Reimagine Learning: Start with the Learning Journey
In this Article
The tools we use to train people seem to change every year. A new platform, new features, a fresh set of buzzwords at every conference. Then you attend the next training session or online class, and you’re back in 1920, complete with tables in rows and a presenter at the front using slides instead of a blackboard. This same ‘event’ plays out in school classrooms, university lecture halls and online training sessions with very little change.
Learning seems to have stubbornly refused to budge from age-old models that use lecture- style scenarios. What is more, most of the latest and greatest learning and assessment tools available merely replicate this lecture-style model. While the tools look shiny and sparkly, the underlying premise often stays pushing-of-content similar to that used in lecture-style classrooms.
How do people learn?
Learning scientists from Vygotsky to Piaget and everyone in between and after, including South Africa’s Seymour Papert (Google him – he did incredible work!), repeatedly find that people really learn when they engage in learning activities, whether on their own or with others; thinking and reflecting on their learning; and engaging in purposeful assessment tasks.Active learning can be included in project-based learning, gamified learning or experiential scenario-based learning. It can take place in the form of a hands-on task, a conversation between colleagues, a question that has to be reasoned through, or a moment of reflection once the work is done. My PhD researched play-based learning in adult learning contexts, showing how the principles of play can become highly effective when designing training and learning programmes that change people’s lives.
The golden thread through all of this is active engagement with learning, which is only possible when learning is designed to be interactive and engaging. This is the kind of learning that pulls learners to the learning experience, gets them excited about the learning journey, and ultimately, is the kind of learning that sticks.
The Danger of Passive Learning
Regardless of the content included in a course, if there is no active learning, the learning experience will remain a passive journey of reading, viewing, paging through content and clicking on buttons.
Passive learning feels like an endless vertical scroll, progressively glazed eyes, and dwindling interest. It looks like high drop-out rates, many non-completes and broken promises from students that they’ll finish the course. This results in almost no change on the ground. Despite the excellent learning content that you created, learning doesn’t stick. Worse, because students don’t engage with the learning, they merely return to what they know, a clear reminder that scrolling through content is not learning.
Active Engagement in Learning
Think back to the last online course you clicked into for work. Perhaps a compliance module, a walkthrough of a new system, or an induction for a role you’d just started. Did it feel alive and engaging, or did it feel like a filing cabinet of PDFs that someone had bolted onto the internet next to the occasional video? The difference between those two experiences usually comes down to a single word: interaction. A course designed to push content can hold excellent material and still feel completely flat, since reading one slide after another is a passive activity, which is definitely not the same as engaging in thinking, doing and reflecting – the hallmarks of active engagement.
Terry Anderson, a researcher who spent years studying how people learn online, gave us a simple and lasting way to think about this. He described three kinds of interaction that support active engagement and make online learning work. Once you understand all three, you will spot their presence – or absence – in all sorts of learning experiences.
Reimagining the Learning Journey
Has the penny dropped yet? The problem with changing learning was never the tools. The problem is that we keep pouring new tools into a very old mould, one built for pushing content to people rather than pulling them into the learning experience. No matter how flashy or high-tech a platform is, it can never fix what is inherently a push-content problem.
This is where Anderson’s three forms of interaction is a particularly useful learning design tool. Using them, the learning development team can deliberately include different forms of interaction, designing learning for engagement, purposefully building opportunities for active learning, and only settling for passive content delivery in rare cases. Anderson’s model gives us a simple lens to hold over any course and ask: Is the learner doing something with the content? Are they submitting reflections or assignments, and getting timely and helpful responses from a knowledgeable guide? Did you include opportunities for trainees or students to learn alongside other people? When even one of these types of interactions is included, Anderson tells us the course moves past passive scrolling and the potential for actual learning increases significantly.
Designing for interaction is what turns a course from something people click through into something that actually sticks.
Next week, we look more closely at the interaction people most often assume belongs in a physical room: learner-to-learner. More importantly, we show you how peer-to-peer learning can happen inside a Moodle course, even when your learners are never online at the same time.
Ready to move beyond passive learning?
Technology alone doesn’t create engagement—good learning design does. Whether you’re building a new Moodle platform or improving an existing one, Limina can help you create learning experiences that encourage interaction, reflection, collaboration, and lasting learning.
Book a complimentary 30-minute consultation to discuss how we can help you design Moodle courses that learners want to complete.
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Dr Isabel Tarling – CEO
Isabel Tarling is a learning sciences scholar, programme designer and education researcher, with a PhD from the University of Cape Town. Her research in online and technology-supported learning forms the foundation for much of her writing. She aims to build easy-to-understand bridges between evidence-based research and its everyday application in real-world contexts. Isabel is the founder of Limina, where these ideas are put to work to reimagine learning for organisations of all shapes and sizes.