This week’s Learning Hero is Benedict Carey, award-winning science and medical writer for The New York Times. Benedict is living proof that you don’t need to devote your whole life to educating people in order to appear in our exclusive hall of fame - sometimes you just need to write one really great book! Released earlier this month, How We Learn: The Surprising Truth about Where When and Why it Happens takes everything we think we know about learning and throws it out of the window. Traditional thinking states that people learn best when they are left on their own to study in a quiet place with no distractions. Since time immemorial, people have assumed without question that this is just the way learning is supposed to be done. Why haven’t they questioned it? Well, they were always on their own in a quiet place without distractions and thus, there was nobody else around to ask! In order to write this book, Benedict has trawled through years of scientific and medical research on learning, memory and the subtler workings of the brain. To put it very simply, he has discovered that we’ve been doing it wrong all this time! Here are just a few counter-intuitive lessons that Benedict presents: Your brain won’t retain information if it doesn’t want to. Distractions can sometimes make learning easier. Cramming isn’t always a bad idea. Your best examiner is yourself. Repetition is not always necessary. Now, don’t panic! We know that this is some pretty mind-blowing stuff, but don’t rush out to buy new hinges for your doors of perception just yet - this new information is a good thing! What Benedict Carey has actually done, intentionally or otherwise, is to write a user’s manual for the human brain. Here, you can find out what you have been doing wrong and get some inspiration on ways to rewire your neurons to absorb learning more effectively. If your grey matter is tingling at the prospect of being used properly, pop down to your local bookshop (if you have one) or order a copy online. You can also keep updated with Benedict’s work by checking out his website, or by following him on twitter or facebook. One of the things we noticed is Benedict’s emphasis on the power of social learning. By collaborating with like-minded learners, we retain more information and we get the opportunity to view the learning through the prism of others’ viewpoints. Interestingly, he also shows that learners can retain even more information by teaching other people and sharing their own knowledge. Our Academy Platform LMS is designed to exploit this kind of collaborative learning with unique social features. If you want to find out a little more, click the button below to download our white paper.  

When it comes to beating the 70:20:10 problem and successfully training a whole workforce, there are many things to consider: How will you train your staff? Will you use gamification? How can you ensure learners continue to develop after the training is over? In this article, we’re going to address this last point. Since 70% of our knowledge comes through on-the-job training and 20% through observation of others (compared to 10% via formal training), it’s clear that in order to obtain a well-rounded understanding, our learning cannot end when we leave the classroom, close the textbook or log off our Learning Management System. Instead, it’s important we create a culture of continued learning, whereby employees see their learning journeys as lifelong, expansive and evolving. When employees are empowered to continue learning and approach life as a library of things to be learnt, learning will evolve in unique and often unexpected ways. Let’s see how… Imagine you are a salesperson in a golfing shop. You have just finished an eLearning module called, ‘The Physics of a Golf Ball.’ Now you know all about why golf balls spin, the speed at which they fly through the air and the impact that different lengths of grass have on how far they roll. "Great!" you think. "I’ve finished my assigned learning and now I know a lot of useful stuff about golf balls." Now, you have two options. You can either take what you’ve learnt and check out - take off your ‘Learning’ hat and put on your ‘Cruising through life’ hat and try to sell some golf balls. Or, you can keep your Learning hat firmly on your noggin and think to yourself, "Hmm… I found it pretty interesting that a golf ball’s trajectory alters so much when it’s hit with a different club. Let me see if anyone on my Learning Management System knows more about clubs…" That’s the difference between approaching life with a ‘can-learn’ attitude and closing off your mind as soon as you’ve learnt what it is that you’re ‘supposed’ to learn. Now, you can confidently sell both golf balls and golf clubs - and even explain which ones will work well together! So how can we create a culture of lifelong learning? Firstly, L&D professionals need to ensure that learners are rewarded for learning. If they aren’t, what’s the point in making so much effort? Why should they take hours out of their day to study if they don’t get any acknowledgement for all their hard work? And we’re not necessarily talking about monetary rewards. Check out this article to find out more about why recognition motivates us to continue learning. Next, give employees (aka learners) a means to communicate with one another. Our Academy Platform Learning Management System has ‘Insights Groups’, which are special areas of the Academy dedicated to specific topics of interest. Learners join up to them and then chat with their fellow learners on the topics, share interesting ideas and link to further reading. It’s a fantastic way to boost the knowledge of all your employees at once - they begin to learn together! Finally, it’s a fantastic idea to make the process of learning new things fun. Research shows we learn more when we’re having fun, and besides, if things are fun we’re more likely to repeat them - so add gamification to online learning to give your employees that extra boost. Pretty soon, you’ll find you’ve created a culture of lifelong learning and you can sit back, relax and watch as your employees boost their knowledge, skills and success all on their own. Want to find out more? Read our research paper on social learning, click here to discover how to get a great return on investment on your training programme, or click the button below to find out more about gamification!  

