September 8th, 2008 by Learning Systems

Have you ever been well educated on a subject, but when the time came to put your knowledge into practice, you didn’t feel entirely confident?

In analyzing how the memory retains and later provides information, it’s important to take into account both the learning situation and the performance situation in a learning system. In traditional learning systems, educators have tend to focus on the learning situation without considering the context in which the learner will perform. The stress is on how to present the information and aid the learner’s memory, but what about the other end of the process, when the learner needs to pull out that knowledge and put it into practice?

If the learner is unable to easily access what’s stored in memory, that knowledge is rendered useless. A successful learning system uses strategies that aid the learner in retrieving information during performance.

September 5th, 2008 by Learning Systems

The order in which content is presented to your learners is another crucial aspect of a learning system. It seems rather obvious that content ought to be taught in a logical order, but again, teachers’ enthusiasm can wreak havoc, or a complex subject can mislead teachers into sorting it out in irregular pieces—maybe works of literature in order of purported importance, and later of time periods, confused with historical events. Sometimes, even if teachers disseminate their material in an organized fashion and in the correct order, a learner might disagree with the order of this learning system and restructure the content for him or herself.

The possibilities for needless confusion in a learning system are endless. Most plausible solution: Convey content in an easily digestible order.

September 5th, 2008 by Learning Systems

A crucial concept, and yet one of the simplest to implement once you get down to business with your learning system. Teachers with the best intentions can get caught up in their own excitement and idealism about the course, overlooking the limited human capacities of their learners’ memory. The teachers will then hold the learners up to standards placed too high up, and the learning system will let everybody down. And all due to careless chunking of the material.

It’s easy for anyone to lose track of what is in their head versus what they are putting out there for everyone else to see—sometimes what you say or write will convey less than you mean to because you’ve gone over it in your head so many times, or vice versa. Extra elaboration, unnecessary details, frills and bows derail and distract instead of enhance. Solution: remember that less is more.

September 5th, 2008 by Learning Systems

Overwhelmingly common, this pattern permeates learning systems across the globe. Learners become saturated with minutiae interspersed with what they’re actually supposed to focus on, or, even worse, there is so very much information—all relevant, important, and necessary to remember—that students’ brains fizz and burn out. Most course curricula are too long, preventing the learner from being able to absorb and process the information without it evaporation just moments after it was utilized in a quiz or exam. If it was remembered for that long at all.

Most learning systems—and teachers too—are ignorant to the workings of memory, which in turn leads to lacking preparation regarding size and structure of the content. Structure is a major component of the failure inherent in these leaning systems: too much of the material is presented in an ineffective manner. Solution: simplify.