Design for How People Learn

About the book

Products, technologies, and workplaces change so quickly today that everyone is continually learning. Many of us are also teaching, even when it’s not in our job descriptions. Whether it’s giving a presentation, writing documentation, or creating a website or blog, we need and want to share our knowledge with other people. But if you’ve ever fallen asleep over a boring textbook, or fast-forwarded through a tedious e-learning exercise, you know that creating a great learning experience is harder than it seems.

In Design For How People Learn, Second Edition, you’ll discover how to use the key principles behind learning, memory, and attention to create materials that enable your audience to both gain and retain the knowledge and skills you’re sharing. Updated to cover new insights and research into how we learn and remember, this new edition includes new techniques for using social media for learning as well as two brand new chapters on designing for habits and best practices for evaluating learning, such as how and when to use tests. Using accessible visual metaphors and concrete methods and examples, Design For How People Learn, Second Edition will teach you how to leverage the fundamental concepts of instructional design to engage your audience.

MY TAKEAWAYS

I really like the writing style of this book – There are a lot of comics. For people like me who don’t like reading huge paragraphs of texts, this is a bless to have.

I might take a class in film appreciation just for my own satisfaction, but I wouldn’t expect the learning objectives to make me a professional film critic. A community-education course on Taiwanese cooking, a painting class at a local art museum, or even a high-school French class aren’t really set up in response to a “problem.”

Not all journeys are about the destination. Some are about taking a nice walk somewhere pleasant, or about getting in shape. Even when the learning isn’t in response to a problem, it’s likely to be in response to a need or desire.