We all know what it’s like when we try to learn new things. We sit down, put our learning hats on and start reading dusty textbooks or watching boring videos for as long as we can stand it. After that hard slog it’s time to work on remembering the learning content, and then, eventually - days, weeks or even months later - it’s time to prove we learnt it by regurgitating the information out onto a sheet of paper. It’s a simple process, right? We take in information, churn it around in our heads and then spit it out. Except, unfortunately, it’s not always that easy. There are many things standing in our way of remembering the tricky topics we’ve spent hours learning. Let’s look at a few of the problems learners encounter: 1. In one ear and out the other! Sometimes it’s hard to get even a basic level of understanding. Ever asked someone for directions and forgotten it all within 12.1 seconds of them walking away? It’s because you weren’t fully engaged and paying attention. Sure, you may have wanted to know which way to go - no one likes being lost! - but for some reason, perhaps their delivery, you just didn’t take the information in. 2. Ineffective recall So, you remember the directions for a couple of blocks, then you come to a fork in the road and you think, "Oops… Now which way?" This happens because we didn’t make enough effort to recall the information for long enough. Repeating the instructions a couple of times can help to remember them for a few minutes, but eventually you’ll reach a dead end of memory and you won’t know which way to turn! 3. Insufficient practice In much the same way, if we practise a little we’ll remember the learning content for a short while. But if we truly want to remember what we learnt and be able to explain it or, even more importantly, actually use the information at a later date, we need to work a lot harder. These are just a few reasons why learning might fail to stick in our heads. So what’s the solution? Well, here is a sure-fire way to make learning stick and stop it leaking out of our brains like sand through a sieve. Make Learning Fun!   We don’t mean you should turn learning into a game - don’t ask the nice man giving you directions to play Monopoly in the street! But adding some elements of game-based play can help us to remember more for longer. We call this ‘gamification’, and it involves adding gaming elements like badges, points and prizes to training. Basically, along your learning journey there are little treats and awards to motivate and engage you in your training. Picture this: the nice man giving you directions says that along the route he’s telling you to go are a few ‘prizes’… "Go to the end of this street. Turn left, pick up the £5 note, then walk to the roundabout up ahead. You’ll need to take the third exit - the one where the puppies are waiting to be stroked - and then continue up past the biscuit factory. Nip into the pub on the left where they’re serving free Guinness, then at the end of the road turn right. Your road is the next one after the comedian telling the world’s best joke." Reckon you’ll be able to remember the directions now? Yeah, we thought so! To find out more about how to make learning fun, download our free research paper - just click the button below!  

Some adult learners look back fondly on their time at school; the friendships, the knowledge, the structure. Others are haunted by the memories of boring teachers, boring lectures and boring topics. These students would sit in class like zombies, just waiting for the day to end so they’d be free to get on with something interesting. But you know what, a lot of these kids who hated school would actually enjoy learning outside of class. They’d get home and hop on the computer, or get out their encyclopedia and learn about zoology, or the oceans, or rainforests. The interesting thing about learning is that if topics aren’t taught correctly then of course learners won’t enjoy being in school, or working their way through eLearning modules on their Learning Management System. This week, we’re sharing with you our favourite 5 TED Talks all about school: 1. Sugata Mitra: Build a School in the Cloud Sugata begins his intriguing TED Talk by explaining where our education system came from: the Victorians. Their goal was to create identical workers who could be selected at random and jump straight into doing a job - which was fine back then, since there were lots of those jobs available. But now, our school system is still producing identical people with identical skills, but the jobs no longer exist in the same form. "I’m not saying [the school system is] broken … It’s not broken. It’s wonderfully constructed. It’s just that we don’t need it anymore. It’s outdated." Watch Sugata’s TED Talk below to discover his solution to this! 2. Diane Laufenberg: How to Learn? From Mistakes Diane, a schoolteacher, explains how school has changed since the time of her grandparents - back then, information was only available in schools. But now, of course, it’s available everywhere; on our phones, on computers, in the ‘cloud’… Times change, so of course our approach to teaching and learning has to change, too. Here’s how Diane sees it: 3. Andreas Schleicher: Use Data to Build Better Schools In his TED Talk, Andreas illustrates how what was once a prestigious institution (the American school system) began to lag behind as the education systems of other countries overtook it. Andreas explains how assessments of skills and abilities can show us where schools are failing and where to focus money to make improvements. Check it out below:   4. Jamie Oliver: Teach Every Child About Food Good old Jamie Oliver. He’s a bit like Marmite - some people love him, some people want to chuck him straight in the bin. But however you feel about Jamie O, one thing is clear: he cares. In this TED Talk, Jamie explains the important role that our schools play in teaching children about food. Did you know, some of our children don’t know what a pear is? They can’t name an onion, or a tomato - in fact, Jamie shows children calling a bunch of tomatoes ‘potatoes’! As Jamie says, the onus is on schools and the education system to teach children about food, teach them how to be healthy and avoid all the obesity problems that are, at the moment, in all of their futures. 5. Brenda Romero: Gaming for Understanding We’re going to be short with this description as the video is so powerful and explains the concept better than we ever could. Brenda, a game designer, creates incredible physical games that teach school-aged children about difficult topics, like slavery and Nazi concentration camps. Just watch: As you saw in the last video, games and game mechanics are fantastic ways to teach children all sorts of topics. We at Growth Engineering do it, too, but for adults - check out the research paper below all about how we use gamification in learning to capture learners’ attention and get them engaged in their learning:  

