Learning as an adult is hard. Indeed, it’s much harder than when we were kids and our brains had the plasticity of learning sponges. Today, our time at work is stretched too thin with a myriad of responsibilities and ever-changing priorities. Our attention is constantly sapped by a barrage of Slack messages, emails, texts, phone calls, and meetings. Our egos batted about like piñatas by near-constant feedback. So, it’s no wonder that when it comes time to take an elearning course at work, it’s natural that our defenses go up. You ask yourself, why should I take time from my crazy busy schedule to learn something marginally useful for my job, won’t fully engage me, will cause me to fall further behind on my long list of to-do’s, will make me feel like an idiot when I get questions wrong on the quiz, and which I’ll forget before the week is out?

Given these emotional and logistical brain barriers, our job of teaching adults is thus supremely challenging. What to do?

We need to change the psychological dynamic between employees and learning. We need to help adults want to learn by delivering content to them that emotionally engages them and is contextually relevant to their work. Thankfully, L&D professionals now have great tools at their disposal to generate meaningful content and deliver it to learners when they need it most.

During our session, we will discuss how to create emotionally engaging games for learners to wrestle with the content as well as to create a gamified, social learning community to motivate learning.

In this session, you will learn: 

• Why traditional passive training fails to make learning stick
• How to engage adult learners across generations
• Measuring the impact of game-based learning and proving ROI

 

Richard Lowenthal leads Partnerships at ELB Learning, bringing over 25 years of experience in game development, publishing, and training for industry leaders like Intel, Microsoft, Merck, and Pfizer. Known for forging partnerships with world-class brands such as Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy!, and National Geographic, Richard focuses on strengthening ELB’s partner channel through robust sales enablement, co-marketing, and automation. He is dedicated to nurturing existing relationships, building strategically aligned new partnerships, and delivering products that help organizations train employees to be more productive and valuable to their employers.