In this episode of The L&D Explorers Podcast, we had the chance to speak with Dr. Clark Quinn, a leader in learning experience design.
Founder of Quinnovation, Dr. Quinn, speaks on fostering deep learner engagement through meaningful practice, feedback, and game design principles, emphasizing that true engagement drives motivation, learning, and real-world application.
Key takeaways
1. Learner engagement: Beyond interactivity
Learner engagement is much more than just interactivity
Engagement is about fostering an emotional commitment and intent to learn, not just surface-level interactivity or gamified elements like points and leaderboards. The goal is to connect learners emotionally to the learning experience, making them feel invested and motivated to participate.
2. Addressing the "why" behind learning
When learners understand why this is relevant to them and what it's going to enable them to do afterward...we have that commitment.
We often assume learners understand the importance of a course, but this isn't always the case. It's crucial to explicitly address why the course matters and how it benefits them.
Conation—defined as the intent to learn—is essential and can be fostered by:
- Providing choice in what learners pursue.
- Supporting learners to achieve competence.
- Creating an environment that emphasizes growth and mastery.
When these elements are combined, learners are more likely to commit the effort needed to succeed.
3. Feedback: A core element of learning
If you don’t know enough to give the right feedback, you shouldn’t be producing the course
Feedback should provide both consequences (the outcomes of a decision) and explanations (why the decision was right or wrong). Without this insight, it’s impossible to design training that effectively addresses learning gaps. High-level application questions (rather than simple knowledge checks) are more effective for reinforcing understanding and practical application.
5 motivational principles from game design
Learning designers can borrow techniques from game design to make learning more engaging:
- Set objectives that resonate with learners and feel relevant to their real-world challenges.
- Present challenges at the right difficulty level: Tasks should be neither too easy (boring) nor too hard (frustrating).
- Use rich narratives and relatable characters to make scenarios more immersive and memorable.
- Focus on feedback loops: In games, players learn from trying, failing, and adapting. The same principle applies to effective learning design.
- Align engagement with education: As Ralph Koster observed, what makes games fun is the same as what makes learning effective—an intrinsic sense of growth and accomplishment.
Actionable insights
Motivated learners retain more, apply knowledge better, and engage more deeply with the material. The key is designing learning experiences that feel purposeful, enjoyable, and relevant.
Mentioned in the episode
- Quinnovation
- Clark Quinn's blog
- Clarke Quinn's LinkedIn
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Dan Gorgone:
Welcome to the L&D Explorers Podcast from GoSkills.
On today's episode, we talked to Dr. Clark Quinn, the founder of Quinnovation.com and a renowned expert in the field of learning experience design and development.
He joins us to discuss learner engagement, and we'll talk about the importance of engagement, how to keep our learners engaged throughout a program, the importance of feedback, and what we can learn from game design to inform our L&D efforts.
I'm Dan Gorgone, course producer for GoSkills. I hope you enjoy this discussion.
Hey, everyone.
Welcome back to the L&D Explorers Podcast. My name is Dan Gorgone. I'm the course producer with GoSkills. Joining us today is Dr. Clark Quinn. He is a consultant, an author, and a keynote speaker with many years of experience in the design and development of learning experiences. So we're talking about games, apps, tools, and so much more.
We're very, very happy to have you here, Dr. Quinn. Thanks for joining us.
Clark Quinn:
Thank you for having me—honored.
Dan Gorgone:
The topic that we're going to talk about today is learner engagement. And for the purposes of our discussion here and for the benefit of the audience that's watching, let's define learner engagement before we jump into it.
So, what are we referring to when we talk about learner engagement? Is it interactivity? Are we talking about course completion rates? What kind of engagement are we referring to here? How would you define it?
Clark Quinn:
So, for me, learner engagement is much more than just interactivity. We see these trivial forms of engagement—click to see more—which is a way of dumping more content in and making people have to work just to consume it. It's not thinking deeply. It can also be points and leaderboards, substituting competition, hopefully to get people more motivated than the material.
