The Key Ingredient For Creating Exceptional Learning

Oct 19, 2018 by The Key Ingredient For Creating Exceptional Learning

In last week’s blog post we talked about effective learning design and how great content helps us get people’s attention. Extraordinary content, design, and technology get us some—but not all—of the way to exceptional learning. There’s one more key element: social interaction.

We learn from each other. When we have to explain new knowledge to our peers in our own words—and argue passionately to make our points—we retain more of what we’ve learned. In many traditional classrooms, this could and should happen but doesn’t; in most online learning settings, it’s simply impossible.

For an exceptional learning experience, effective social learning must be the rule rather than the exception. That’s why, at Nomadic, we baked social interaction right into the platform.

Here are 3 ways that we use to encourage social interactions at Nomadic —you can incorporate these into your organization to provide exceptional learning experiences:

1. 1. Use structured conversations by using challenges and debates derived from the content around them, reinforcing and teasing out complex ideas.
2. 2. Encourage good-spirited competition– this is effective because it taps into learners’ desires to win and get noticed by the right people. At Nomadic we use leader boards were learners earn points for completing sections of content, doing well on quizzes, and—most importantly—for engendering more conversations.
3. 3. Use thought-provoking, challenging prompts at the top of the comment/debate threads to push learners to put their new knowledge into practice using their own words. The objective here is not to encourage simple regurgitation; if you link the prompts directly to the content, the conversations are curated and contained so we don’t end up with long streams of comments made just for the sake of commenting. This is honest-to-goodness dialogue.

By creating open-ended conversations and rewarding learners for their progress, we’re seeing unprecedented levels of engagement in online learning. Effectively incorporating social interaction into the learning experience is the missing ingredient to creating rich, thoughtful, and honest conversations that can change how organizations do business.

Want to provide your team with the best learning experience? Book a demo and see Nomadic in action.