A few weeks ago we promised you that something very exciting was about to happen… And now we’re delighted to say it has! Today marks the launch of GE TV, a section of the Growth Engineering website that is dedicated to interviews with industry experts, eLearning movers and shakers, and of course our lovely clients. Over the past few weeks Juliette, Growth Engineering’s Managing Director, has been busy interviewing guests; our videographer has been filming and editing; and our developers have been beavering away behind the scenes to get the page ready for launch. You’ll find each video packed full of insider tips, tricks and thoughts about how the Learning and Development landscape is changing and how to create truly exceptional online learning that will knock the socks off learners! Anyway, enough of us blathering on. Time to check out the videos! CLICK HERE TO GO TO THE AWESOME NEW GE TV PAGE! WAHOO! Still here? Why not sign up to tour the Academy Learning Management System, the platform that all our lovely clients are talking about in the videos? Just click the button below!  

In the past, evaluating your learners’ progress was complicated. You’d have to put together drawn-out tests, hand out assessments, spend hours marking them and then work out where they are lagging behind and enroll them in the correct course to get them back on track. Wouldn’t it be better if this whole process was simpler? Easier to put together, quicker to deliver and a breeze to mark? Well, please welcome to the stage the Academy Platform Learning Management System. This nifty piece of software has exceptional reporting functionality, making it painless to monitor learners’ progress and make sure they are achieving what they need to in the right timeframe. Here’s how it works: Academy Admins can set up tests and assessments to check their how their learners are doing. That much is the same as standard, classroom testing. The difference comes in the application: Admins sign learners up to take tests and assessments from the comfort of their office chair. No printing, no running to the supply closet for extra ink and no walking around classrooms handing out tests required! No, with the Academy’s Assessments functionality, Admins simply create the tests and assessments, select which learners should receive them and then click ‘Send’. Once learners have completed the test or assessment (and they will, because they know there’s a badge in it for them - read more about gamification in learning here!) they submit their answers for marking. Depending on how the Admin set up the assessment, the marketing will either be automatic (such as multiple choice questions) or they’ll choose to assess essay-based answers themselves. Once done, learners will receive their mark and - here’s the really clever bit - they’ll automatically be enrolled in further training in areas that they’re struggling with. How awesome is that? Extra reading, additional eLearning modules and further information is automatically pushed out to them upon completion of their test or assessment. This really makes the Admin’s job easy and lets them get on with other important duties, like creating new eLearning content, uploading modules to the Academy and making sure everything is running smoothly (which it most probably will be!). We think the Assessments functionality on our Academy Platform Learning Management System is pretty special. But that doesn’t mean the rest of the gamified LMS isn’t awesome too! To find out more all the cool things it is capable of, sign up to a webinar tour of the Academy by clicking the button below:  