I want to focus much more on the intrinsic engagement that says, why should I care? I would really like to have this experience at the end of the learning. Well, at the beginning of the learning, at the introduction, to go, you know, I do need this and I don't know it. And this experience will change that. If you have all three of those, I suggest you've got a commitment that the learners will invest the cognitive effort to pay attention to the material and to apply what they're learning to situations you provide them for.
So, to me, engagement is much more about an emotional commitment to the learning experience—the intent to learn. And that includes cognitive immersion. Interactivity is necessary, but it has to be the right type of interactivity.
Dan Gorgone:
That's a really wonderful point—the emotional connection you have to strike with your learners right off the bat. I've been involved with many courses over the years, and so many times one of the things that has been recommended both to me and that I'll recommend to others, especially the marketing people, is when you're describing this course, when you're promoting this course, you've got to include the "What's in it for me?" factor for the audience.
Clark Quinn:
But that's absolutely right.
Too often we just assume learners know why this course is important, and we don't address that explicitly. That can be at any level: K-12, higher ed, or corporate learning. When learners understand why this is relevant to them and what it's going to enable them to do afterward—as you said, the "WIIFM" (what's in it for me)—we have that commitment. In cognitive science, we talk about cognition, affect, and conation. Cognition is the typical stuff we care about in instructional design, which says we need to present the right information and provide practice. We don't do a good job of this according to learning science, but that's a separate problem.
Affect is who you are. It's not learning styles, but it is sort of a personality, and that's sort of fixed. It seems to be immutable. But conation is really interesting because that's your intent to learn. What we want to do is get people intending to commit the effort to learn this.
Self-determination theory—from Deci and Ryan, who’ve led that initiative, and my colleague, who has been an important communicator of that perspective for me—talks about getting people to feel like they have a choice in what they pursue, in being supported to achieve competence, and recognizing that the rest of the environment—the other people and the design from the designers—is focused on helping them achieve that competence. When you put those together, you get the opportunity to get people to intend to learn. You're absolutely right. We see it too seldom.
It’s not just the marketers—it’s the designers. Right from the get-go, you should have them going, “You know, I do need this.”
Dan Gorgone:
The last thing we want to do is make any learner feel like they're forced into some kind of learning. That certainly goes to the designers, the marketers, and especially the L&D professionals who are designing a program, putting something together, perhaps at the request of the higher-ups who want certain things.
We certainly don't want our courses to feel like, "Well, you know, in the end, it's the two hours of continuing education that I'm required to do per month, and next month I'll have another two, and blah, blah, blah."
The best-case scenario is we want that interest. We want people to really be ready to dive in because they know the course has something of value for them.
So, with that being said, how do we engage learners from the very start, beyond the “what's in it for me?” copy about the course description and "by the end of this course, you'll be able to X, Y, and Z"? How do we engage them right from the start?
Clark Quinn:
Well, to me, it is partly that “what's in it for me?” But you need a visceral reaction that says, “You know, I don't know this, and this would be valuable if I knew it.”
You can get that reaction humorously or dramatically. You can poke fun at not having the knowledge, or at somebody not having knowledge and somebody else having it. Or you can do it dramatically.
Michael Allen used to have this flight safety video where flight attendants have a safety checklist just like pilots do. But they weren’t performing it, and they wanted to get them committed to it. So, they had a disaster scenario where the plane takes off, it’s flying, and it has to land on the water. They go to inflate the rafts, and there's no air in the inflators.
Suddenly there's this dramatic moment. The notion is, after that, maybe you do recognize this may be something worthwhile.
We can even do this with compliance. There's a reason we do compliance training. Everybody hates it because it's done as an information dump instead of saying why it’s important.
What should people be able to do as a result of this training that will keep them safe, keep the company from being sued, and keep customers and clients safe? There are reasons—we just have to make them manifest. We have to be willing to spend the effort to understand.
