lifeandlearning

There have been many instances in my life where I learned something only to forget it sometime later. Two things that come to mind are Calculus and operating the back end of Moodle (an LMS very popular in Australia, India and the UK). I do not think much about Calculus as I am sure I would not have made it anywhere as a mathematician anyway but forgetting how to operate certain things in Moodle is something that haunts me every single day. The reason why I forgot how to operate Moodle is because I did not use it for a couple of years. During these years I entered what is called as a ‘forgetting curve’. This was a term first used by Hermann Ebbinghaus in the late 1880s. This essentially means that any information in our memory not used for a certain period starts to decay. The rate of decay may be different for different pieces and types of information, but it does affect every piece of information. So, what is the relevance of this forgetting cu...

Microlearning is strongly gearing up to be the buzzword for 2018 in instructional design and L&D circles. Sometimes also called as bite sized learning, Microlearning is an easy enough concept to understand. It is learning in small doses. It is learning along a very narrow and very specific learning concept. So, for example, a traditional eLearning course might be an hour long but in Microlearning we are talking about a learning aid that might take 5-10 minutes. But how much can a person learn in 5-10 minutes you ask? Apparently heaps or at least enough to do the job. I had recently purchased an old guitar with a couple of strings broken. Now I did not know the first thing about repairing broken guitar string. So, the first thing that I did was fire up my computer, go to YouTube and look for a video that deals with this subject matter. After watching a 3-minute video I was able to repair both the strings. That is Microlearning and its benefits in a nutshell for you. There i...

I love a good story.  I remember I used to love them when I was a kid. I still love them, albeit, the type of stories that intrigue me now has changed a lot from the type that I used to like when I was a kid. Most people love stories. I read somewhere that it is because human beings are hard wired to better process and store information when it is presented to them in a narrative form. This could be the reason why throughout human history information, morals and value systems have been taught and brought forward using stories. Think about some pieces of information that were provided to you last week without any context or narrative and think about a movie you watched a few years ago. Chances are you would still remember the movie from a few years ago better than you remember the pieces of information from a few days ago. The reason behind this is that the movie told you a story, which means that the information provided in the movie was provided to you in a believable,...

During my initial days as an eLearning developer, I often tried to go for very bright and colourful themes and backgrounds as I perceived them to be visually attractive. I also had the habit of putting a lot of graphic elements in my slides. This happened as I did not have a well-developed sense of visual hierarchy back then.  A visual hierarchy is the sequence in which a person looks at things. This is a very important concept as it allows you to control (to a great extent) the manner and sequence in which learners look at your content. Used effectively, a visual hierarchy can generate and sustain interest in your learners and give them a feeling that they are looking at the important stuff. Used ineffectively or not used at all can make the learners feel that the course is directionless or has a lot of fluff and put them off. In order for the visual hierarchy to be effective, our information need to align with how the human brain and eyes co-ordinate t...