This week’s Learning Hero is Eric Sheninger, Senior Fellow at the International Center for Leadership in Education (ICLE) and former principal of New Milford High School. What makes Eric so heroic? Well, where do we start!? Eric has built a career from finding ways to drive performance and encourage positive change. His initiatives have mostly been based on bringing institutions into the digital age and making the most of the opportunities that today’s technologies can offer. We were particularly inspired by his work at Milford High School in New Jersey. Before he took the reins, Milford was a High School like any other, non-descript and stuck in the same old habits that have come to define secondary education. When Eric became principal, he turned the school from an everyday high school into globally recognised model for innovative learning practices. He introduced BYOD (bring your own device) initiatives to help students, teachers and parents connect. This helped to create a culture of social learning which prepared the students for the workforce of the future. In this, Eric’s forward-thinking is truly evident. Every aspect of life is changing at an exponentially rapid pace - and the world of work is no different. The initiatives that Eric helped to introduce not only give those students a head-start in their professional development, they also prepare them for roles that don’t necessarily even exist yet. Now, in his current role, he uses his expertise to assist other schools and districts in their own initiatives. This is an ongoing mission to transform school cultures and implement more efficient practices and forge stronger links between all members of the school community. Because of his progressive ideas, Eric is recognised as an innovative leader, a best-selling author and a popular speaker. He regularly appears at events and conferences describing ways to facilitate learning through social media and web 2.0 technologies. These practices not only boost the performance of the students, but they improve public relations, uncover new opportunities and (our favourite) engineer growth throughout the entire educational system. If you want to find out more about Eric, you can visit his website which includes plenty of resources, videos and links to upcoming speaking events. Be sure to check out his blog, A Principal’s Reflections, which is a treasure trove of insights and stories about educational successes. You can also follow him on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Eric Sheninger is just one of several individuals who have seen the potential of social learning and generated positive results by putting the theory into practice. Social learning is becoming increasingly popular as a means to encourage a culture of knowledge sharing within businesses and institutions. Our Academy LMS ranks as the world’s #1 Gamified Social Learning Management System, combining the functionalities of an online learning platform with those of a social network. But that’s just the start of it. If you want to find out how to enable social learning within your business, click the button below to download our white paper.  

Making learners happy and getting them engaged in their learning is hard. There - we said it. Creating award-winning Learning Technologies solutions is not a cakewalk. It involves hours and hours of dedication, brainstorming, meetings, planning, building, demolishing, reinventing, testing and releasing. But you know what? It’s worth all the hard work when we see our customers’ learners doing brilliant things on their Learning Management Systems. The trick, dear readers, is to make sure your Learning and Development programme is set with the aim of delighting learners. It’s not enough to aim for, say, simple reporting or uploading as many eLearning modules as possible. Here are five top tips to get your learners happy, engaged and improve their knowledge: 1. Don’t skimp on ‘fun’ We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: you must make learning fun! It’s important not only to make the learning content itself enjoyable and engaging, but also the way in which it’s rolled out to learners. Which would be more enjoyable for learners: accessing an eLearning module from a link in an email, or accessing an eLearning module from the dashboard of their state-of-the-art Learning Management System, after checking their position on the leaderboards (#2! Get in!) and sharing their achievements with friends on social media? 2. Looks are important It’s not enough to have a well-oiled machine. In order to engage learners and get them enjoying their training, the machine needs to look good and work properly, too. We actually wrote a whole research paper on why it’s important that Learning Management Systems (and all software products) have good design aesthetics. Click here to read The Art of Engagement!  3. Make it social For goodness sake, don’t force your learners to spend their days alone, in isolation, rushing through their eLearning courses to get back out into the real world so they can interact with other people! Instead, make the process of learning social - that’s what will really make the difference between a boring, ineffective training programme and a delightful, engaging one. 4. What’s in it for them? You can’t expect your learners to enjoy the whole process if they don’t know why they’re being taught these things or what it means for them. Other than being able to prove they’ve learnt about the basics of buyer behaviour (ISMM Unit 203), what does the course actually mean for them? Well, it means they are better able to sell to customers, which in turn means they hit targets. Clearly, hitting targets is great and it stands them in good stead to progress through the ranks at their organisation, gaining promotions and payrises. So don’t tell your learners, "We have enrolled you in this course on buyer behaviour." Tell them, "We have enrolled you in this course on buyer behaviour because we think it’ll help you develop in your role here at Company XYZ." 5. Believe in it! If you don’t believe that your Learning and Development plan is going to knock the socks off your employees, make your seniors dance in their seat and be your springboard into the L&D hall of fame, then your learners won’t see the point in it. You’ve got to prove to your learners that their brand new, shiny Learning Management System is the bee’s knees and that it really is the answer to everyone’s prayers. So what do you say? Is it time to give it a whirl? It’s actually never been easier to secure learner engagement and boost your company’s success - the technology is there, the passion is there and the results are there. Discover the secrets guaranteed to engage learners by reading the free research paper below:  

