Making Your Content Sticky: How Do We Remember Stuff?
Week Four: The Handbook for Course Creators
Maybe you've heard this quote: "It's not about information, it's about transformation." Ok, great. But how do you design your course so that your learners experience transformation?
Welcome back to Week Four of this 13 week series where each week I distill down some key strategies and concepts you need to know to design courses that WORK.
#4 How do we remember stuff?
In our first few weeks, we were focused on the three main elements of course creation: 1) Audience, 2) Problem You're Solving, 3) Transformation.
Today, we move deeper into how we actually help learners transform by setting them up to remember the great content you're going to share with them in your course.
Have you ever gone to a workshop or training, gotten all fired up about it, and then not been able to recall most of it the following week? Yep. Me too.
That's where a basic understanding of how humans remember stuff comes in handy!
The key here is to consider two things: 1) Attention, 2) Memory.
Before you can influence someone's memory, you have to GET THEIR ATTENTION. A few ways to do this are:
Surprise them
Use variety - people become blind to consistency
Tell a story
Change up your tone of voice
Appeal to their emotions
Once you have your learner's attention, now it's time to HELP THEM REMEMBER the content you've painstakingly put into your course.
A few strategies to get information to stick in people's long-term memory are:
Use repetition
Chunk the information down into categories
Give learners a framework for the information
Give learners opportunities to practice applying or using the information
Ask them to recall or repeat what they've learned
*Credit to Julie Dirksen, Design for How People Learn
Happy Course Creating!
Have a spectacular week folks!
Jess Paré
Founder & Chief Learning Alchemist
About The Lab!
Thanks for joining me here in the "lab" as we explore what it takes to transform your wisdom and knowledge into programs, courses, and products you can share with your clients in physical reality. Just as the alchemists of old experimented with combining different elements to see what the outcome would be, I see myself as a bit of a mad scientist (with better hair!). By pouring the content swirling in your head into the beaker of my design process, we alchemize your content into something magical that you can share with your audience.