How to Design Compelling Learning Experiences?
Investing time and energy into HOW your training will Engage and Empower your trainees will boost the attention and retention rates on the WHAT
So now that you have set up the learning objectives of your upcoming training, identified the knowledge that need to be transmitted and the final evaluation — how do you design an experience that will facilitate learning and magnify lasting impact for your trainees?
Learning Design is an endless and fascinating field of research and experimentation for those who take an interest in brain sciences, cognition, emotions and creative environments. Learning Design is vital for a training to produce impacting results. But it seems that the awareness has not yet fully penetrated the world of adult and professional training. Too many training sessions still rely on a top-down-powerpointed-single-trainer format where students are force-fed tons of data delivered by trainers who are eager to ensure that they have heard it all. If you are lucky, the trainer will include one short hands-on activity where you get to apply your newly acquired skills to a case.
Trainers often pay so much attention to the WHAT, that they are oblivious to the HOW. How do we learn as human beings? How do you create an environment and experience that foster curiosity, sustain focus and prompt retention? These questions are growing even more acute now that distance training has become a staple.
Our experience at Openfield Institute has led us to believe that, very much like Transformation Design, Learning Design is an art & science that calls upon individual and collective drivers that we can trigger by combining a few selected models, methodologies and recipes to create a journey for the trainees. In this article, they are described under three design principles: Engagement — Experience — Empowerment.
Engagement
For the hero to take up their learning journey, they need to first become aware that there is a gap between what they know now and what they do not yet know. This is the trick used by all the best detective stories writers: as readers, we know that a crime has been committed but we do not know who has committed it. Once we know who, we are left hungry for why the crime was committed. Compelling writers thus create a gap between a piece of knowledge that we have and a piece that we want to have. This is how they trigger and sustain their readers’ attention. As a trainer, your challenge is to trigger and sustain curiosity and focus among your trainees. Using this storyteller tip is a great way to engage your students. Provide a piece of knowledge — ask a question that make them want to know the next piece — etc…
Engagement is also deeply stimulated by responsibility. Being responsible for our own growth and transformation is a lasting way to ensure that we will make the most of what the training has to offer. As a trainer or HR, make sure to have students express their own learning needs and objectives upfront and check on them regularly. This is a good way to create a kind of “contract” within the trainee.
Any learning journey is a challenge for its hero. It is paved with obstacles, dreads, tests, fails and more fails. For your students to take up the challenge and learn from their fails, they need to feel safe in the learning environment that you create. Stress and pressure are the worst enemies of learning. Trust is its best friend. It is a good idea to borrow technics from coaches who always begin a gathering with the collective weaving of a safety net. Many simply state a few rules (mutual respect, listening, kindness, etc…) and/or ask the members of the group to state their own rules. These technics help to lay the foundations for trust.
Experience
When you are faced with a room or a Zoom full of students from all walks of life, chances are, they are all different. They understand concepts through different channels, they explain their ideas differently, they express themselves through different means and yes, they learn differently. With his Multiple Intelligences research, Howard Gardner provides a deep insight into our different styles of learning.
In a nutshell, some of us learn better by reading or writing, others by looking at a picture or drawing, others by talking to people, others by playing with concepts or objects, etc.
What this means for you as a trainer is that you should accommodate for more than one or two learning styles when engineering your training sessions. For example, you can alternate between sessions where pairs swap ideas/knowledge, individuals write and read, small groups build 3D prototypes. This is a good way to address multiple styles of learning within a group of people from various backgrounds.
In the context of professional training, you might be facing a crowd of people who share similar ways of learning. Hence their attraction to the same occupation. In that case, you might want to engineer as much sessions as possible where their preferred learning styles are activated. A clichéd illustration of that is sales. Sales people usually enjoy talking and sharing thoughts with others. They draw energy and learn a lot through interaction with others. With a crowd of sales people, you want to allow for many sessions where they can interact with one another. This is another cliché, yet my bet is that a group of accountants will be more stimulated by puzzles and multiple choice questions than by a loud group conversation.
The rapid growth of online training is a fantastic opportunity for gamified learning to make headways. The gamification of learning strongly maximizes the enjoyment and extends the interest of learners over time through connection and collaboration with others, immediate feedback and increasing challenges.
Empowerment
Regardless of the preferred learning style of our participants, we have witnessed, time and time again, that the best way to ensure that the learners deeply understand and sustainably remember knowledge is by having them teach others what they have learned. The Learning Pyramid below show us that we remember only 10% of what we read, but we remember a good 90% of what we teach. Practice doing provides an honorable 75% retention rate.
Concretely, how can you engineer that? Practice doing is already used in training though use-cases and role-plays. Teach others is seldom encountered, although more and more schoolteachers experiment what is called flipped teaching whereby students prepare the course at home and the class is meant to answer questions and practice exercises. For your training, you can as an example, design a session where:
· You dispatch your students into small groups
· In parallel, you have divided the piece of knowledge into X different chunks. Each knowledge chunk is supported by texts, videos, charts, presentations… this is up to you
· Each member of a group is responsible for a chunk from which they must learn as much as possible
· Give them 20–30 minutes to go through the data relating to their chunk
· Then have them teach the other team members of their group what they have learned
This is a lively way to empower your students and make them responsible not only of their own learning, but also that of their fellow learners. As a trainer, your role is to create the right conditions for it to happen, to complete missing pieces and encourage students.
In designing our Masterclass at Openfield Institute, we use the 5Es of Education model created by Matt & Gail Taylor. We create repeating cycles of explain and exemplify for the learners to understand the topic, experience to practice the theory directly, explore the concept through different lenses to become more familiar with it, and once they capture what is useful to them, they create a level of expectation for themselves.
This model is not linear. We sometimes engineer explore before explain or exemplify. This guidance shows how your design can empower your students to take a proactive part in their own learning.
Designing a learning journey will take you, the designer, onto an exciting play field where your focus is not only on the knowledge to convey but also, to the same extent, on creating the best possible experience for your trainees to learn. The end result of such an equation is optimum chances for your students to understand, apply, analyze and create. As an HR, the investment you make into the Experience will pay off by ensuring the learning is deeply and sustainably rooted within the individuals and the teams of your organisation.
