From the course: Components of Effective Learning

Create powerful learning opportunities with context

From the course: Components of Effective Learning

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Create powerful learning opportunities with context

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Any learning event that fails to present the context right upfront, it's going to have a much more difficult time connecting with learners, engaging them and motivating them to learn and improve their performance. The context gets learners into a situation, but, not every context says the same value. So what makes a good context? First is the portrayal of situations, learners can readily imagine themselves being in this reassures learners that they're receiving some instruction that's likely to be relevant to them. Now, we still don't know if the specific level of behavioral components are right for them. But we'll learn that quickly from the challenge and the activity components. We want a situation in which people tend to make mistakes. Those situations present powerful learning opportunities. It's not interesting nor engaging to have overly simplistic situations such as, you go to write a report and your pencil need sharpening, right? Not a big challenge, not a good context there. We use the word authentic a lot in CCAF because we want learners thinking about and practicing in situations that matter that they might actually be in. The best training has people performing tasks a lot now for novice a sure. We need to simplify situations, so they aren't taking on something that's just far too complex for them. But even for novices we want to be sure, that we've got a good measure of authenticity. So for example, if we're teaching short order cooks, we wouldn't want to start with eight completely different food orders having to be cooked and served hot simultaneously. Although we'd expect, beginning to that level of complexity in our training, we wouldn't want to start there. But still, we want to have a setting of authenticity, that's believable. It's presented in a way that feels like, I'm in the real situation. Let's always put learners in a situation that they care about.

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