From the course: Components of Effective Learning

Powerful and weak contexts

From the course: Components of Effective Learning

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Powerful and weak contexts

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- Now let's see what a context-based CCF design actually looks like. Now remember, context heightens motivation, and it facilitates the meaningful transfer of learned skills, really important stuff, right? In your work, you can use context to stimulate learning in a variety of ways. Let me give you some examples. You could require the learner to solve problems and actually do things. You can use a timer for learners to beat while completing a task. You can dramatically demonstrate the impact of poor performance and also good performance. Really, I'd like to see you do all three of those things. As a designer of learning experiences, you can employ some simple prompts, case studies, and apprenticeship models to inspire the transfer of skills where the learner takes the content and applies it to their actual job. Rather than giving learners one shot at learning a new skill and amassing all the practice activities into one episode, we've learned that it is far more effective, far more, robust research on this, to space out practice over time. People will remember what they've learned far better if they practice a little bit every few days and then maybe every other week and so on. Ask the learner to think of the situation they're training for. Maybe it's the rollout of a new procedure, or new software or new policies. How could starting with a case study, a simulation or a timed skill task help create that motivating context that you just have to have. We design training for California police officers responding to emergency situations connected to terrorist activity. Our design is based on an interactive simulation that places the learner in the context immediately. As a first arriving police officer, you need to investigate, identify risks, help determine the appropriate steps to secure that scene and request appropriate resources. All of those things are up to you in whatever order you want to perform them. It couldn't feel more real. In this design, you'll notice the absence of standardized question forms, such as multiple choice questions, true false matching, fill in the blank and so forth. While those structures do have their uses, they don't really engage learning activity. They just look at isolated points of knowledge and they provide very little of the critical performance context that learners need. Learning tasks just must be authentic. They must relate directly to effective performance to tasks on the job. Authentic tasks are far more appealing than almost any rhetorical or academic task. They heightened our propensity to get involved, and that is what we're after. Involvement, engagement, and learning, the kind of learning that leads to performance success.

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