Design Excellent Learning?

Looking to level up your game as a teacher, facilitator, or designer of any learning experience? Here are some science-backed guidelines to follow.

Books to Read

If you like this stuff, you should probably also buy and read 2 books (feel free to expense them as Professional Development):

1. Make it Stick (high-level, user friendly)
2. eLearning and the Science of Instruction (technical reference)

Create an Awesome Live Training

Build Excellent Slides for Learning

When you’re ready to go, start with this template designed to bake in great learning science principles to your presentation:

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1f1PfWUp_A-cIcQL4PkaiLDt1E51ovL2iRcoLAO1lOcQ/copy

Then, schedule some time with Abnia if you want to chat further about excellent instructional design and teaching. Everyone can always keep building those two skills, and she’s here to help 🙂

Create Effective Video, Decks, or Docs

Follow the 5 Ss to create learning materials that deliver on their promise.

Skills

At the start of the video, document, or deck, quickly outline the skills you’re going to teach the learner. “Today we’re going to [do a thing]…” If you can’t phrase the content of your video or document this way, it’s probably not going to make for great learning. Learners must know how success is shown or measured in order to learn. These are called “Learning Objectives” and if you’d like to get great at writing them, check out this guide from Carnegie Mellon: https://www.cmu.edu/teaching/designteach/design/learningobjectives.html

Short

Five minutes maximum read or watch time. When was the last time you paid perfect attention to an hour-long educational video? Never, that’s when. If you’ve got too much material for five minutes then you’ve got more than one video to make.

Simple

Don’t add elements like decorative graphics, music, or anything else just to “make the learning fun.”

DO use graphics, animation, or sounds when they:

• Provide a clarifying example
• Show the steps in a process
• Demonstrate a relationship (especially charts)
• Show a transformation

DON’T use graphics, animations, or sounds:

• For decoration
• For simple illustration (random picture of a tree when you say “tree”)

This doesn’t mean you can’t use humor or have fun with your content. The goal is for everything you add to be both educational and interesting, not just one or the other.

Singular

Address your learners in the second-person singular (“you” not “you guys”). Remember that you’re speaking to one person at a time on the other side of that camera or screen, not to a crowd. For video, make “eye contact” with the camera as much as possible.

Summarize

At the conclusion of your video, doc, or deck, quickly summarize the steps in the process, concepts to consider, important things to remember, measures of success, etc. to leave the learner with a cohesive picture of what you’re trying to teach.

Collect Feedback

Designing a great product of any kind starts and ends with researching your users. Take one great step in that direction by collecting feedback on your live experience!

Do you want to use CTC standard metrics to collect feedback and improve your events in the future?

Look no further than this customizable link. Just replace [EVENT-TAG] with whatever you want the identifying tag for your event to be, and send the completed link to your attendees.

Let Learning and Development know what questions you have 🙂

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdHBsYZ-TvAtTPa3KXeEOEJN4gufM0JuzWMeTgfEmv3GnqGnw/viewform?usp=pp_url&entry.1575815673=[EVENT-TAG]

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