We did the Serious eLearning Manifesto a number of years ago. Michael Allen, Julie Dirksen, who worked for him and wrote the fabulous book Design for How People Learn, Will Thalheimer, one of our great translators of research to practice, and I said, "What’s the difference between typical eLearning?"
We were in the eLearning space, so that made sense. Most of what we said is relevant to learning in general—not just eLearning but also face-to-face. We talked about what makes serious eLearning, and amongst those things was showing that learning should be driven by engagement.
It shouldn’t be easy for authors—it should be engaging to learners and meaningful to them. That, to me, is a really important element that says, "I connect." Once you’ve got them hooked—and it is, you know, again, I mentioned three things because sometimes you can have people going, "You know, I need this, but I know it." And they don’t. You wouldn’t have designed the course if they didn’t.
So, you may have to "slap them upside the head" in various forms, like having them try and demonstrate that they know it and fail. Then, they may be more open to learning. But they also have to believe that what you’re going to do is going to change that. Otherwise, they’ll think, "Yeah, they’re making me do this, but this is just going to be the same old garbage."
As designers, I would suggest our industry—not necessarily you or me—but our industry tends to create outcomes that people don’t trust will lead to meaningful change. We focus so much on, "Let’s make sure they know content," and in cognitive science, we call that "inert knowledge."
You’ll study it, pass a test on it, and go out into the real world, but it won’t even get activated because you’ve never applied it.
Dan Gorgone:
Well, you mentioned a few ways that you can grab the learner’s attention—the audience’s attention—from the beginning, either in a humorous way or a dramatic way, something like that. And, as you said, hit them "upside the head" with some knowledge or scenarios—things that will really make the case that this learning is important.
How do you maintain that, though, throughout the course? Because you don’t want to keep hitting the same pain point every time, and it’s like, "Yes, I understand. I need to know this. Fine, let’s go." How do you maintain that motivation throughout the course as the learners continue?
Clark Quinn:
Well, in a sense, you’ve made a promise. When they believe that they need to know this and that this experience will change that, then you have to deliver on that promise. That doesn’t mean repeating the same message again. It means putting them in situ—giving them models that they recognize as relevant.
That’s more on the cognition side, but they can tell that you understand what they need. Then you show them examples that are interesting—stories about how somebody faced a situation they immediately recognized as, "Oh yeah, I can see that. It would be really nice if I could deal with it." And you show how the model does it.
Cognitive research by John Sweller shows that if you give people examples before they practice, they actually do better and learn faster than if you immediately throw them into practice.
But then your practice similarly has to put them in a situation where they recognize the type of situation and wish they could handle it. You give them enough of a model to succeed.
There are several elements that you need to triangulate. You need the right setting, the right context, and the right level of challenge. It can’t be too easy—that’s boring. It can’t be too hard—that’s frustrating. It has to be pitched in that zone where people are engaged.
It turns out there’s a wonderful alignment between what makes people engaged and what makes effective learning. In fact, Ralph Koster, a game designer, wrote a book called A Theory of Fun and talks about how what makes games fun is learning—which is really cool. For our purposes, learning can and should be "hard fun."
But we have to spend the effort to ensure we’re getting the right stories, the right level of challenge, and that the feedback matters as well. It can’t just be right or wrong—we have to tell them why it was right or why it was wrong.
When you get all this aligned so that learners see they are facing challenges that are meaningful to them, pitched at the right level, with feedback that helps them improve, they see that the designer has cared about their development of competency.
And there are other elements—you need to make it safe. If they fail and it gets held against them—what I call the "Miranda organization" where "anything you say can and will be held against you"—nobody’s going to give their best.
But if you make it safe to fail, so they’re willing to try different things, experiment, and explore, that accelerates learning. When you get all the elements working together to create an experience/
That’s why I like the label "learning experience design" instead of just "instructional design." Instructional design done properly includes this, but it’s too easy to focus on a linear process and focus on the cognitive aspects alone, neglecting the emotional.
