Once upon a time, before working as a Senior Content Manager at Rethink, I taught literature, expository writing, and creative writing to undergrads. Eventually, I transitioned from academia into e-learning. While the two fields are different, many teaching principles remain the same.

What Is Learning Design?

Learning design is the application of best educational practices to online courses and training. It may also be referred to as instructional design or learning experience design.

At Rethink, our writers and designers use the following principles of learning design to inform our course creation. 

Begin With a Needs Assessment 

Before creating a course, it’s crucial to calibrate the content to the user. Otherwise, the course can be too easy, too challenging, or outright irrelevant to them.

Here are some questions we might ask our clients in our initial conversations.

• What knowledge base do the users already possess? Is the course intended for those who are new to the subject, for seasoned professionals, or for users somewhere in between?
• Who will be taking the course? Is it intended for executive leadership, management, individual contributors, or all of the above?
• What led to the need for the course? It may be that a new law, regulation, or other rule needs to be socialized to employees. Or perhaps some kind of expensive mistake or bad publicity has revealed the need for training on a specific concept or process. Often, it’s simply an important topic and learners need to be reminded.

A needs assessment helps define what problem the training is solving for.

Use Active Learning Objectives

Learning objectives are active, measurable, and focused on the learner. They are not simply a list of topics in the course. Learning objectives require the user to be able to achieve them.

For example:

At the end of the course, learners will be able to:

• Define conflicts of interest
• Recognize how personal relationships, outside employment, and other common situations can create conflicts of interest
• Identify when and how to disclose conflicts of interest

Each learning objective is a specific and testable skill.

Backward Design

As a writer, starting with a lesson's learning objectives structures the entire writing experience. Once I have the objectives, I work backward to build the content knowledge and skills necessary to achieve those objectives. This process is known as backward design.

Implement Gradual Release

“Gradual release” is a common teaching strategy in any classroom. It has many names and variations, such as “scaffolding,” “guided release,” and “I do, we do, you do.”

The basic idea is that the teacher first models the skill they want their students to master. As students gain confidence in their new skill, the teacher gradually “releases” responsibility until students can meet the learning objective(s) on their own. 

• I do: The teacher models how to do the task, solve the problem, etc.
• We do: The teacher and students work together.
• You do: Students work independently.

In e-learning, a scaffolded lesson might begin by presenting information, then delving into scenarios and simple knowledge checks, and finally ending with a more complex assessment.

Engage the User With Interactivities

We’ve all had to take those exhausting online trainings where we hit the “Next” button so hard we might hurt ourselves. What makes them so incredibly boring? Often, it’s the passive role we are forced into. An information dump is coming our way and we are expected to absorb it.

Active learning is much more engaging and effective. In e-learning, active learning techniques include:

• Interactions where the user has to click or swipe to make a choice. This might be a knowledge check, like a multiple-choice question. It can also be much more sophisticated, such as exercises where the user must sort the information into various categories.   
• Scenarios, case studies, and examples to make the material relevant. For compliance audiences, this could include interviews with employees, real incidents that happened on the job, etc.

But Keep It Organized

While active learning techniques engage the user, it’s also important for learning retention to establish a predictable structure. Perhaps a course has five chapters, and each chapter is organized the same way (opening scenario to grab interest, then teaching, then knowledge check).

The user knows what to expect in each chapter and doesn’t have to expend mental energy situating themselves.

And Review Periodically

Learners need time to digest information. Build regular reviews into a course, especially longer courses, so that the user can stop, take a beat, and synthesize.

Chunk Information Into Bite-Sized Pieces

Chunking simply means breaking up information into smaller pieces of information. The smaller pieces of information should be focused and build to the larger idea. Common chunking techniques include:

• Hierarchy: What’s the main idea? What are the supporting details? Headers and subheaders let you know how to classify information. 
• Bullet points group connected information together. 
• Bolding emphasizes vocabulary, main ideas, and other information that a scanning reader can instantly identify as important.

Here’s an example:

Did you notice…

• The headline gives us the overall topic: “What We Allow”
• The categories for “What We Allow” are “chunked” visually into four flipcards. 
• Clicking on each flipcard gets into another subset of information about the topic.
• Bolded font emphasizes the main ideas.

Visually, the reader can quickly see what the big ideas on the page are and how they relate to each other.

Create Effective Assessments

By assessments, we mean both knowledge checks within a lesson and end-of-lesson quizzes. Assessments help reinforce information and skills and also show the user what they need to review.

Bloom’s Taxonomy

Bloom’s taxonomy refers to a system of classification for the different stages of learning:

• Remember
• Understand
• Apply
• Analyze
• Evaluate
• Create

While the first few “levels” in Bloom’s taxonomy are more passive and focus on absorbing and retaining information, the latter tiers require active and creative interpretation.

For users new to the subject, it makes sense to prioritize lower-level tiers like “Remember” and “Understand.” For users who are familiar with the material and need to be able to parse nuanced situations, higher-tier Bloom’s questions like “Apply” and “Evaluate” will make more sense.

Answerability

Any question needs to be “answerable” in a lesson. It’s an important principle for all educators: Don’t test on what you haven’t taught.

End With a Summary

What are the major points of the lesson?

For example, in this blog post, you learned to explain the basic tenets of learning design:

• Begin With a Needs Assessment
• Use Active Learning Objectives 
• Implement Gradual Release
• Engage the User With Interactivities
• Chunk Information Into Bite-Sized Pieces
• Create Effective Assessments
• End With a Summary

Final Steps

As you wind down the lesson or course, you might also:

• Link to further resources. Where can the user go if they want or need more information? In compliance, this often means linking to relevant in-house policies.
• Add a certificate of completion. The user attests that they understand and will follow the rules.
• Thank the user for their time. And then send them on their way!