By now, it shouldn't come as a surprise that elevating your learning experience (LX) is what we are all about (ahem, it's in the name).
You may think the sound of elevating your learning experience sounds great and all, but you're not sure what it takes to actually do it. No worries, we've rounded up the top five ways you can elevate any learning experience.
It's all about the six E's. At ELX, we know them as our Core Convictions.
Exciting
Efficient
Effective
Effortless
Evaluated
Experiential
Make your LX exciting.
Excite (verb) /Ik'sait/ to make someone feel very pleased, interested, or enthusiastic, especially about something that is going to happen
Elevating your LX by making it more exciting can occur before and during the experience. Turn up the energy through a fun internal marketing campaign, pumped-up music that transforms your presentation into a party, food, fun themes, games, and competitions that weave interactivity and engagement into every moment. Need a few ideas? Here's some to get you started:
Change up the scenery and host your training somewhere new. Think local resort or outside at a park.
Leverage positive reinforcement and meaningful offer prizes and rewards
Make it a competition. It's totally fine to have winners and losers. You can even make it a "Final Four-style" competition that gets everyone involved.
Make your LX efficient.
Efficient (adjective) /ɪˈfɪʃnt/ doing something in a good, careful, and complete way with no waste of time, money, or energy
Efficiency is all about planning and repurposing. Consider how you can minimize the time it takes to create content while maximizing the variety of content you produce. Connect with other L&D pros to understand their methods to get the biggest bang for their buck and build training experiences that use time and energy wisely. Want a few tips on how to make your LX more efficient? We've got you:
Use the templates
Create a training theme with a storyline that you pull throughout the year and add to continuously
Take a systematic approach to designing and developing content.
Make your LX effective.
Effective (adjective) /ɪˈfektɪv/ producing the result that is wanted or intended; producing a successful result.
Building effective training is a bit of an industry buzzword. Make your LX more effective by honing into the measurable performance change you want to see. Tap into tried and true theories and methodologies, like Procedural Rhetoric and the Transtheoretical Method, to create an experience that motivates your learner on a psychological and neurological level. Elevating your LX to be more efficient doesn't have to be complicated. Here are a few things you can do:
Leverage learner profiles to know your learner beyond the training moment
Meet the learner where they are at and create training that supports them during and outside of the workflow
Hone into the learning analytics
Tie it all back to organizational problems and metrics
Make your LX effortless.
Effortless (adjective) /ˈefərtləs/ needing little or no effort so that it seems easy
From a content development side, learn to set it and forget it by leveraging customizable resources and automating wherever possible. Creating an effortless LX means being incredibly thoughtful and sensitive to the learner's perspective. Invite your learner to participate in the design process to accurately capture their experience. Uncover the answer to questions such as:
What is happening to the learner before they need to exercise this skill?
What happens to the learner after they have exercised this skill?
What does the learner need to know to get in the right mindset before attending this learning experience?
What does the learner need to ensure they apply the information?
What are the limitations and opportunities for training content in their role?
Make your LX evaluated.
Evaluate (verb) /ɪˈvæljueɪt/ to form an opinion of the amount, value, or quality of something after thinking about it carefully.
Elevating your LX by evaluating it does not mean collecting copious amounts of data. It's about taking that data and thinking carefully to inform your next decision. Evaluation occurs at multiple points throughout the learning experience, not just after. Here are a few ways to sprinkle in measurable moments into your LX:
Analyze data to maximize efficiency and eliminate waste, including time, money, and energy
Consider data to build training that is more learner-centric
Apply the data to multiple moments of your LX (from onboarding to skill mapping)
Refer to data during the content development and design phase
Highlight data while asking for budget increases
Make your LX experiential.
Experiential (adjective) /ɪkˌspɪəriˈenʃl/ based on or involving experience
Making your LX more experiential requires catering to the five senses and leveraging interactivity and immersion to help transport the learner from reality into the training environment. According to Hill and Helmers (2004), a continuum of vividness places one form of media/content as more vivid than another. The more vivid your training environment appears, the more believable it is.
Most vivid information:
Actual experience
Procedural Rhetoric (Bogost, 2010)
Moving images with sounds (videos)
Static photographs
Realistic paintings
Line drawings
Narrative, descriptive accounts
Descriptive accounts
Abstract, impersonal analysis
Statistics
Least vivid information
Elevating your learning experience is about knowing your learner on a deeper level and tapping into their motivations and concerns to cater the experience to their needs. Use the six Es to take your learning experiences up a notch (or two) and connect with us on LinkedIn to share how your training transformation is going.
References
Bogost, I. (2010). Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames (The MIT Press). The MIT Press.
Hill, C. A., & Helmers, M. (2004). Defining Visual Rhetorics (1st ed.). Routledge.
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