#learningstrategy — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #learningstrategy, aggregated by home.social.
-
A survey of learners on a large, authoritative global health learning platform has me pondering once again the perils of relying too heavily on learner preferences when designing educational experiences.
One survey question intended to ask learners for their preferred learning method.
The list of options provided includes a range of items.
(Some would make the point that the list conflates learning resources and learning methods, but let us leave that aside for now.)
Respondents’ top choices (source) were videos, slides, and downloadable documents.
At first glance, this seems perfectly reasonable.
After all, should we not give learners what they want?
As it happens, the main resources offered by this platform are videos, slides, and other downloadable documents.
(If we asked learners who participate in our peer learning programmes for their preference, they would likely say that they prefer… peer learning.)
Beyond this availability bias, there is a more significant problem with this approach: learner preferences often have little correlation with actual learning outcomes.
And learners are especially bad at self-evaluating what learning methods and resources are most conducive to effective learning.
The scientific literature is quite clear on this point.
Bjork’s 2013 article on self-regulated learning emphatically states that: “learners are often prone to illusions of competence during learning, and these illusions can be remarkably compelling.”
The study by Deslauriers et al. (2019) provides a compelling demonstration that while students express a strong preference for traditional lectures over active learning methods, they actually learn significantly more from the active approaches they claim to dislike.
This disconnect between preference and efficacy is not surprising when we consider how learning actually works.
Effective learning requires effort, struggle, and sometimes discomfort as we grapple with new ideas and challenge our existing mental models.
It is not always an enjoyable process in the moment, even if the long-term results are deeply rewarding.
Furthermore, learners (like all of us) are subject to various cognitive biases that can lead them astray when evaluating their own learning.
The illusion of explanatory depth, for example, can cause us to overestimate how well we understand a topic after passively consuming information about it.
None of this is to say we should ignore learner perspectives entirely.
Motivation and engagement do matter for learning.
But we need to be thoughtful about how we solicit and interpret learner feedback.
Asking about preferences for specific content formats (videos, slides, etc.) tells us very little about the actual learning activities and cognitive processes involved.
A more productive approach might be to focus on understanding learners’ goals, challenges, and contexts.
What are they trying to achieve?
What obstacles do they face?
What constraints shape their learning environment?
With this information, we can design evidence-based learning experiences that truly meet their needs – even if they don’t always match their stated preferences.
As learning professionals, our job is not to give learners what they think they want.
It is to create the conditions for transformative learning experiences that expand their capabilities and perspectives.
This often means pushing learners out of their comfort zones and challenging their assumptions about how learning should look and feel.
Bjork, R. A., Dunlosky, J., & Kornell, N. (2013). Self-regulated learning: Beliefs, techniques, and illusions. Annual Review of Psychology, 64, 417-444. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-113011-143823
Deslauriers, L., McCarty, L.S., Miller, K., Callaghan, K., Kestin, G., 2019. Measuring actual learning versus feeling of learning in response to being actively engaged in the classroom. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 201821936. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1821936116
https://redasadki.me/2024/06/30/why-asking-learners-what-they-want-is-a-recipe-for-confusion/
#globalHealth #learningMethods #learningStrategy #learningStyles
-
The global health community has long grappled with the challenge of providing effective, scalable training to health workers, particularly in resource-constrained settings.
In recent years, digital learning platforms have emerged as a potential solution, promising to deliver accessible, engaging, and impactful training at scale.
Imagine a digital platform intended to train health workers at scale.
Their theory of change rests on a few key assumptions:
- Offering simplified, mobile-friendly courses will make training more accessible to health workers.
- Incorporating videos and case studies will keep learners engaged.
- Quizzes and knowledge checks will ensure learning happens.
- Certificates, continuing education credits, and small incentives will motivate course completion.
- Growing the user base through marketing and partnerships is the path to impact.
On the surface, this seems sensible.
Mobile optimization recognizes health workers’ technological realities.