I think "learning experience" helps highlight the role emotion plays. We actually have evidence that when people are motivated, they learn better.
Dan Gorgone:
Well, you just mentioned there—well, you mentioned a whole bunch of things there—I want to dig into all of them. But you mentioned the cognitive load of going through a course, and that’s something designers need to consider: the amount of information and the amount of effort, especially that mental effort, that’s going on inside a learner’s head as they’re going from section to section.
Learning experiences can vary wildly—they can be a coffee break or a week-long intensive workshop. As you’re designing these things, how do you keep that cognitive load in mind? How do you give people all the things they need without overloading them?
Clark Quinn:
I actually don’t think it’s that hard to keep cognitive load in mind. I think it’s hard to have the time to deal with it properly. We may recognize that we can’t load the learner with too much, but to do that properly, we’ll make our first best guess about the right level of difficulty for the first practice, the second practice, and so on.
We also need to worry about the context and spread it enough to support transfer. But our first best guess won’t be perfect.
I really worry about waterfall design approaches—where we think, "If we build it, it’s good." No. You make your first best guess, but then you test it. That’s why I like iterative design approaches like Megan Torrance’s LLAMA or Michael Allen’s SAM. David Merrill’s Pebble-in-the-Pond is heading in this direction too.
These approaches say: Create, but focus first on the core practice. Get that right and then supply it with the least amount of models and examples necessary to succeed.
There are things we do wrong. For instance, we have unrealistic expectations about how long it takes to create a good learning experience. And there’s often no testing—people think they’ll get it right the first time. But humans are too complex. We're not don't have as predictable a properties as cement or steel. We're really variable and we, you really do need to make our first best guess.
So you're not wasting a lot of time testing and refining over things you could get right from the get go. But it's that fine tuning that matters. And we should be expecting that there's a little bit of tuning and so by testing and tuning is how we get that cognitive load right.
We make our first best guess. We find out, oh, this was a little too complex, this was too easy, let's ramp it up, we can accelerate it, shorten it. And when we get that right, then we have a much greater likelihood of having the outcome, the impact on the learner's ability to perform, and therefore, the impact on the organization that we need.
Dan Gorgone:
One other thing you mentioned previously was the role of feedback in this learning experience. So there are plenty of asynchronous learning experiences where learners the sit down, they lean back, they watch videos and they might, you know, pop in some questions to multiple choice, you answers to multiple choice questions, things like that.
And there's not a, a great deal of feedback coming their way. It's, you know, more of assessment of knowledge, things like that. But at the same time, some organizations may not be in a position to provide feedback to. They may not have the knowledge internally. They may have brought in something from outside and presented it and said, this is the best that we can do to help train you.
So where do we, you know, are we looking for the balance? Is that what we're looking for? Like with all things, we're looking for balance, we're looking for a good medium ground when it comes to providing feedback, really helpful feedback for learners when they're taking a course, when they're in a learning experience, because, you know, in addition to applying what they have learned and practicing it on their own to really understand what they're doing, that that feedback can be so valuable. So what do you think?
Clark Quinn:
First, if you don’t know enough to give the right feedback, you shouldn’t be producing the course. You literally have to understand it well enough that you can teach it to others. And if you don't, you shouldn't pretend.
Now, you raise a couple good issues and I want to thank you for bringing it up because I didn't mention one of the first things you should do with feedback is give them consequences, show them the outcomes of what they've done because that tells them how the whole world works.
We should be providing with models that explain how the world works and we should put providing examples that show how the model is used to make good decisions. A good model lets you say, "If I do this, then this will happen. If I do that, then that will happen. This is better than that, so I’ll do this." The feedback needs to reinforce that that was the right choice or the wrong choice based upon the model.
But first, see the consequences of the world because that shows you how the world works as well. So you give them the consequences, then you give them the feedback.
Fortunately, I used to rail against tools because they used to exist that only had one piece of feedback for all the wrong answers.
