Course Design Strategy: The Art of Making People Learn
About this ebook
Rather than offering another rigid model or a collection of tips about slides and technology, this book explains the principles that should guide your most important design decisions.
Combining research from cognitive psychology, neuroscience and instructional design with practical training experience, the book explores memory, attention, curiosity, emotion, cognitive load, feedback, practice and productive failure. It also examines why some familiar training methods feel effective while producing little lasting learning.
Written for trainers, subject matter experts, instructional designers, teachers and course creators, the principles apply across classroom, virtual, online and blended learning.
In Course Design Strategy, you will learn how to:
- Design courses around what learners need to be able to do
- Use memory and forgetting to shape your course structure
- Gain attention and maintain it throughout a course
- Manage cognitive load so learners can remain focused on learning
- Identify the eureka moments and eureka concepts that unlock a subject
- Use curiosity, emotion, examples and stories to make learning memorable
- Build feedback loops that help learners improve
- Design exercises that make learners retrieve, think, struggle and learn from mistakes
- Make testing part of learning, not just assessment
The result is not simply a course that presents information, but one that gives learners a genuine chance to understand, apply and remember what they have learned.
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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.
