Design

Leverage techniques like guided interaction and worked examples to improve knowledge retention and engagement.

Instructionism and the "banking" concept of education

There is a good chance that the educational experience you received is based on instructionism. Instructionism was designed for the industrialized economy of the early 1900's and focused on ensuring that students become compliant and efficient workers. The are no major problems with optimizing for efficiency, but instructionism's focus on workers that are compliant can create problems. (VUCA, Creativity, etc...)

Paulo Freire, has an interesting analogy that can help you understand instructionist. He talks about the "banking" concept of education where knowledge is "deposited" in the learner's head like money in a bank account

"ninguém educa ninguém, como tampouco ninguém se educa a si mesmo: os homens se educam em comunhão, mediatizados pelo mundo."

"Estes, em lugar de serem recipientes dóceis de depósitos, são agora investigadores críticos, em diálogo com o educador, investigador crítico, também."

"A educação autêntica, ... não se faz de A para B ou de A sobre B, mas de A com B"

Basic facts about learning that works

• It isn't enough to learn facts and procedures, you need to know in which situations to apply them and how to modify them as needed depending on the situation.
• Connected learning: complex bundle of knowledge, not a simple list of isolated facts
• Focus on learning AND teaching. Students don't learn by simply getting better teaching. they need to actively participate in their learning process
• Learning env. create safe spaces for experimentation
• Groups and context
• Build on prior knowledge
• Reflection: express their developing knowledge. conversation or creating artifacts

When can I consider onboarding done?

“onboarding isn’t a single moment, or a single feature, or a single flow. It’s a process that connects many activities, over time, to bridge the gap between trying a new product and becoming a core user of it. Tutorials, videos, setup flows, slideshows, and signup flows may all be a part of that journey, but none alone are the journey.” -- Krystal Higgins¹

It depends on your goals, but people learn at different speeds and at a large company they have very different needs. In general you need to draw a line in the sand and declare it done. But in some sense it is never really done. There is always one more thing to learn.

Measuring Learner Satisfaction

Holistic Learning Experiences

1. "Start with the performance problem"
2. "Determine if learning can help"
3. "Clarify what success looks like"
4. "Determine learners' needs"

Authentic Learning Tasks

"An authentic learning task is a task as it exists in real life"

"you need to learn the main 'complex skill' in an integrated manner"

"Complex learning 'involves integrating knowledge, skills, and attitudes; coordinating qualitatively different constituent skills, and usually transferring what's learning... in training settings to ... work setting"

• skill
• knowledge
• attitude

Zone of Proximal Development

"we need to provide the appropriate level of guidance and support to help the learner complete the learning tasks at each 'complexity' level"

Direct instruction model

• "introduction/review: set the stage for learning"
• "development: model the expected learning outcomes by providing clear explanations and examples"
• "guided practice: Monitor and engage pupils with assigned learning tasks"
• "closure: bring the lesson to a conclusion by highlighting what was covered"
• "independent practice: provide learning tasks that are independent of teacher assistance"
• "evaluation: assess progress"

Feedback

• "The goals (Where am I going?)"
• "Current performance (How am I doing?)"
• "Future performance (Where to next?)"

"(feed up, back and forward)"

1. Task level
2. Process level
3. Self-regulation level
4. Self level

"only telling learners that they're doing something wrong can be detrimental if they don't understand why they're doing it wrong and what to change to do it better"

• corrective feedback (what)
• directive feedback (how)
• epistemic feedback (why)

novice learners benefit more when feedback is directive. advanced learners benefit more when feedback is epistemic.

Worked examples

"A worked example typically illustrates a principle or pattern, which helps learners to abstract the important/relevant information to map to similar or even different problems. It helps them go from the surface structure to the deep structure of problems, focusing on structural aspects of problems to derive the underlying concept common to the examples."

Spaced learning

"The effectiveness of spaced learning comes down to this: tackling learning in various short sessions works better than learning than learning that same thing in one long session"

Retrieval practice

"They found that testing repeatedly works better than just one-time testing"

"Production (coming up with the answers yourself works better than recognizing answers)"

Interleaving

"Interleaving is basically a method to space practice"

"When we design related but different learning activities we achieve several good things, For starters, we add a layer where learners need to decide which strategy they need to choose... We help learners figure out what distinguishing elements there are on which they need to base their choice approach..."

Self-directed learning

"SDL is the process where someone takes the initiative to diagnose their own learning needs, formulate their learning goals, identify learning tasks to be carried out to support their learning, and perform those tasks"

"The learner doesn't necessarily always start with determining a learning need. They might just try to complete a work task, run into problems and need to find a solution"

Personal learning network

"the network of people a self-directed learning connects with for the specific purpose of supporting their learning"

• consume
• create
• connect
• contribute