That's ridiculous. Because your alternates to the right choice should reflect the mistakes people make. We don't make largely random errors. We occasionally do. There's a little bit of randomness in our architecture which is evolutionarily adaptive, but most of the mistakes we make are patterned. We're making mistakes based upon models we're bringing in that are inappropriate.
The feedback helps, but you have to, if you've made the alternatives, things that people get wrong, you have different feedback for that way of going wrong than this way of going wrong. So you should make sure that people hear that.
And other than that it's minimal, it shouldn't be personal. You wouldn’t say, “You're an idiot,” unless the character first says that because they're and you're teaching interpersonal skills of dealing with nasty people.
But you know, there are situations, you know, everything has an exception to the rule, right? But by and large you shouldn't comment on them as a person. You should show them the consequences and then give them feedback in the model about why it was the right or wrong choice, that's part of making that safe.
And if you don't understand enough to know the way people go wrong and why they do, you really can't be designing effective learning outcomes approaches to develop their ability to perform. And you really should be thinking what do they need to be able to do after this? And that's what should be the in the examples and that's what should be in the practice. And they should recognize, yes, this is what I need to do. Otherwise you end up back at that inner knowledge situation.
There was some research done by Pooja Agarwal, who's a student of Roediger, who's one of the co-authors on the book “Make it Stick,” which is really good book about taking research on what makes learning stick and translating that into practical recommendations. But she was a student and she found that asking low-level questions, we have this belief that you need to ask questions to make sure they know the knowledge before you give them the challenge to apply that knowledge and situation. Turns out that's not necessary it in the situation where you're having them actually apply the knowledge, they have to retrieve it too. She found that if you just ask those high-level application questions that leads to as good a performance and quicker than asking the level questions and the high level questions. And it was far more effective than just asking the low-level questions.
We can stop asking all those knowledge checks which don't do any good. We should be making people ask questions and ask them to apply that knowledge in the ways they'll have to apply.
Dan Gorgone:
I wanted to ask you something because, in our discussion here, you’ve mentioned so many aspects of learning design leading to engagement that just feel like game design to me. I wanted to ask about the parallels between learning design and game design.
And I wanted to ask you about the parallels between learning design and game design because certainly gamification has, you know, been not just a buzzword.
Yeah, there you go. I see you're already railing against it. But you know, the gamification of learning has been like a buzzword or, or a technique or a strategy.
But that certainly brings up the questions of, well, what does that mean? What does it mean? You add points, you add ribbons or things, badges. What is the real, you know, goal that we're trying to achieve there?
And so it seems like there are so many parallels between game design and learning design that it's worth kind of asking you, since you're the doctor here, what are the overlapping themes here? And what can L&D professionals learn from game design that can help inform their designs?
Clark Quinn:
I didn’t even pay you to ask this question, but I’m glad you did! My first book was about how to design games for learning, and it built on some research I did when I was an academic, before becoming an independent consultant.
There has been a long history of exploration of games for learning and they find that when you do it well. And there's also a bad period in the 80s. A bunch of people were producing games and they put game designers, instruction designers room together and what they came out was effectively chocolate-covered broccoli. This was not fun, right? It was just not good.
But before then, there had been some really great examples.
I really remember Robot Odyssey where you had, were trying to escape the city and you had these robots and you built circuits to make them respond in particular ways so that they could deal with the obstacles faced in getting out of the city. It really intrinsically required you to apply that knowledge in ways that made sense. And that to me is what we're looking for.
And when I say, Raph Koster wrote a book on games and points out how what makes it fun is learning. If you think about it, you get it to a new level in the game and there's these new NPCs you have to combat and they have new tricks that you have to master to beat them. And there's a test at the end, it's called the boss. And you have to apply those tricks you've learned to overcome the boss. And when you do, you've demonstrated you've now mastered this competence and you move on. We can do that with games.
