How to increase your employees’ learning capacity
If you're a corporate trainer or responsible for online learning, providing effective e-learning to your employees is one of your main goals. The problem is, some employees will inevitably pick things up more easily than others, which can create imbalances in learning and decrease the productivity of the entire company. To counteract this issue, you need to find ways to help everyone reach their full learning potential, no matter how fast they learn. In this article, we’ll explain why people learn at different speeds and show you some specific strategies that you can use to improve learning for all your employees, across the board.
Why learning capacity is so important in corporate training
When you’re training a cohort of employees, you need to make sure that each of them reaches the learning goals that you set out for the training session or course. The problem is that some people learn more quickly than others — which means that you’ll either need to slow down the training or leave the slower learners behind. Neither option is ideal. If you slow things down, you might bore the quicker learners and risk losing their engagement. But if you don’t, the less efficient learners might not learn what they need to know.
Current Challenges and Trends
The modern workplace is very diverse, and that’s a challenge for corporate training. For example, older employees may struggle to use eLearning technology, while younger employees might need more interactive elements to keep their attention.
To address these challenges, many companies are using adaptive learning and creating eLearning personas to fine-tune the learning experience for their employees. By meeting everyone where they are, these methods improve learning efficiency and ensure that no one gets left behind or bored. Other popular trends in corporate training include gamification, microlearning, and scenario-based learning, all of which can help to improve learning efficiency.
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Scientific Background
Science (as well as personal experience) shows us that individuals vary in their capacity for learning new information — and the speed at which they do it. This is the result of several factors:
Cognitive abilities and neuroplasticity
These can vary from person to person and will affect the speed at which people learn new information.
Prior knowledge and experience
When people have appropriate background knowledge, it can make it easier for them to learn new, related information. Someone with experience in marketing will pick up advanced concepts more quickly than someone who is learning everything from scratch.
Motivation
When people are highly motivated, they find it easier to concentrate and learn new material.
Learning styles
People can generally be grouped into one of five different learning styles. These are visual learners, auditory learners, haptic learners, reading-and-writing learners, and communicative learners. When people are given material in their preferred style, it will be easier for them to learn and retain the information.
Learning is a complex process and, as a corporate trainer, there is only so much that you can do to influence how quickly your employees learn. But if you design your eLearning programs to be motivating, appropriately difficult, and cater to as many different learning styles as possible, you’ll cover all your bases and set everyone up for success.
Methods to increase learning speed and learning capacity
While you can’t influence your employees’ cognitive skills directly, there are plenty of ways to help all your learners make the most of their training. The way you present information, how often you repeat it, and at what intervals it is repeated all have a significant impact on how well people retain what they have learned. Let’s take a closer look.
Spaced repetition
Studies have shown that long-term retention of information is enhanced when the material is reviewed over increasing intervals of time. “Cramming” for a test might work in the short term, but spacing out review sessions helps people cement what they have learned.
How to implement:
Build periodic reviews into your eLearning program. When material is first learned, review it more frequently. As the students move on to other material, review the older material from time to time to keep the information fresh.
Microlearning is perfect for this type of review. You can use digital flashcards like Knowledgeworker Cards, or create short videos, infographics, audio clips, or more. These snack-sized lessons let your learners review information efficiently, even on the go. (And by the way, studying in different environments can also improve retention!)
Active recall
Having students actively review what they’ve learned — as opposed to passively studying it — also speeds up learning and improves results. When students repeatedly practice recalling what they’ve learned, they exercise their memories. That makes it easier for them to retrieve the information in the future. It also helps to anchor the learning in long-term memory rather than short-term memory.
How to implement:
To encourage active recall, add elements to your eLearning programs that require students to actively use the information they have learned. This could take the form of quizzes, for example, or open-ended questions for them to answer. It’s important to include these types of learning in addition to passive learning methods like reading, listening, or watching videos.
Stories and real-world scenarios
Humans love stories. They draw us in and create more of an emotional impact than studying facts and statistics. And that makes them a powerful tool for learning. Incorporating real-world scenarios and stories into your eLearning program can increase motivation, promote a deeper understanding of the material, and encourage long-term retention of the information.
How to implement
When designing your eLearning program, think about ways to build stories into the course materials. Introduce new concepts with stories that illustrate the effects in the real world. In addition, you can use scenario-based learning like Knowledgeworker Coach to have students practice using their newly gained knowledge in real-life scenarios.
Gamification
Gamification refers to the practice of adding game-like elements to everyday activities to make them more engaging and motivating. By adding things like challenges, rewards, and progress tracking, you can make learning more enjoyable for your students and keep them motivated to complete the course. Increased motivation also improves learning results.
How to implement
Many modern eLearning software providers include gamification elements in their systems. You can incorporate as many or as few of these as you like into your eLearning program. Have employees engage in a little friendly competition with leaderboards, add badges or bonuses for completing different units, or even send learners on “quests” to review information before answering a quiz. You could also incorporate dialog scenarios using Knowledgeworker Coach.
Adaptive learning
Adaptive learning is enormously helpful when you need to train a cohort of employees with diverse backgrounds and learning needs. Rather than forcing all of them to go through identical training programs that go from Point A to Point Z, adaptive learning lets you personalize the learning content based on the needs of each particular student. This improves learning outcomes for everyone: students are neither bored nor overwhelmed by what they are learning.
How to implement
With adaptive learning, you create learning paths for your students that can be automatically customized as needed. Some students might test out of certain modules, while others might start off with an additional module that teaches them to use the eLearning software. As they progress through the learning path, students who fail to pass a unit review, for example, are sent back to review the material again. Students who receive an exceptionally high score might be offered the chance to test out of a related unit. The options are endless.
The bottom line.
Learning capacity and speed are influenced by a wide variety of factors. Some of them, such as cognitive abilities, are intrinsic, but there are plenty of factors that you can leverage to improve learning outcomes for all of your students. By incorporating active recall, spaced repetition, gamification, adaptive learning, and scenario-based learning, you’ll help your students get the most out of your eLearning courses. And that doesn’t just benefit your students — it benefits your company as a whole.
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