Course Design Strategy: The Art of Making People Learn

by Ethan Honary

Overview

This book is packed with strategies and insights that will help you design better training courses. It focuses on how people learn as the key factor in making design decisions.

The book shows you how to design a good course for any field, no matter what medium you use to deliver it. Learn how the brain works, how people forget, how to gain and maintain attention and how to make a subject interesting. Then use the easy-to-follow guidelines to design strategically by increasing curiosity, making content emotional, making learners practise what they have learned and using failure as a teaching tool.

The art of designing a course and making people learn is mastered through practical experience of running courses; the science is gained by evidence-based research on how people learn. The book combines the two, offering many examples and studies in cognitive psychology, neuroscience, instructional design and training the trainer. You will find lots of examples and studies in the book that provide insights that may not be obvious but that lead to important design decisions. They will change forever how you think about training design and delivery and help you design courses that your learners will love.

In Course Design Strategy, you will learn:

• How to make content memorable
• What learners expect from a course
• How people learn and forget, and why this should be the cornerstone of any course design
• How to use eureka moments and eureka concepts as the building blocks of course design
• How to make content easy to learn
• Why the presence of a feedback loop is crucial to learning
• How to use exercises and tests to enhance learning

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781838495305
Publisher:	Skills Converged Publishing
Publication date:	07/01/2021
Pages:	350
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.73(d)

About the Author

Dr Ethan Honary is the founder of Skills Converged, which specialises in designing soft skills training materials. He is a training consultant, an author and a course designer. 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. Ethan's unique background and his great passion for the world of training mean that he understands the needs of a diverse set of learners and what it takes to train them. He is the author of several books, including Train the Trainer: The Art of Training Delivery, published under the Skills Converged brand and a bestseller in the field. For more than a decade, via Skills Converged, Ethan has enabled thousands of trainers worldwide to deliver outstanding training courses on soft skills. Through his instructor-led and online train the trainer courses, he shares his passion and his discoveries concerning how to design and deliver effective training courses. He lives in London with his wife.

Table of Contents

1 INTRODUCTION

2 UNDERSTAND THE PSYCHOLOGY OF A LEARNER

3 UNDERSTAND LEARNING

4 UNDERSTAND NEUROSCIENCE

5 MAXIMISE LONG-TERM LEARNING

6 MAKE IT MEMORABLE

7 DESIGN THE RIGHT TYPE OF PRACTISING

8 DESIGN CONTENT STRATEGICALLY

9 LEARN FROM THE ATELIER METHOD

10 DECIDE WHAT THEY SHOULD LEARN

11 MANAGE THE COGNITIVE LOAD

12 MAKE IT EASY TO LEARN

13 MANAGE ATTENTION

14 MAKE THEM PRACTISE

15 DESIGN HIGH-IMPACT EXERCISES

16 TEST THEM

FINAL REMARKS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

APPENDIX A: CONTRASTING PAIRS

REFERENCES

INDEX