ELEARNING DESIGN

In any training environment,  we believe the learners must understand why the learning is relevant to them, and the quickest way to achieve this is to contextualise the content. People take more notice if they understand how a subject will affect them and, crucially, if they can see the consequences of getting things right and how doing things wrong might affect them.

Scenarios can be used to simulate real-life situations that the learner identifies with (Show me, don’t tell me!) while involving them in a narrative relevant to their everyday lives creates greater engagement.

Creating a believable, relatable narrative can be challenging, especially for a varied audience, but we believe the crucial factors are:

• Understanding the problem
• Recognising the triggers
• Identifying key decision points

It means the core content, when it comes, is more likely to stick, and the scenario provides a memorable hook that can be referred back to, helping the transfer from working memory to long-term memory, consequently making it easier to apply in the real world.

Appropriateness is about recognising the learner’s current level of knowledge and making the learning flexible enough for them to engage with it in different ways to meet their requirements.

To reduce extraneous load (issues associated with how the material is presented that prevents learning), we believe a simple-to-complex sequencing should be used, referred to as ‘scaffolding’.

In digital learning, ‘scaffolds’ typically present information in a graphical form or ‘chunk’ information in a meaningful way, which can be shown or explored by the learner before undertaking any learning tasks.  This allows them to see the ‘big picture’ before drilling into the content and helps support information retention.

Chunking content in this way makes it easier to recall, and research indicates that ‘bite-sized’ learning supports learner focus too. In a world in which social media and content on-demand is the ‘norm’, expecting learners to stayed focused on a single 30-minute module is not always realistic.

An important challenge often overlooked when developing courses, is creating content that learners can relate to, making it look, feel and sound like something they recognise, acknowledging generational, gender and cultural differences.

We strive hard to be inclusive when creating our modules, from accessibility to language (for example, being mindful of pronouns) to inclusive visual representations.

While learning styles are notoriously difficult to cater for in digital learning, especially if the course is not being targeted to a known cohort, a variety of media should be included, visual, auditory, reading and practical, to cater for as broad a preference as possible.

If learners don’t feel represented, or worse excluded, due to learning preferences, language and cultural barriers, training programmes are far less likely to be effective.

In other words, we always strive to find the best fit for your content that will work for every learner.

When an individual is faced with learning something new, one of the best ways to cement that learning is to encourage them to apply it in a safe environment, while connecting it with what they already know – and a great way to achieve this is to use formative assessment.

Within a module, we can use simple knowledge check questions with feedback or more complex scenarios, but the key is providing a realistic challenge with formative feedback. The benefits of this include:

• Applying decisions in a ‘safe environment’ and understanding the consequences
• Allowing people to practice the same task with different variables and see different outcomes.