TorranceLearning

Each and every day, pointless elearning is forced upon bored learners who won’t be able to apply what they’ve learned on the job.  Our mission at TorranceLearning is to stop this waste of time, money, and brainpower dead in its tracks!  Our clients know that more meaningful, interactive courses encourage real, active learning – instead of just dumping content on the learner.  Why does it matter?  When we apply knowledge, we are able to absorb it better.  We can reflect on it better, and we learn better. 
 

A tale of two seminars 

Imagine yourself at a presentation given by an expert in some esoteric field – something you know nothing about.  This is the primo guru in the field, and she’s got slide after slide projected on a screen in front of you to prove it.  She’s got bullet points, charts, graphs, and a lot of numbers to back up her talk. You even get a printout of all the slides as big as a telephone book to take home.  Your head is swimming, your eyes glaze over, the air isn’t getting any fresher, and you can no longer tell if this has anything to do with you or not.  You’re now at about two hours past the point where you’re learning anything.

Now imagine learning about the very same topic, but this time, you’re at a “High Technology and You” workshop.  And, as it turns out, it is all about you and how you can use this once esoteric information in your own life.  Instead of talking at you for hours, you participate in activities that are meaningful to your world.  There’s probably a lot of group discussion – maybe even some debate.  You get a chance to explore relevant, real-life situations.

The topic is the same, but the situations are completely different.  In which scenario are you more likely to actually learn something useful?  Why the difference?  When we apply knowledge, we are able to absorb it better.  We can reflect on it better, and we learn better. 

Your elearning should be more like a workshop and less like a lecture.

For that, you need meaningful, action-focused interactions.  Clicking on the ‘Next’ button is not an interaction – it has nothing to do with engaging the learner.  A Jeopardy!® game is interactive but, unless you’re practicing to be on the show, it’s probably not very relevant to how you work.   Just because the learner is clicking with their mouse doesn’t mean the material is clicking with the learner.

So, what makes a meaningful, action-focused interaction?  That depends on the subject matter, the learning objective, and the learners.  For instance, a big part of working with our clients is helping them get to know us a bit.  So, we can use this Meet the TorranceLearning Team interaction to introduce the team and our favorite hobbies.  Give it a try -- it's fun!  Now, matching hobbies with people is a fun way to meet us ... but that same activity wouldn’t work so well with most other topics.   

We’ve developed some interactions we’re pretty proud of, because they were relevant to the material in the course, and they helped learners achieve their objectives.  Here are a few examples:

• In a course we built for the National Marrow Donation Program to train registry drive volunteers, we created an interactive scenario in which learners were asked questions by potential donors.  The questions demonstrated realistic situations that volunteers would likely face in a drive.  The volunteer had to determine how best to answer the potential donor’s questions, and received feedback on the choices they made. 
• For a healthcare client, we included an interaction that had the learner (in this case, a doctor) write out how they would describe to a patient a potentially embarrassing exam the doctor would need to perform.  The doctors had the ability to print what they wrote so they could keep it for future reference.
• For a food industry client, we built in action plans at the end of each course.  Learners could make their own customized action plan to print out and use in coaching discussions with their manager.
• For another client, we included knowledge check questions that asked the learner to respond to a hypothetical colleague’s somewhat “off” idea with a constructive answer, based on the concepts they just learned. 
• In Pulling the Perfect Shot of Espresso, we teach new baristas how to make perfect espresso.  During the online course the barista has to identify pieces of equipment and “press” the correct buttons to make the espresso.   

Yes, interactions make a course more interesting.  But the real benefit goes beyond that.  A meaningful, relevant interaction that pulls the learner in to the experience will drive home key concepts and make the content much more memorable.  The learner experiences the information and is much more likely to recall it back on the job and in the real world, helping to improve performance.

We’d love to talk to you about your learning needs.  Send us a note at info@torrancelearning.com.