Wake Learning

A useless fact from ten years ago sticks in your head. Something important from yesterday doesn't.

The brain isn't being lazy here, it's being selective. Anything surprising or unexpected gets flagged as worth remembering, because standing out from the pattern usually means something matters.

The mistake is assuming that means training should be full of fun facts for their own sake. It doesn't work that way. A surprise only helps memory when it's tied directly to the thing you actually need someone to remember.

Picture a compliance course that opens by telling employees most of them think they know the policy, and most of them are wrong. That's a small surprise, and it's doing real work: it makes the next five minutes matter in a way a standard policy review never could.

The surprise isn't the content. It's the door that gets people to pay attention to the content.

Ask someone to guess before you tell them the answer, and they'll remember it better. Even if the guess is wrong. Sounds backwards. But the guessing is the point.

A prediction forces the brain to engage instead of just absorb. When the real answer lands, there's something to compare it to, and that's what makes it stick.

This is the pretesting effect. It shows up in training as simple as:
→ A "what happens next?" before the reveal
→ A question before the concept is explained
→ A pause before the answer

Small shift. Big difference in what learners actually retain.

What's one place in your training where you explain before you ask?

Did you know one of today's most effective presentation techniques for learning dates back over 100 years?

Long before PowerPoint existed, teachers used flannelgraphs, boards covered in felt where paper cut-outs could be added, removed, and rearranged to explain ideas step by step.

Instead of showing everything at once, information was introduced gradually, allowing learners to focus on one idea before moving on to the next. That simple approach helped reduce distractions, kept attention on the presenter, and made it easier to follow detailed explanations.

It's the same reason many presentations and e-learning courses still reveal content progressively rather than displaying every point on the screen at once.

Flannelgraphs may seem old-fashioned today, but the learning principle behind them is still widely used because revealing information gradually helps reduce cognitive overload and directs learners' attention to one idea at a time. It's a principle that's now built into everything from PowerPoint presentations to modern e-learning.

Most people think highlighting is one of the best ways to learn, but research says otherwise. Highlighting can help organize information and make important sections easier to find later.

On its own, though, research has shown it does very little to improve long-term learning because simply marking text doesn't require the brain to actively process or retrieve the information.

Here are a few research-backed ways we'd suggest to make learning more memorable:
✅ Retrieval practice: read a section, close your notes, then write down or say everything you can remember before checking what you missed.
✅ Practice questions: test yourself with questions that make you explain, apply, or solve something rather than simply recognizing the correct answer.
✅ Summarize in your own words: after reading a topic, write a short summary from memory as though you're explaining it to someone who knows nothing about it.

Highlighting works best as a way to identify the most important information. Remembering it is the next step, and that's where techniques like retrieval practice, self-testing, and summarizing make the biggest difference.

Most people picture the finished course when they think about e-learning development. That's usually the last thing we build, not the first.

Before any course takes shape, the real work is understanding the audience, pulling the right knowledge out of subject matter experts, and figuring out which approach actually solves the problem in front of you. Skip that step, and even a polished course can miss what learners actually needed.

That's why we treat it as a full process, not just course production.
- Custom courses: fully tailored e-learning built around your objectives, brand, and learners.
- Content migration: moving existing training into new platforms while improving the structure, not just relocating files.
- Scenario-based learning: realistic decision-making activities that let learners apply what they know.
- Microlearning: on-demand resources built for the moment someone actually needs support, not a scheduled course.

Whether you already have an L&D team or you're building learning from the ground up, we work alongside your subject matter experts to turn complicated information into learning that's clear enough to actually stick.

If any of that sounds like a gap you're working through right now, let's have a conversation: https://hubs.li/Q04wMCr-0

We're celebrating 60 years of International Literacy Day!

First celebrated in 1967, International Literacy Day was created to highlight the importance of literacy and has been marked around the world every year since.

60 years later, it still provides us with a good opportunity to think about what literacy really means. Being able to read the words is important, but being able to understand and use the information you're reading matters too.

That's particularly relevant in workplace learning, where someone can understand every individual word in a training course and still struggle to understand what they're actually being asked to learn or do.

Long sentences, unnecessary jargon, unexplained technical terms, and poorly structured information all make learners work harder to find the meaning.

There are some simple ways to make workplace learning easier to understand:
✅ Replace unnecessary jargon with familiar words, and clearly explain technical terms that learners genuinely need to know.
✅ Break complicated information into shorter sections, with each one focused on a clear idea or action.
✅ Put instructions in the order learners need to follow them, rather than making them search through paragraphs to work out what to do.

Clear writing doesn't mean making content overly simplistic. What it does mean is removing unnecessary barriers so learners can focus their attention on understanding and using the information.

https://hubs.li/Q04wMc2T0

International Literacy Day International Literacy Day | All you need to know about this day: date, history...

Here's a behind-the-scenes look at one of our e-learning projects 👀

One of the best ways to understand effective instructional design is to see it in action, so we thought we'd share one of the portfolio samples from our website.

This one's a branching scenario built for social work students. Instead of reading about best practices, learners step into a real case, make decisions, and see the consequences play out. That's the thinking behind good scenario-based design: understanding, deciding, and reflecting builds a far stronger learning experience than simply being told the right answer.

Explore the sample for yourself 👉 https://hubs.li/Q04nqklf0

Cramming feels productive. It isn't.

The spacing effect is one of the most well-replicated findings in learning research: information reviewed in short, spread-out sessions sticks far better than the same hours crammed into one sitting.

Forgetting a little between sessions isn't a failure. It's what makes the next review actually work.

The biggest problem with most staff training isn't its length, it's its timing ⏰

People learn more when they practice the same workplace skill in different situations, rather than repeating the exact same scenario every time 🔄
Research shows that exposing learners to varied versions of a workplace conversation or challenge improves retention and makes it easier to apply on the job.

Instead of repeating one task, learners work through similar situations with different people, circumstances, and levels of difficulty, forcing them to think it through rather than rely on a memorized response.

That builds stronger recall and reflects reality more accurately, since workplace conversations rarely play out the same way twice.

This is one reason on-demand role-plays can be so effective, giving learners the chance to build experience across a range of realistic situations.

Great insight from the Association for Talent Development in their article on why on-demand role-plays work 👉 https://hubs.li/Q04nqy0m0