Course Design Strategy: The Art of Making People Learn

Ethan Honary

Jul 2021 · Skills Converged Publishing

About this ebook

This book is packed with strategies and insights that will help you design better training courses. It focuses on how people learn as the key factor in making design decisions.

The book shows you how to design a good course for any field, no matter what medium you use to deliver it. Learn how the brain works, how people forget, how to gain and maintain attention and how to make a subject interesting. Then use the easy-to-follow guidelines to design strategically by increasing curiosity, making content emotional, making learners practise what they have learned and using failure as a teaching tool.

The art of designing a course and making people learn is mastered through practical experience of running courses; the science is gained by evidence-based research on how people learn. The book combines the two, offering many examples and studies in cognitive psychology, neuroscience, instructional design and training the trainer. You will find lots of examples and studies in the book that provide insights that may not be obvious but that lead to important design decisions. They will change forever how you think about training design and delivery and help you design courses that your learners will love.

In Course Design Strategy, you will learn:

·      How to make content memorable

·      What learners expect from a course

·      How people learn and forget, and why this should be the cornerstone of any course design 

·      How to use eureka moments and eureka concepts as the building blocks of course design

·      How to make content easy to learn

·      Why the presence of a feedback loop is crucial to learning

·      How to use exercises and tests to enhance learning 

About the author

Dr Ethan Honary is the founder of Skills Converged, which specialises in designing soft skills training materials. He is a course designer, training consultant and an author. He has an interest in a diverse set of subjects such as psychology, artificial intelligence, training the trainer, emotional intelligence, fine arts and software engineering. With such unique background Ethan understands the needs of a diverse set of learners, and what it takes to train them. He is the author of several books, including the highly praised Train the Trainer: The Art of Training Delivery.