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Rosie Scott
Senior Learning Designer
Learning Pool
Muddying the waters
OK, let's take a break from the 'big
ideas' for a minute and think about
some of the little things we can do to
help learners. I could embark on a
tortured metaphor here about mud
actually being lots of little bits of dirt and
it's that that ends up 'muddying the
waters', but I'll spare you that because…
ouch.
Instead, let me ask you a question: have
you ever seen an e-learning course (or,
gasp…written one) that had so many
acronyms in it you started to develop
acronym-blindness? I bet you have.
Well, I'm in the middle of designing a
programme that has a similar problem;
but instead of creating an acronym for
every obscure process and piece of
regulation they subscribe to they have
created an entirely new word, or more
often appropriated one that already
existed and given it a whole new
meaning.
I'm questioning the meanings of simple
words at this point; the world has turned
upside down and I don't know if I'm
coming or going…and I don't think
that's what they were going for.
In trying to make things clearer and
easier for learners to understand,
they've ended up doing the opposite.
And there are lots of small examples of
this type of thing that we often find
ourselves falling back on: an acronym is
shorter than spelling out the whole
phrase; a bullet point list is simpler than
a long paragraph; bolding key terms
and phrases helps people remember
them, but it's so easy to overdo it.
I've seen so many courses where a lot
of effort has gone into explaining a
mnemonic and presenting it visually so
that people remember it, whereas in fact
time would be better spent explaining
what it means for the learner. And then
there's all the 12-step processes and
models with catchy names - maybe
we're making the processes easier to
remember, but do they actually apply to
the learner in real life?
All these little strategies that we use
stem from the right impulses, but so
often we overuse them and achieve the
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