- If corporate trainers
were ever to put bumper stickers on their cars,
one of them, no doubt, would be this,
learning is a process, not an event.
Implied in this slogan is the concept of spaced learning
which if you attend training conferences,
you've probably heard of.
Digital learning is likely to use spaced learning,
which is another way it differs from traditional learning.
Spaced learning is exposing learners
to smaller chunks of content at set intervals.
Here's how it often works.
There's a highly touted training event,
let's say an instructor-led course
on leadership fundamentals.
A few days after the event,
the people who attended get an email
with the key behaviors from the course
that they are to apply to their work.
In the email, the behaviors are simply listed.
A week after the event,
they receive those key behaviors again,
but in a different format.
Instead of a list of behaviors,
there are three short work scenarios
in which the principles have been applied.
A few weeks after the event,
participants receive text reminders of the behaviors.
The intervals at which the content is sent to learners
gets longer as the information begins to work itself
into long-term memory.
Some of you may be thinking,
spaced learning, isn't that like microlearning?
Yeah, it's similar.
Both formats dish out small portions of learning at a time,
though microlearning tends to stress brevity
and spaced learning stresses the increased intervals
and the information being formatted in different ways.
Traditional learning, on the other hand,
leans heavily on masked learning
or what I call one and done.
Meaning you sit in a class, or in front of a computer,
for the better part of a day
and learn a ton of new information.
At the end, you pass whatever assessment
that's been created
and it's assumed that you've learned whatever it is
you were there to learn.
But we pretty much know that's bogus.
And that we're going to forget 90% of what we learned
before next Tuesday.
And research on spaced retrieval practice backs us up.
Information that sticks is information we're exposed to
or retrieve again and again.
Ideally, in different forms and in different contexts.
And here's the thing.
Digital learning makes it easy to do spaced learning.
At set intervals,
and really, the intervals depend on what you're teaching,
you can expose learners to tightly focused content
in different formats.