The Pop Education team are back on board with fresh eyes and eager minds.
In the final throes of 2020, our team met in person (we know! In person! It was so exciting!) and enjoyed some fabulous food, friendship, fun and found out more about each other.
This event was a team planning/professional development day and that leads my point.
One of our many talents is Education Design. We do this in a variety of forms, from working with subject matter experts who provide us with content, to creating content from scratch. One of the key elements to creating engaging courses is preventing the yawn factor.
What makes students yawn?
In a face-to-face class, we know that anything is a struggle after lunch. Carb load is in progress and the morning brew has worn off. Three-fold is the struggle of a Friday afternoon.
Boring reading. We all know that reading is essential to learning and to everyday life. What we need to do when designing is to make sure that the reading is not a burden and that the relevant information with the “why” you need to know this is explained. Keep it short and sharp and make sure that you are speaking the language of the learner.
Long videos. We are living in a fast world. We have everything we need to learn at our fingertips, we want to see it do it and get on with it. Long drawn-out videos cause yawning. Twenty 3-minute videos will capture the audience better than an hour, and the gaps can provide some downtime for other activities.
Talking to themselves. I love a good forum in an online course, but the way they are set up has to be in a way that engages the learner. Using open questions and encouraging discussion between learners is a good way of keeping the student engaged, just like face to face.
When designing the focus is not just on the learner, the focus needs to be on all stakeholders. Creating a course which is a joy to facilitate makes the facilitator happy. When the facilitator is happy, they create learner engagement in the course. When the learners are engaged, they obtain the required skills and knowledge to be assessed and they share with their cohort. When the assessments are contextualised to the skills required the learner can see the “why” and they are successful and achieve great outcomes.
So, back to the point, when the Pop Ed crew met late last year it was a Friday, not once during the day did we have yawn moments. Why? It was fun. We didn’t feel like we were learning. Our voices were heard. We felt safe and respected.
It would be great to hear from other facilitators.
Do you have any strategies which prevent the yawn moments?
Image by BlueFarrar from Pixabay.
