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Six Key Principles of High Impact Learning

COE attendant

 

Prof Roger Schank, CEO Socratic Arts coined the quote: “There are only two things wrong with education. What we teach and how we teach it”. The quote holds in its essence, the purpose of High Impact Learning. It provides a practical and comprehensive approach for bridging the gap between employee and organizational goals and launching training initiatives of visible and lasting impact.

The recent Community of Experts workshop Achieving High Impact Learning, presented by i-Fundi General Manager, Joel Perry, saw great minds collaborate and engage on the topic. It was indeed a quality learning experience.

The key take away from the workshop was a breakdown of the six key principles to help guide the creation of high impact learning experiences. The principles are:

  1. Contextualized

Convey the context or “the bigger picture” for the topic, preferably at the beginning of the programme. Learners should know what the ultimate goal of the programme is. They should be able to see in detail how each lesson helps them to achieve that goal.

  1. Relevant

Keep training programmes relevant by ensuring that audience and content are as aligned as possible. Employees are most interested in learning subjects that have immediate relevance to their work and/or personal lives. They want knowledge or skills that can be immediately applied and that will be useful for years to come.

  1. Problem-Based

Use real-life problems or case studies that learners might have encountered. This enables participants to teach themselves. In this way, they become “producers” rather than “consumers” of knowledge.

  1. Learn by Doing

The best way to learn a skill is to practice the skill. Incorporate as many role plays and simulations into lessons as possible. Taking an active rather than a passive role makes for a higher quality learning experience. In the workplace, learning should be supported by effective leadership, which includes mentoring, coaching and overall supervision.

  1. Social

Social learning encourages a community of learners, learning as much from the collective as from the expert facilitator. Use interactive games and draw on the practical knowledge and experience that participants bring to the classroom.

  1. Self-Directed

Self-directed learning empowers learners to set their own direction, enabling them to choose what and how much to learn and know. Learning content must be responsive to the needs of the learner and learning materials must be accessible to learners wherever they are and whenever they want to study. eLearning is ideal to help learners meet this objective. Learning content must be responsive to the needs of the learner and their individual learning styles.

In a nutshell, to achieve high impact learning, we must understand why we’re learning something to place it in the context of a larger goal or need. We learn better when our past experiences are appreciated and we don’’t waste time learning things we already know. We appreciate it when the experience is interactive, fun, practical and social – a kind of “edutainment”. We learn better when the programme is problem-centered, instead of content-oriented. Finally, using technology, we should be able to direct our own learning and access it anytime and anywhere.

To download the presentation, click here.