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Corporate and Small Business Training
by Cynthia Lee Henthorn
Strategies
Instructional Strategies
Designing courseware and curricula involves determining techniques that will motivate learners and enhance their retention of the training.
This part of the development process is the "instructional strategy." What are the components of a designer's strategy?
Listed below are samples of instructional strategies from which a designer might choose while developing instruction. Often, the parameters and requirements of a project (including the audience, delivery channel, and business objectives) will guide the core of my instructional strategy.
1. Gain and keep attention
Encourage learners to process an example.
Intersperse examples among practice problems.
Apply multiple choice question/answer sets, allowing learner to review example and identify principles behind steps or tasks.
Engage learner's multiple senses.
Apply attractors that leverage senses of sight, audio, and touch, such as:
motion, color, shapes, sound, interactions
Protract learning duration.
Avoid concentrating all learning requirements in a single session.
Limit time of lessons, especially eLearning. (Learning limits: 30 minutes max; 20 minutes preferred)
Balance cognitive load (How much a learner can absorb at any one time).
Segment supporting knowledge (concepts) from procedures (steps in a process).
Apply summaries and captioned illustrations.
Avoid redundant and extraneous content.
Minimize amount of text per screen or slide.
2. Provide stimulus material
- Provide real-world scenarios with characters to whom the learner can connect.
- Show relevance of instruction to the tasks that a learner will perform on the job.
- Use narration to create a relationship with learner.
- Personalize the online instruction:
- use language that is collaborative and cooperative (we/us) and puts learner in the instruction (you)
- use first and second person in scripts
- apply a conversational tone
- Provide problem-solving and hands-on practice opportunities.
- Apply interactive simulations to provide connection to the actual environment in which the task or concept will be applied by learner.
- Praise learner's successes.
3. Enhance retention
- Provide ways for learner to feel a part of the instruction.
- Apply a social presence in the instruction to influence level of retention:
- create a learning partner, like a visible character, or use a single voice
- Provide a sense of participation and involve learner through interactivity.
- Format lesson content in a graphical organizer (i.e., diagram) that learner must assemble.
- Allow learner maximum navigational control of the lesson:
- give learners ways to create their own direction and pacing
- Provide problem-solving and hands-on practice opportunities.
- (see Stimulus Materials above)
- Reinforce lesson content by activating learner's curiosity.
- Pose questions and problem-solving scenarios or a hypothesis.
- Use chunking to help learner process summaries of the new information
4. Elicit learner performance
- Compel learner to to pull information from the instruction, rather than structuring the lesson to push information to learner in a strict linear format.
- Create reasons for learner to use, need, and pull the content:
- use objectives to create Start and Finish lines
- apply use cases and scenarios to create relevant reasons and needs for the content
- put learner in active role of explorer, rather than passive recipient of information
- pose questions and apply problem-solving activities
- Engage learner's decision-making process by allowing learner to go after the most relevant information when its needed.
- Provide choices, such as:
- menus and navigation
- intermingle questions or assessments into use cases
- layers and branching
5. Stimulate recall of prior knowledge
- Provide examples where learner can discover personal relevancy.
- Encourage learners to explore content and construct their own understanding of the subject.
- Use stories and use cases to which learner can relate:
- encourage learner to develop ownership of a task or a problem
- provide an ill-structured or ill-defined problem to help the learner think like a member of that practice's or industry's community
- Connect new information to concepts that the learner already knows.
- Use bridging:
- comparing and contrasting
- analogies and metaphors (in both stories and pictures)
- Provide examples where learner can discover personal relevancy.
6. Provide learning guidance
- Prompt learner with cues, callouts, and hint boxes.
- Recap objectives:
- Use repetition.
- Use Table of Contents as a means for learner to reference learning objectives throughout instruction.
7. Provide feedback about performance correctness
- Use realistic situations and real-world dilemmas along with pros and cons of each choice in feedback.
- Give learner opportunity to distinguish between right/wrong answers.
- Give learner opportunity to assess own performance:
- allow user to receive and see score
- Use realistic situations and real-world dilemmas along with pros and cons of each choice in feedback.
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