Variety
A couple weeks ago I had the opportunity to catch up with a college buddy who was in town for two days of training on corporate finance. We met out after he’d completed his first day of the training, and at one point I asked him how it went. He told me about how his flight had been delayed, that his hotel was nice, and how it was always fun to visit Chicago on the firm’s dime. As for the actual class?
“Oh, I was doodling within the first 30 minutes.”
It was straight lecture and exceptionally mind-numbing. He did his best to stay engaged, but eventually moved on to jotting down different starting lineups for this season’s Indiana Hoosiers basketball squad, trying to find a good one (as if one existed).
I should mention that aside from being a hopeless Hoosiers fan, this friend was a very strong student in college and is now a successful lawyer. He’s always been a very motivated learner, but his motivation was soundly defeated during the course of those two days. Sixteen hours of lecture will do that to a person (most people, actually).
The length of human attention is estimated to range from 3 to 5 minutes per year of age in young children to a maximum of around 20 minutes in adults. After three to five minutes of “settling in” at the start of a standard lecture, studies have found that the next lapse of attention usually occurs some 10 to 18 minutes later, and as the lecture goes on the attention span gets shorter, often falling to three or four minutes towards the end.
This is not where my post transitions to a condemnation of instructor led training. A “page turner” e-learning course can lose a learner just as quickly. I also have to confess to having attended live training sessions that mixed music, lights, multi-media, and motivational speeches in with lectures and group activities to rave reviews from participants. (Now there’s still the matter of reinforcing essential information from the live sessions so that it’s not forgotten. An engaging classroom session can provide learners with an interactive experience, but not one that allows them to go through or review the training at their own pace – accessing vital information when and where it’s needed).
Regardless of delivery method, the key is to keep the learner engaged by making sure the training is presented in a variety of ways. Level 1 evaluations of learning are conducted strictly to measure how the participants of a training program react to it. While a positive reaction doesn’t guarantee learning, a negative reaction almost certainly lessens its chances. And that negative reaction is almost certainly guaranteed if we reach that 20 minute mark and are still giving learners the same experience.
A common strategy we use in many of our courses is to simulate the learner’s work environment, and so we keep them engaged by sending them to a new virtual location, introducing a new character, having a client crisis arise that must be addressed immediately with newly acquired knowledge, or interrupting the experience with a sudden machine malfunction that needs to be handled in a way that affects customers as little as possible. You get the idea.
The challenge is finding the right balance while considering the overall goals of the training, the audience, any constraints, etc. The best combination of approaches can then be delivered either within a single e-learning experience or throughout a suite of courses blended with live training, virtual classrooms, mentor sessions, social networks, and so on – all based off the needs of the client, and more importantly, the learning and engagement needs of the audience.
Jim Drummond
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Senior Instructional Designer
NogginLabs, Inc.