Multimedia content seems more engaging than pure text.
Assessments appear to verify learning.
Incentives promise to drive uptake.
Scale feels synonymous with success.
While well-intentioned, such a platform risks falling into the trap of a behaviorist learning agenda.
This is an approach that, despite its prevalence, is a pedagogical dead-end with limited potential for driving meaningful, sustained improvements in health worker performance and health outcomes.
It is a paradigm that views learners as passive recipients of information, where exposure equals knowledge acquisition.
It is a model that privileges standardization over personalization, content consumption over knowledge creation, and extrinsic rewards over intrinsic motivation.
It fails to account for the rich diversity of prior experiences, contexts, and challenges that health workers bring to their learning.
Most critically, it neglects the higher-order skills – the critical thinking, the adaptive expertise, the self-directed learning capacity – that are most predictive of real-world performance.
Clicking through screens of information about neonatal care, for example, is not the same as developing the situational judgment to adapt guidelines to a complex clinical scenario, nor the reflective practice to continuously improve.
Moreover, the metrics typically prioritized by behaviorist platforms – user registrations, course completions, assessment scores – are often vanity metrics.
They create an illusion of progress while obscuring the metrics that truly matter: behavior change, performance improvement, and health outcomes.
A health worker may complete a generic course on neonatal care, for example, but this does not necessarily translate into the situational judgment to adapt guidelines to complex clinical scenarios, nor the reflective practice to continuously improve.
The behaviorist paradigm’s emphasis on information transmission and standardized content may stem from an implicit assumption that health workers at the community level do not require higher-order critical thinking skills – that they simply need a predetermined set of knowledge and procedures.
This view is not only paternalistic and insulting, but it is also fundamentally misguided.
A robust body of scientific evidence on learning culture and performance demonstrates that the most effective organizations are those that foster continuous learning, critical reflection, and adaptive problem-solving at all levels.
Health workers at the frontlines face complex, unpredictable challenges that demand situational judgment, creative thinking, and the ability to learn from experience.
Failing to cultivate these capacities not only underestimates the potential of these health workers, but it also constrains the performance and resilience of health systems as a whole.
Even if such a platform achieves its growth targets, it is unlikely to realize its impact goals.
Health workers may dutifully click through courses, but genuine transformative learning remains elusive.
The alternative lies in a learning agenda grounded in advances of the last three decades learning science.
These advances remain largely unknown or ignored in global health.
This approach positions health workers as active, knowledgeable agents, rich in experience and expertise.
It designs learning experiences not merely to transmit information, but to foster critical reflection, dialogue, and problem-solving.
It replaces generic content with authentic, context-specific challenges, and isolated study with collaborative sense-making in peer networks.
It recognizes intrinsic motivation – the desire to grow, to serve, to make a difference – as the most potent driver of learning.
Here, success is measured not in superficial metrics, but in meaningful outcomes: capacity to lead change in facilities and communities that leads to tangible improvements in the quality of care.
Global health leaders faces a choice: to settle for the illusion of progress, or to invest in the deep, difficult work of authentic learning and systemic change, commensurate with the complexity and urgency of the task at hand.
Image: The Geneva Learning Foundation Collection © 2024
https://redasadki.me/2024/06/30/learn-health-but-beware-of-the-behaviorist-trap/
#behaviorism #eLearning #healthTraining #HealthLearn #HRH #HumanResourcesForHealth #learningCulture #learningStrategy #workforceDevelopment
-
Many health leaders are highly analytical, adaptive learners who thrive on solving complex problems in dynamic, real-world contexts.
Their expertise is grounded in years of field experience, where they have honed their ability to rapidly generate insights, test ideas, and innovate solutions in collaboration with diverse stakeholders.
