Learning Research & Science
Insights culled from analysis and inquiry that keep learning professionals up-to-date on how people learn, technologies, approaches, and performance improvement practices.
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eLearning Guild Research: Survey Data vs. Crowdsourcing Data
Instructional designers often need to have reliable data about how people do things, but no data exists. When this happens, designers can take a chance and go with their gut, or they can do actual research. But formal research is hard and it is expensive. A better answer sometimes may be to collect observations using crowdsourcing. This month, learn how to do effective crowdsourcing.
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Brain Science: Enable Your Brain to Remember Almost Everything
In his recent columns, Art has explained the nature of memory and ways to change the shape of the “forgetting curve.” In this column, he adds another important technique for overcoming forgetting: boostering.
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Get Small: Reframe eLearning Design
Given the task of creating eLearning that teaches “soft skills”—sales, coaching, and leadership are examples–it’s tempting to try to pack as much information as possible into a module. There’s a better, research-supported way to approach this kind of design challenge and shrink workplace learning to a manageable size. Read about it here.
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eLearning Guild Research: Making mLearning Usable
The eLearning Guild has completed an important study of how people interact with mobile devices. If you design mobile apps for eLearning, this study will help you design better: minimum sizes of text for various mobile devices, preferences for touching different devices, designing for keyboards, design differences for phones, phablets, small tablets, and large tablets, and much more.
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Brain Science: Overcoming the Forgetting Curve
It is a painful fact that employees quickly forget most of what they learn in training. The forgetting curve quickly erodes the benefit of the instruction—that is, unless you know the secret of the “booster”! Here is a simple way, proven through research, to improve memory and behavior change following instruction.
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Making mLearning Usable: How We Use Mobile Devices
In this report, Steven Hoober, with Patti Shank, analyzes the results of studies of how people hold, touch, and use the various tablet sizes, and explores the implications for the design of mobile interfaces and mLearning.
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Brain Science: The Forgetting Curve–the Dirty Secret of Corporate Training
We try to design training, including eLearning, so that people will remember what they learn and apply it to the workplace. But people forget half the information that instruction presents within an hour, and 90 percent of it within a week. Can a designer do anything about this? Read what neuroscience knows about why we forget—the foundation for understanding how to deal with it.
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Brain Science: The Neuroscience of Teaching and Learning
The human brain is enormously powerful. It contains and controls our memories, our passions, our thinking, and our learning. Successful eLearning applications must work in a way that is compatible with the way the brain learns. Today we introduce a new column that will explore what neuroscience is finding out about the way the 100 billion nerve cells in the brain function!
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2014 Global eLearning Salary & Compensation Report
Patti Shank explores trends in eLearning pay worldwide, looking at variables such as company size, number of people managed, and experience and providing a salary calculator to help readers figure baseline salaries.
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eLearning Guild Research: Karl Kapp on Using Stories
Research shows that stories are extremely powerful tools for learning. That’s because our brain has a natural ability to remember facts told in a story. The implications of using stories to support learning are described in the Guild’s new Big Answers report, Using Stories for Learning: Answers to Five Key Questions, by Karl Kapp. This article explains why you need to read the report.