Accessible learning: human connection with smart technology.

The cultural significance of storytelling in sharing, instilling and reinforcing cultural values, entertaining, teaching and sharing information is well established. It’s currently experiencing a boom (e.g. video streaming services, social media) and creating a competitive landscape for people’s time and attention. In this context learning has to acknowledge that it also competes for eyeballs, and that the best storytellers are most likely to win.

Stories connect with people emotionally, and they do this by engaging with universal human values. In the context of creating effective corporate learning, we also need to humanize our content – because before people can engage at even the simplest level, they have to care. It’s not even that complicated, some excellent examples of human values that work well within learning include security (removing fear of the unknown) power & achievement (personal gain) self-direction (a sense of control) and tradition (a sense of cultural continuity). These all lend themselves well to being packaged up into learning stories.

I appreciate that whilst there is cross over, learning and entertainment stories are not the same thing. The reliance on remotely delivered learning over the last 18 months has made people review what best practise looks like. The importance of ‘teacher presence’, physical interaction and peer-to-peer networks in the context of learning, is well captured in this recent article by Ben Pike of Masterstart. It’s well worth a read on how people learn, the importance of access to both live and on-demand learning content, particularly for less well-educated groups. It is this sense of creating learning that doesn’t leave any one particular group behind that interests me.??

My company is a creative digital learning agency. We focus on creating learning stories that can be delivered via self-directed eLearning, bite sized learning content and digitised classroom manuals. Our portfolio of services can replace a tutor when not available or augment the tutor’s capabilities with impactful content to share in the physical or virtual classroom. The technology we use creates new ways of telling stories to share knowledge and inspire new behaviours. Our expert learning designers use universal human values to ensure a human connection runs through the content. That sensibility combined with our agnostic approach to technology, aims to create the most universal accessibility.

We think it’s the most fascinating (and important) topic to explore right now. So Fenturi are hosting a webinar called “Creating an Emotional Connection”, where we will be outlining how a human connection runs through all our digital based learning courses. We will be doing a deep dive into specific techniques, supported by numerous examples of our work. You can register here and we hope you can make it and that you’ll share your questions and thoughts on the topic too.

We want your thoughts because often the best ideas come from being open and collaborative; as we wrote this article we spoke to our friend Dr Simon Moore, CEO of Innovation Bubble, the psychological insights and behavioural solutions consultancy. He shared his perspective, which serves as an excellent concluding thought, which I’ll finish with here:

“Emotions are the driving force behind human action, and inaction! We underestimate how influential emotional experience is in relation to the relevance, understanding, and remembering of information. This is because emotions are our primordial judgement system - they inform us very quickly in terms of risk, threat and opportunity. We put more effort and energy into things that make us feel positive, but if it doesn’t feel right we do not engage or even actively avoid.”