As a training coordinator, you must know what makes for an excellent eLearning experience, such as engaging, well-designed, relevant, and informative content. However, one critical component must be present for your content to succeed, and that is ensuring that something is not only learned but also retained.
The fact is that it’s human nature to forget a lot of what we learn, watch, think about, and even work hard to remember. New information is moved from our short-term memory to our long-term memory through a process called learning retention. In other words, it’s all about making new information stick. Even though it’s inevitable that people will forget things, online instructors are always looking for practical ways to assist their corporate learners in effectively remembering information for extended periods.
This article will give you valuable tips for designing training sessions to improve learning retention.
- Put Important Information In The Beginning
What do employees remember if they don’t remember everything? It would be ideal if learners remembered only the most crucial bits of information, but you need to clarify those portions and concepts; chances are they’ll take away a random assortment of facts.
Therefore, focusing on important information is essential to improving learners’ likelihood of memorizing it. There are several ways to accomplish this, such as by drawing the learner’s attention to important points by making them bold and more significant. Relevant points should be mentioned in your learning outcomes to emphasize the most important takeaways. Make sure that any additional information supports rather than distracts from the main issues, and summarize the essential points while concluding the content.
- Reinforcement Through Social Learning
In any corporate learning environment, peer communication is a significant part of our learning. Offering opportunities for learning reinforcement also aids in knowledge retention. This gives you a chance to guarantee that the information is flowing smoothly. You can ensure a constant learning flow for your learners by sparking conversations on discussion boards and assigning collaborative coursework on whiteboards. Similarly, online meetings and themed online communities can be used to ensure subject-matter knowledge transfer.
- Bite-Sized Learning With Microlearning
Learning new skills can be intimidating, especially with lengthy videos and text materials. Extended training modules can lead to long gaps between assessments, which is their main drawback. It also deprives the learner of the ability to choose where to begin the course. Moreover, engaging your employees with extended modules takes a lot of effort.
Choose from among the best LMS apps that include social learning and microlearning features and enable you to provide bite-sized learning experiences to your employees. Microlearning significantly improves knowledge retention and provides learners with various other benefits, such as convenience and flexibility.
- Incorporate Interactive Elements
We are far more likely to remember engaging and interactive learning experiences that completely captivate us. Design your training programs with interactive elements such as click-and-learn and rollover interactivities. Better retention is enabled by interactive assessments between learning course materials and instant feedback. The majority of corporate learners agree that being able to engage with information aids in skill development.
- Use Simulation-Based Learning
Using simulation-based learning, you can give your learners an active learning experience while also letting them use what they’ve learned in real-world situations. A practical learning experience is more likely to stick with us than a theoretical one. We feel a sense of ownership over our learning when we can put what we’ve learned into practice, which inspires and engages us. This is why most of the best LMS software packages include the tools needed to provide simulation-based learning.
- Use Stories To Convey Knowledge
When it comes to retention, storytelling is unquestionably the most effective training method. For thousands of years, humans from around the world have handed down knowledge through stories. It can be as effective to hear a story that includes a lesson as it is to go through the experiences yourself. However, stories will only work for some types of information. Inserting numbers and data into a story is unlikely to work. Stories are far more effective at conveying the results of actions.
Conclusion
Ultimately, the key to achieving good learning retention is to take advantage of the adult brain’s ability to absorb and retain information, keep learning goals clear, keep training courses short, make an explicit connection between what is being learned and true context, and finally, get employees to put that knowledge to use as soon as possible.