If you’ve played any kind of video game, you’ve probably received a badge for completing a level, killing a baddie, getting a high score or creating the perfect town. Badges have long been used to represent achievements in the video game world - and they’re also now a key ingredient in ‘gamifying’ online social media and, as we use badges, online learning experiences too. As far as social media goes, you may already be familiar with the badges awarded on Foursquare (though this is sadly no longer gamified) and Wikipedia. These badges motivate and engage users to continue interacting with the platform, in the same way as badges, achievements and points motivate learners to interact with their Learning Management System. But what is it about badges - little virtual artefacts that do nothing more than represent a completed action - that causes users and learners to react in these ways? In other words, what is the psychology behind badges? We came across a really great research paper on this topic: Badges in Social Media: A Psychological Perspective by Judd Antin and Elizabeth Churchill. We thought it would be a good idea to adapt this research paper from the social media realm to the online learning environment to see why badges motivate learners! 1. Badges are fun and interesting Could it be that badges break up the monotony of everyday actions enough to motivate us to strive for more? No - we don’t think so, and neither do Antin and Churchill. Instead, they suggest it’s because of the following points: 2. Goal-setting Antin and Churchill argue that perhaps the most obvious function of badges is as a goal-setting device: goals keep us focused on what we need to achieve and badges challenge us - i.e. give us the extra motivation - to complete the actions. There’s plenty of research to show that setting goals motivates us to achieve them, and in fact it is often thought that the fun and interest of goal seeking is the reward, rather than the badge. In this case, the badge merely directs the user or the learner in the correct direction - the goal gets them there. One important point that Antin and Churchill note, and which we tackle on our Academy Learning Management System, is that goal setting is most effective when learners can see their progress towards the goal. Therefore we make sure to award learners points alongside badges, which accumulate to push learners over the threshold of their current ‘level’ of achievement and ‘level up’. 3. Instruction Sometimes, particularly on a Learning Management System if learners are not familiar with the learning environment, badges are helpful to show people which direction to take. For instance, learners on the Academy LMS are able to check out the badge cabinet, which shows not only all the badges they’ve already achieved, but those available to them. If they didn’t already realise they could share their progress on Twitter, they do now - and they can get a badge for it! 4. Reputation, status and affirmation Everyone likes to be thought of as an expert, and what better way to prove this than by showing off your trophy cabinet full of badges!? In this way, badges can be motivating as status symbols - they advertise learners’ achievements and accomplishments without the learner shouting, "Hey! Look at me! Check out what I can do, I’m the best!" Because, let’s face it, they wouldn’t have any friends if they did that. Why do you think badges work to motivate and engage learners? What is it about badges that you find addictive? To find out more about gamification and badges, download our free research paper below!  

It’ll be no surprise to you when I say that we, as a culture, ‘get’ learning in a classroom. By that, I mean we understand what goes on in classrooms. We know how to behave. We know that when we enter a classroom, we take our seats promptly, get our notebooks out and wait. When the teacher enters, we fall silent. In fact, we’re silent pretty much the whole time, except for when we are called upon to answer a question or put forward one of our own. In other words, we’re acculturated from childhood to the norms and expectations of classrooms. This is one of the reasons that making the switch from classroom training events to online learning can be difficult for employees to master. After all, if we’ve never used a Learning Management System or consumed content online before, what do we know about learning in online environments? The answer is clear: not much! In fact when we first log on it’s all pretty alien to us. We wander around poking things, clicking buttons, testing how things work and trying to figure out how to navigate this bizarre new world. Herein lies the problem. If learners aren’t given direction, they will not know how to behave in their online environment. There is a huge difference between online learning and classroom learning environments. Learning and Development professionals can’t just sign their learners up to their new Learning Management System and then leave them to it - there is no instructor to lead the discussion, no set hours to ensure learning is completed and no leader to direct learners back onto the right track when they go off on a tangent. So how can we overcome these problems, show learners how to interact with their Learning Management Systems and solve the problems associated with low traffic, disengagement and poor return on investment? The solution lies in getting learners to engage with their learning platform. And the way to do this is through ‘gamifying’ the whole experience. Gamification means to add elements of game mechanics to non-gaming scenarios. So when Matilda logs onto her gamified Learning Management System for the first time, she is awarded a badge. When she downloads extra reading material, she gets another badge. And when she answers her fellow learners’ questions she gets a whole heap of ‘experience points’ showered down onto her. Badges, points and leaderboards help to guide learners through their learning journey, showing them the actions they need to make, the routes they need to take and the information they need to consume. It’s really as simple as that: there’s no need for an instructor to light the way when gamification does the job just as well, and has the added bonus of making the whole process super fun! Want to find out more about gamification? Download our free white paper by clicking the button below!