Course Design Strategy: The Art of Making People Learn

Knowing your subject well and having valuable content to share are essential, but they are only part of effective course design. Learners also need to stay attentive, make sense of the content and remember it afterwards. Course Design Strategy shows you how to create the conditions in which people can understand, practise and retain what they learn.

Rather than offering another rigid model or a collection of tips about slides and technology, this book explains the principles that should guide your most important design decisions.

Combining research from cognitive psychology, neuroscience and instructional design with practical training experience, the book explores memory, attention, curiosity, emotion, cognitive load, feedback, practice and productive failure. It also examines why some familiar training methods feel effective while producing little lasting learning.

Written for trainers, subject matter experts, instructional designers, teachers and course creators, the principles apply across classroom, virtual, online and blended learning.

In Course Design Strategy, you will learn how to:

• Design courses around what learners need to be able to do
• Use memory and forgetting to shape your course structure
• Gain attention and maintain it throughout a course
• Manage cognitive load so learners can remain focused on learning
• Identify the eureka moments and eureka concepts that unlock a subject
• Use curiosity, emotion, examples and stories to make learning memorable
• Build feedback loops that help learners improve
• Design exercises that make learners retrieve, think, struggle and learn from mistakes
• Make testing part of learning, not just assessment

The result is not simply a course that presents information, but one that gives learners a genuine chance to understand, apply and remember what they have learned.

Dr Ethan Honary is the founder of Skills Converged, which specialises in designing soft skills training materials. He is a training consultant, an author and a course designer. He has an interest in a diverse set of subjects such as psychology, artificial intelligence, training the trainer, emotional intelligence, fine arts and software engineering. Ethan's unique background and his great passion for the world of training mean that he understands the needs of a diverse set of learners and what it takes to train them. He is the author of several books, including Train the Trainer: The Art of Training Delivery, published under the Skills Converged brand and a bestseller in the field. For more than a decade, via Skills Converged, Ethan has enabled thousands of trainers worldwide to deliver outstanding training courses on soft skills. Through his instructor-led and online train the trainer courses, he shares his passion and his discoveries concerning how to design and deliver effective training courses. He lives in London with his wife.