In January 2021, as countries were beginning to introduce new COVID-19 vaccines, Kate O’Brien, who leads WHO’s immunization efforts, connected global learning to local action:
“For COVID-19 vaccines […] there are just too many lessons that are being learned, especially according to different vaccine platforms, different communities of prioritization that need to be vaccinated. So [everyone] has got to be able to scale, has got to be able to deal with complexity, has got to be able to do personal, local innovation to actually overcome the challenges.”
https://youtube.com/live/uvv-g0lXy4c
In an Insights Live session with the Geneva Learning Foundation in 2022, she made a compelling case that “the people who are working in the program at that most local level have to be able to adapt, to be agile, to innovate things that will work in that particular setting, with those leaders in the community, with those families.”
https://youtube.com/live/nCB20y49hBI
However, unlike Kate O’Brien, some senior leaders in global health disconnect their own learning practices and their assumptions about how others learn best.
When it comes to designing learning initiatives for their teams or organizations, these leaders may default to a more simplistic, behaviorist approach.
They may equate learning with the acquisition and application of specific skills or knowledge, and thus focus on creating structured, content-driven training programs.
The appeal of behaviorist platforms – with their promise of efficient, scalable delivery and easily measured outcomes – can be seductive in the resource-constrained, results-driven world of global health.
Furthermore, leaders may hold assumptions that health workers – especially those at the community level – do not require higher-order critical thinking skills, that they simply need a predetermined set of knowledge and procedures.
This view is fundamentally misguided.
A robust body of scientific evidence on learning culture and performance demonstrates that the most effective organizations are those that foster continuous learning, critical reflection, and adaptive problem-solving at all levels.
Health workers at the frontlines face complex, unpredictable challenges that demand situational judgment, creative thinking, and the ability to learn from experience.
Failing to cultivate these capacities not only underestimates the potential of these health workers, but it also constrains the performance and resilience of health systems as a whole.
The problem is that this approach fails to cultivate the very qualities that make these leaders effective learners and problem-solvers.
Behaviorist techniques, with their emphasis on passive information absorption and narrow, pre-defined outcomes, do not foster the critical thinking, creativity, and collaborative capacity needed to tackle complex health challenges.
They may produce short-term gains in narrow domains, but they cannot develop the adaptive expertise required for long-term impact in ever-shifting contexts.
To help health leaders recognize this disconnect, it is useful to engage them in reflective dialogue about their own learning processes.
By unpacking real-world examples of how they have solved thorny problems or generated novel insights, we can highlight the sophisticated cognitive strategies and collaborative dynamics at play.
We can show how they constantly question assumptions, synthesize diverse perspectives, and iterate solutions – all skills that are essential for navigating complexity, but are poorly served by rigid, content-focused training.
The goal is not to dismiss the need for foundational knowledge or skills, but rather to emphasize that in the face of evolving challenges, adaptive learning capacity is the real differentiator.
It is the ability to think critically, to imagine new possibilities, to learn from failure, and to co-create with others that drives meaningful change.
By tying this insight directly to leaders’ own experiences and values, we can inspire them to champion learning approaches that mirror the richness and dynamism of their personal growth journeys.
Ultimately, the most impactful health organizations will be those that not only equip people with essential skills, but that also nurture the underlying cognitive and collaborative capacities needed to continually learn, adapt, and innovate.
By recognizing and leveraging the powerful learning practices they themselves embody, health leaders can shape organizational cultures and strategies that truly empower people to navigate complexity and drive transformative change.
This shift requires letting go of the illusion of control and predictability that behaviorism offers, and instead embracing the messiness and uncertainty of real learning.
It means creating space for experimentation, reflection, and dialogue, and trusting in people’s inherent capacity to grow and create.
It is a challenging transition, but one that health leaders are uniquely positioned to lead – if they can bridge the gap between how they learn and how they seek to enable others’ learning.
Image: The Geneva Learning Foundation Collection © 2024
#adaptiveLearning #coCreation #criticalThinking #healthLearning #immunization #ImmunizationAgenda2030 #KateOBrien #leadership #learningCulture #learningStrategy #peerLearning