How To Avoid Overwhelming Learners
The deluge is upon us! Run for cover!
Well, I’m not talking about an invasion or a natural calamity. I’m talking about the stuff that we are faced with every minute of every day – the torrent of information that keeps hitting us, threatening to sweep us off our feet and drown us, if we’re not careful.
Ah, the curse of social media, which constantly bombards us with information from all directions. Combine this with a heady dose of FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out), and we can be sure to get inundated in the oncoming flood, without retaining much that is useful.
I have a fairly simple practice for handling social media. There are a select few in the industry who I really respect and admire, and I therefore want to listen to their opinions. Over the years, I’ve ruthlessly eliminated any kind of distraction, which basically is any information that is not from this select few. Of course, I keep editing and pruning this list.
My challenge is, this ‘select few’ runs into a few dozens, if not more. So, what for many is typically a barrage of irrelevant information concealing a few precious gems, I have a steady stream of high quality, valuable content, which of course I don’t want to miss out on (this is real FOMO in action, you see).
Okay, having said that, this article is not about how I handle social media. It’s about we can ensure that learners don’t get washed away in a similar onslaught of information in the courses we design.
How many times do we end up having to include way more than the average individual can digest in a one hour course, or in a day’s workshop? Because the Subject Matter Expert insisted “they have to know this”. Or the unit manager said “this part is mandatory”. We see their point, so we end up adding that piece of content.
A drop here, and a drop there. And slowly but surely, the drops add up to form the deluge.
We try of course to avoid overwhelming learners with too much information. Because we know that an overwhelmed mind is ill-equipped for learning. Scientists and researchers have time and again proved that cognitive overload (the situation when we’re faced with more info than we can handle) is actually detrimental to the learning process.
So what can we do to avoid overwhelming learners? Here are a few approaches I can think of:
1. Break Up The Information Into Smaller, Bite-Sized Pieces
Content chunked into digestible units can go a long way in helping learners absorb the information easily, without feeling overwhelmed. We should, of course, take care to ensure that this is done well, and that the chunks are not too interdependent.
2. Distribute The Information Over A Period Of Time
If it is not critical that the audience should consume the entire content in a short time (applicable for instructor-led courses where traveling is involved), it would help to deliver the content piecemeal over a stretched duration. Referred to as spaced practice, this approach has been seen to have tremendous benefits for learning and retention.
3. Create Information Loops
Chunking and spaced practice can only work well if sufficient repetition is built in to allow for absorption into long term memory. Therefore, whatever strategies are adopted, make sure to create these information loops, which are basically about summarizing and repeating content at varied intervals.
4. Cover Each Point In Greater Depth, Or Provide Context
In a recent project, we were required to help learners recall safety precautions they had to take before undertaking any maintenance work. Learners had gone through in-depth training on these safety precautions, and the client insisted that it would be sufficient if we added a line mentioning this, along with a generic image indicating safety. We did, but in addition, we added a couple of lines containing a super quick overview of the safety precautions, and provided a link to the original course if they wished to review it. Result: the overview and the link helped learners better recall what they had learned in the original training.
5. Increase The Duration Of The Course, If Required
Implementing any or all of the above approaches might mean an increase in the duration of the course… which is okay, in my opinion. Ultimately, what counts is that learners have understood the content well enough that they are able to translate it back in their workplace.
What do you think? What other approaches can we use to make sure that we don’t end up overwhelming learners?
