#13 Course creator's old habits block learning

In the newspaper world was quite common practice to print in broadsheet format. It was a large format that filled almost the entire kitchen table. Most newspaper companies used this format until the early 2000s because they thought that customers wanted these. And then UK’s Independent changed the format to tabloid size and their “circulation surged”. Later, every other company followed their example.  

The original reason why “quality newspapers” chose the broadsheet format was taxation changes in 1700 when they started taxing newspapers by page quantity. So, newspapers chose to have bigger pages, so you could have more text on the same page. It was a cost-saving tactic, not a customer preference. (You can read the original Harvard Business Review article here)

Nice story, but how does this is related to learning and training?

Because they did it, it should be good, right?

Sometimes the old thinking is linked to the basic teacher-learner hierarchy. And teachers are thinking about what is best for the learner. Sometimes they are right, sometimes they are going offroad with their thoughts. For example, trainers are focusing more on the colors, animations, and games of the course than on whether this training is valuable for the learner/customer/colleague.

Most of the time the old thinking shows up when people talk about learning. Many average professionals think that learning is just consuming content. So, watching hours of videos makes you learn stuff? Yep, and before you started reading this newsletter, and you stopped eye-bawling your LinkedIn/Instagram/TikTok feed, do you even remember the last video you watched?

Videos aren’t bad, or games, or animations. But the thinking behind the courses is just continuing the mistakes that we have made in the past. Learning is more about active interaction between the trainer, learner, content, and assessments: A personal trainer in the gym asks your goals, tells you what to do, and then demands you to do your pushups. In organizational learning, we are just watching the gym equipment.

How to survive from your own bias?

One of our success stories is bookkeeping software Accountor Finago. Before they started building their customer training courses, they asked their client, what they wanted to know about their software. And then they decided to make courses that answer those questions. After that, they had a pilot group that tested it, and that is how they got even more information on how to develop the course.

And the insights from customers were:

- Customers want to see their progress and showcase their knowledge with certificates

- Learning modules should be short and valuable

- Assessments were one of the top contents of the course

But use these insights wisely and be sure that you are not continuing to print on the broadsheet.

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So you can start building your courses for just 6€/licence/month. And you can always change the amounts that you will need for the next month.

More information can be found at www.claned.com/pricing

Quick resources:

Regarding the old thinking newspaper story, Aino shared her real-life example of when she used AI to help make courses.

Chirs gives a bold statement: “Stop doing webinars”.  Listen to this 10-minute recording of why you should instead start using them differently if you want more learning to happen.

Do you want to learn to make better online courses? We got you covered with our free course!