And my most recent book, “Make It Meaningful,” was about taking those principles from games and saying, how do we apply it to the design of learning experiences more broadly? But there are lots of things about. Look at the beginning of games. They have tutorials that are story-driven, but you play Legend of Zelda and somehow you go into this hut and there's this guy who teaches you how to use your sword and it fits into the story. But they're getting you to master the basic skills so that you can then move on and then they can start adding complexity to it. We should be taking a lot from this.
And there's this alignment between what makes effective education, what makes engaging practice. And I had eight elements, that eight is more than my short term memory can keep track, even though I should know this for cold. But it's about meaningful goals and the right level of challenge. And you care about the problem that you're solving. And the problem you're solving is real application of the knowledge you need to learn. And it goes on and on.
And it turns out that's what makes effective education, what makes engaging experiences. When you put those together, you have to understand that alignment or you will mug it up. But if you understand the alignment, you can reliably, repeatedly design learning experiences that are effective education and engaging the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
Can you tell I got wound up, I'm passionate about! So you can, if you have the resources, can create learning experiences are really effective and learners go, oh yeah, this was transformational. Not just instructional.
Dan Gorgone:
It's nice too, when you can, you know, build something that actually is fun and teaches where the learner doesn't feel like they were in some program. It didn't feel like work, it didn't feel like class, it felt like fun, it felt, you know, refreshing and, and rewarding. Right? So I think that's what we all kind of strive for.
But I do want to, I do want to bring our discussion to a close and I want to ask you one more thing as we kind of wrap this up for the L&D professionals that are out there. Certainly they've had a lot to, to to chew on from your responses so far. But what I was thinking, what would be a good way for those people who are watching to kind of assess what they've built so far?
What are, what are some ways that they can get some perhaps feedback from learners or assess their programs and try to better understand the current state of what they've bu so that they can focus on learner engagement and say, let's see if we can build something a little bit better or can we maybe bake in some more engagement along the way and improve that experience so that they feel better about what they're getting?
And I'm just kind of curious, what are some things that we can leave the professionals with as they close out this recording here?
Clark Quinn:
Okay, personal opinion. I think the thing that's going to make the biggest difference between unengaging experiences and engaging experience is the practice. Upfront: hook them emotionally. Do address that. But then make sure your practice is tuned properly. Make sure that they are doing things in the practice that are things they'll have to accomplish in the real world after the learning experience. Put them in interesting stories. Don't just have stock cardboard cutout characters. Give them a little depth. Write more background for this person than actually shows up in the game or in the learning experience.
In this case, it seems like unnecessary work, but it gives some richness to the character and motivation that helps establish that they're not just dumb or evil or bad, but they're interesting and the world is complex and it helps them recognize that and gives them a way to make it happen.
So there's a lot of nuances, but just making sure your practice is in a good setting with that right level of challenge and you have a sequence of contexts that they recognize will cover the space they need to transfer to and increase the level of challenge and complexity at the appropriate level for them. I think if you just focus on making the practice better, you're going to go a long way towards both making it more effective and more engaging.
Dan Gorgone:
I love that.
Sounds like go a little deeper. Go a little deeper. Provide a little something deeper for your for your learners and the experience will deepen as well.
Clark Quinn:
Yep, absolutely.
Dan Gorgone:
I love it. Well, Dr. Quinn thank you so much for joining us once again, Dr. Clark Quinn.
And we can learn more about you from your website, right? Quinnovation.com
Clark Quinn:
Quinnovation.com. Also has a link to my blog. Thoughts that end up appearing in books and presentation stuff tend to show up there first. So, Learnlets.com. I'm involved in a couple other things. The L&D Accelerator is an evidence-based society for L&D practices, and I'm an advisor to Elevate 9, which is still in development, so no further reason to mention it yet, but hopefully soon.
But yeah, thanks for the opportunity and I really hope your audiences will take this opportunity to make experiences better for their learners and raise everybody's game.
Dan Gorgone:
Hey everyone, thanks for watching this episode of the L&D Explorers podcast.
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