Learning Quality Matters: 3 Key Strategies to Drive Engagement

With the pandemic continuously hitting the global economy, organisations have been finding ways to create blended learning champion. Successfully engaging learners remotely has not been easy, yet it is an inevitable part to achieve any training impact. Learning quality matters, that is why I am going to share 3 tips that are vital to uplift learning experience on the digital means, thus facilitating transfer of knowledge. We will look at it from a scientific angle in accordance with the memory structure of human.

1. Keep It Short

E-learning videos are popular sources of digital learning. Although online videos can cater a large group of learners to watch anytime and anywhere, the effectiveness is questionable due to tech fatigue. A study conducted by Microsoft found human’s attention span has dropped by one third (from 12 seconds to 8 seconds) in the past 10 years with the rise of digital technology (Gausby, 2015). Fortunately, simply shortening the video length can tackle the issue. Study has suggested 6 minutes long videos are more attractive to learners, and the engagement is more impactful when the length is within 3 minutes (Guo et al., 2014). People have a higher tendency to view and finish those videos.

Trainers should make the content more precise and break them into smaller chunks. While shorter videos unavoidably leave some content out, they are compatible to our attention span, so ends up being more efficient. Imagine how satisfying the session would be if learners can absorb all the presented key points? So, keep your videos short and sweet.

2. Make It Fun

Another magic formula is to maximise enjoyment and capture the interest of learners. Gamification of learning involves gaming elements in online trainings, motivates leaners to actively participate, thereby effectively promote memory retention. On the one hand, learners can take active control over the training environment, which allows them to immerse and derive solutions in an innovative way (Ormrod, 2015). On the other hand, personal experience in the game enables learners to connect insights gained in the debriefing session with information already built in the memory network, making encoding and retrieval stronger and easier, stimulating memory.

What’s more, personal involvement fosters knowledge to be stored as episodic memory (Tulving, 2002), which warrants the learning to be implanted in the long-term memory. Although it is effortful to gamify monotonous learning content, the benefits can be huge. In this regard, try to make the contents fun and attractive.

?3. Solutions Based

Ideally, when learners are capable to apply knowledge and skills learnt to the workplace, organisations’ return on investment in learning and development would be maximised. Nevertheless, transfer of learning is not as straightforward as people imagine. Specific and practical training materials have to be given according to learners' circumstances. Instead of identifying common problems in the workplace, trainers can provide targeted solutions based on learners' distinct working scenarios with respect to their work roles and industries (Carr, 2010).

When the learning materials assemble employees’ work contexts, target their pain points and offer direct solutions, transfer of knowledge is strengthened.

Filtering out distractions and irrelevant information prevent learners’ attention to slip away. Apart from that, learners should also be encouraged to practice the learnt solutions in similar situations to reinforce information encoding process, and transfer the new knowledge into long-term memory.?

In short, be precise, keep it short. Make the content fun and engaging. Stay personal and focus on relevant scenarios. As virtual learning offers great flexibility and efficiency, it is clear that the market would sustain the demand for high quality digital learning resources. These strategies will keep you good hands to advance learning experience amidst a digitalised world where tech adoption and multi-screening behaviours are popular.?

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References

Carr, M. (2010). The importance of metacognition for conceptual change and strategy use in mathematics. In H. S. Waters & W. Schneider (Eds.), Metacognition, Strategy Use, and Instruction (pp. 176-197). Guilford Press.

Gausby, A. (2015). Attention Spans. https://dl.motamem.org/microsoft-attention-spans-research-report.pdf

Guo, P. J., Kim, J., & Rubin, R. (2014). How video production affects student engagement: an empirical study of MOOC videos. In?Proceedings of the first ACM conference on Learning @ scale conference?(pp. 41–50).

Ormrod, J. E. (2015). Human learning (W. Lin, L. Yanping, L. Fenglin, & L. Zheng, Trans.; 6 ed.). China Renmin University Press.

Tulving, E. (2002). Episodic memory: From mind to brain. Annual Review of Psychology, 53, 1-25. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.psych.53.100901.135114