this footage—when people see that, they’re going to be like, “Is this possible?”

 

It’s always about knowing what’s possible, and how can you know? When you talk to Zoom, and Zoom has limitations on how much bandwidth they can allow for high quality to go through, and that’s told that that’s a standard to you, you have to accept it because it’s a company that understands it. But when you learn that there are free tools to help enhance over Zoom calls… whoa, whoa, whoa! We’ve got to get involved with this, you know what I mean? You’ve got to see it to believe it, really. You’ve got to hear it, also.

 

Here I have my mic out of frame on purpose, but it’s like really close because my first career was in sound design and audio engineering. I know how important that is. And although over Zoom it will be delayed, maybe, when we get back and I send you the footage, it won’t be. I’ll pause there, over to you.

 

Frances Kleven: But I think that’s back to what we were talking about earlier about attention span: we reflected on our conference as well, and you go to a lot of conferences, I do as well. And that’s not always the case. Sometimes you’ll be in a room and you look around and people are catching up on email, they’re on their phones. But we also know it’s possible. We know it is… and the entertainment industry is thinking about this with movies, of what is… it is possible for people to sit through a three-and-a-half-hour movie, but you have to give them something that they feel like, “This is where I want to be at this moment, and this was made for a good use of my time for three and a half hours.”

 

Dr. Kris Alexander: Exactly. Exactly.

 

Frances Kleven: But I think we have to start from the premise, and as you’re thinking about all those tools, it is possible for learners to be engaged. It is possible for learners to pay attention for long periods of time with complex, difficult information. It is possible, but we have to be willing to say, “I need to learn the things, the tools that I need to be able to deliver something to achieve that.”

 

Dr. Kris Alexander: It’s true. I agree with that. I’ve also learned though—and my wife tells me this all the time—she said, “Kris, not everybody is as excited about technology as you. You would love to spread this digital gospel to everybody, like, ‘Yo, I can show you how to show up!’ But not everybody wants to do that.” Some people will need to—and I do do this over Zoom calls—coach folks how to set up lookup tables. We can’t assume that everybody wants to do it.

 

I know people want to show up as it, but it’s not the same thing. The amount of time that it takes for me to learn… my wife is doing an online course in French, and they’re asking her to do presentations. I love Canva—fun fact, everything you’ve seen so far is in Canva, even my LearnUpon Connect talk was done in Canva. I love Canva, I use it every day. She was like, “Yo, can you show me how to do this?” And I found out this one thing—I’m not going to get into it right now, but I will.

 

When you have an item and you resize it, and you want to… like, I have the number one, and I want to make the number two, and every time I bring it in it goes this big and I would normally have to shrink it down: Canva has this option where you shrink down the number one, you duplicate it underneath, and you drag the number five into the number one and it just replaces it! And I learned that in front of my wife and I was flipping out! And she was like, “Yo, you’re the only kind of person that would get excited about this.” But I’m like, so excited to tell everybody about it!

 

This is a long-winded way of saying: I’ve come to understand that that’s why people connect with me, because not everybody wants to do this or knows that it’s possible. And I can, step-by-step, run you through that. But I think to your point, it’s admitting that it may be necessary—that is the first step. It’s admitting possibility as the first step.

 

Frances Kleven: And so, I know we’re coming up on time and I have 10,000 more things I want to chat about, but I wanted to leave people with a next step. If you’re an instructional designer and your job is to create training materials to train employees on policies, on skills, on communication, or your job is to create learning materials for training your customers on your software: what is one thing that you should start doing, within that theme of: what’s one thing you could start doing that makes your learners, even if they’re virtual, make them feel like you want to be there?

 

Dr. Kris Alexander: So the number one thing I would say to understanding how you get started is to think about the one question: How do you want to be remembered?

 

After the experience. I want to be remembered as the person that gave eye contact. I want to be remembered as a person with a nice background setup. I want to be the one that shows concrete information, not too much text on a slide. And even if you don’t know those elements, you are able to say, “Yo, this is how I want to show up.” Put that into a language learning model, or even the CreateUpon platform, which will explain to you exactly how that happens. You have an opportunity to educate yourself in a way that was never possible before, thanks to all of this agentic learning, all of these large language models that can help you understand your gaps. It’s not about “do it for,” it’s about learn how to galvanize.

 

Frances Kleven: Yeah. And it becomes your brand, and that should be the brand that you’re representing in your organization. That when people take a course that you created or watch a video that you created, that really should have your stamp on it, and people should say, “Thank you for creating that. I can’t wait for those courses.” Like, this should be something exciting and something personal.

 

Dr. Kris Alexander: Yeah. The other thing—I know you said only one final point—this is what I tell a lot of students that come into my classroom, they’re shocked by this: You’re not in competition with anyone.

 

And the moment that you realize that, you will think about what specific contribution you can do on this planet to upgrade folks, and then you hone in and you just go. You just go.

 

Frances Kleven: Yeah. Especially when you’re looking at all the tools that people are using and things that they can create, it’s not the competition that you’re looking to have the best video, or to have the best gamified functionality. It really is: what can you do to create something that is meaningful to your organization?

 

Dr. Kris Alexander: How you show up is how you show up.

 

Frances Kleven: Well, that is the perfect way to… I don’t want to say end this conversation, but pause this conversation until we chat for three hours another time. But this was a delight, best 30 minutes of my day, and I will take all this energy into the weekend. Really, really appreciate your time, and thank you for joining The Learning Signal!

 

Dr. Kris Alexander: Thanks so much for having me. We’ll chat again soon.

 

Frances Kleven: Bye!