Engaging learners and ensuring the effectiveness of instructional designs are quintessential goals for eLearning professionals. To achieve these goals, it’s crucial to understand how people learn and retain information. Here are five psychology principles every eLearning professional should be aware of:
1. The Cognitive Load Theory suggests that our working memory—the “mental workspace” we use to carry out cognitive tasks—is limited in the amount of information it can hold at one time. For eLearning, this means that courses should be designed to reduce unnecessary cognitive load by breaking complex information into chunks and using a mix of multimedia to enhance understanding without overwhelming the learner.
2. The Social Learning Theory, proposed by Albert Bandura, posits that learning is a social process, and people learn from one another through observation, imitation, and modeling. In eLearning, incorporating social elements like forums, group challenges, and peer reviews can help simulate this social context and encourage collaborative learning.
3. The Dual Coding Theory argues that combining verbal material with visual images enhances learning because the information is encoded twice—in linguistic and visual form—in our memory. This principle informs eLearning professionals to use text-and-image pairings wisely in course design to optimize retention and recall.
4. The Spaced Repetition Principle is the idea that spacing out learning sessions over time helps to improve long-term retention of the material. This technique can be implemented in eLearning courses by revisiting key concepts at varying intervals throughout a course or in follow-up refresher modules after course completion.
5. Finally, the Self-Determination Theory focuses on the human need for competence, autonomy, and relatedness. To apply this to eLearning, creating courses that allow learners to make choices about their learning path, ensure clear connections between lessons and real-world applications (competence), and foster a sense of community or connection with others (relatedness) can increase motivation and engagement.
By grounding their strategies in these psychological principles, eLearning professionals can create more effective educational experiences that cater to how humans naturally process and engage with new information.