Thursday, August 23, 2007

Kineo's August Rapid e-Learning Newsletter


If you've been following my blog for awhile, then you already know how I feel about the folks at Kineo. They provide some fabulous (free) resources to the e-Learning community and have just been nominated the "Best New Kids on the Block" by the Brighton and Hove Business Awards.

This month's newsletter is no exception. Here are a few highlights:

Sustaining Performance in Rapid e-Learning
includes some great tips and ideas for how to create effective follow-up activities to ensure knowledge transfer on the job. Although it's geared towards "rapid e-Learning" efforts, these guidelines can be applied to any type of training.

They've also got an audio interview with Dr. Itiel Dror who discusses the brain and e-Learning. Dr. Dror is a cognitive scientist, who urges instructional designers to keep the focus on the learner rather than the learning materials and to design the learning experience to the human brain.

Dror states that learning designers shouldn't worry so much about learning theories, which are too abstract and don't guide us in how to design learning. Instead, we should learn about the actual mechanisms in the brain.

Some highlights from the interview:
  • Understand cognitive load so you can optimize the presentation of materials to the learner and increase the capacity of learners to acquire new information.
  • Get into the learner's shoes.
  • Learn ways to help people learn more in less time: use exaggeration to burn concepts and ideas into memory.
Dr. Dror's bottom line: to optimize the learning experience, learning designers must understand the cognitive systems in the brain.

You can read old Kineo newsletters (check out the June newsletter and listen to an interview with me!) and subscribe at the Kineo Newsletter page.

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