At DBLX, crafting creative, engaging and informative learning experiences is our speciality. But what exactly is a learning experience and how do we define it? In this article, we’re going to take a deep dive into the world of learning experiences to pinpoint when and how they occur. We’ll also share a few tips on how businesses and organisations can maximise learning experiences for their employees to get the very best out of them.
Learning Experience Definition
Learning experiences are any interactions, courses, programs, or experiences where learning happens. We tend to think that, by default, learning only happens in schools or classrooms, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. Learning experiences have the potential to happen anywhere from traditional academic settings to places and situations outside the classroom, such as through interactions with others or gamification.
Learning experiences aren’t bound by physical locations or particular formats. Instead, they encompass a wide range of educational interactions. And it is important to make this distinction in order to better understand how, when and where learning takes place. A rise in new technologies has dramatically diversified the ways in which we learn and how readily available learning materials are. But learning doesn’t just happen behind a screen now, either. The learning experiences umbrella also takes into account learning through physical interactions with others and in hands on settings.
Why Are They Important?
From the moment we are born, we start learning. Babies, for example, aren’t born being able to walk and talk – yet there isn’t a school that they go to in order to learn these things. Instead, they pick up these crucial skills by watching, imitating and practicing. Each time a baby face plants the floor while attempting to crawl or babbles away in their highchair, they are taking part in a learning experience. As well as this, for thousands of years information has been passed down through storytelling to help us understand and remember it.
When children go off to school and learn, it easy to think that classroom-based learning is the only way to absorb and retain information. But if we give some consideration to the above example of babies learning to walk and talk, this isn’t true at all. Learning experiences present themselves throughout our life. In our normal day-to-day we are constantly picking up new skills. We learn from the people we live with, our colleagues, our family members and our friends. We watch videos and read articles, all the while absorbing and processing information to apply in the future.
This is why taking an experiential approach to learning is so important for those in charge of devising learning activities. Not only do we all have different learning styles and preferences, our environment can also have a direct effect over how effectively we learn, as well as the medium through which it is delivered. In embracing learning experiences, we open up a whole world of opportunity to impart information that isn’t bound by a single location or way of doing things.
What Makes A Great Learning Experience?
While some aspects of learning are spontaneous and unanticipated, those which cater to a specified learning goal require a little more nuance, planning and understanding. To do this effectively, we need to understand what makes up a great learning experience.
Adding Value
Learning really clicks when an individual understands how and why it applies to them. When a learner masters a new skill or understands the theory behind a practice, it leads to an aha! moment that is fulfilling and rewarding.
Individuals tasked with devising and designing learning experiences must first understand the motivations of their learners. For example, you might ask: how will this learning experience help someone to do their job more effectively? Or: how is this experience relevant for everyone who is taking part?
When you truly understand what makes your learners tick and how you can add value to their lives by effectively imparting the information or new skills, you can then reverse engineer the whole design process to communicate this at every point of the training or course.
Substance Over Style
It’s easy to get hung up on making learning experiences visually pleasing and interactive, but there’s a time and a place for everything. Throwing a bunch of media at a learning experience and hoping it will stick just isn’t enough, no matter how tempting it may be.
Multimedia elements, rich visuals, gamification and storytelling can all be used to great effect in learning experiences. But they have to be used in the right context, with a clear understanding of how they will benefit the learner and lead to that aha moment we mentioned previously.
Meeting Learners Where They Are
If you’re rolling out a learning experience to a group of individuals, it’s important to acknowledge they might not all be on the same page. For this reason, great learning experience meet each learner where they are on their learning journey by assessing existing knowledge and designing tasks with different levels to provide stretch and challenge opportunities.
Starting at a point that is too advanced, or too easy, will very quickly result in a disengaged learner. Instead, we should aim to create learning experiences that cover the foundations while providing opportunities for more advanced learners to dive deeper into the subject matter and increase their understanding and breadth of knowledge.
Catering To Different Learning Styles
We all have learning preferences. Some of us are visual learners, which means we connect better with diagrams, graphs and flow charts to absorb information. While others like reading and taking lots of notes or getting hands on with a task. While you can’t segregate your learners into different learning styles, you can absolutely design learning experiences with these preferences in mind by providing a range of activities, tasks and interactive elements that cater to different learners.
Putting Theory Into Practice
Theory and practice are both essential to great learning experiences. Knowing the ‘why’ helps learners to feel a sense of purpose in learning the skill or information. Knowing how to apply that skill to real-life situations empowers them to use what they’ve learned in the future.
A lot of learning experiences that are based in the classroom go above and beyond in terms of theory, comprehensively covering a topic to help beginners to eventually become experts. But what good is theory if you aren’t sure how to apply something practically?
There are lots of ways to build practice into learning experiences to help retention and recall. This could be through setting projects, practical tasks or holding practice sessions.
Getting Feedback
Everyone loves getting feedback when it’s done correctly and constructively. Good feedback helps us to know if we are on the right track or whether we have to change course slightly. It also instils with a sense of pride in our work, especially when praise is thrown in the mix too.
It’s not enough to give someone a learning experience and let them navigate through it blindly. Feedback should be built in, whether that’s through periodic knowledge checks, in-person feedback during a practice run, or a mark at the end of a test or assignment. When learners know where they are in their learning, they understand how far they’ve come and how far they’ve got to go which is really empowering.
Ready To Start?
Creating exciting, empowering and effective learning experiences requires research and understanding of your learners. They should be designed with not only the goals of the experience in mind, but also the preferences of learners, too. It’s also important to understand that some learning experiences are wonderfully spontaneous, or don’t require as much robust planning as you might think. For example, in the workplace, a new starter might be able to learn much more from shadowing a colleague in their role than sitting in front of a presentation or an hour.
Here at DBLX, we craft show stopping learning experiences for businesses looking to up their L&D game. From new product launches to in-house eLearning delivered through an LXP or LMS, we can help you pinpoint the best mediums and multimedia required for a learning experience and apply that in the most interactive and interesting way possible. Want to know more? Head over to our projects to see how we’ve supported global brands such as BT Group and Kia to craft out of this world learning experiences, or contact us to speak to a member of our team.