July 15, 2025 • 34 mins
In this episode of the Inside Learning Podcast, brought to you by the Learnovate Centre, we dive deep into the principles of effective learning with special guest Julie Dirksen, author of 'Design for How People Learn' and 'Talk to the Elephant.' Julie and host explore topics such as designing impactful learning experiences, the role of habit formation, and the importance of understanding learner objectives. Julie shares insights on overcoming resistance to change, leveraging AI in learning, and the importance of bridging knowledge gaps. This engaging conversation is a must-watch for educators, instructional designers, and leaders aiming to create meaningful and sustainable learning environments. Learn more about the science of learning and the future of work at Learnovatecentre.org.
00:00 Introduction to the Inside Learning Podcast
00:15 The Importance of Effective Learning Experiences
01:02 Welcome Julie Dirksen: Author and Learning Expert
02:27 Communicating Learning Objectives
08:15 Challenges of Unlearning and Adapting to Change
20:13 Bridging Learning Gaps and Behavioral Science
26:39 The Expert's Perspective and Effective Learning Design
29:14 The Closet Analogy: Organizing Knowledge
32:10 Conclusion and Where to Find More
Find Julie: https://usablelearning.com/the-books/
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
The Inside Learning Podcast is broughtto you by the Learnovate Centre.
Learnovate's research explores the powerof learning to unlock human potential.
Find out more about Learnovate's researchon the science of learning and the
future of work at LearnovateCentre.
org.
A successful learning experience doesnot just involve a learner knowing more.
It's about them being able todo more with that knowledge.
(00:23):
Sometimes a learner's main gap isknowledge, but more frequently knowledge
and information are just the suppliesThe learner needs to develop new skills.
That is just a flavor of what we'regonna cover in today's episode based on
the book that shows how we can use thekey principles behind learning memory
and attention to create materials thatenable an audience to both gain and
(00:46):
retain knowledge and skills we share.
This new edition includes techniquesfor using social media for learning,
as well as two brand new chapterson designing for habit and the best
practices for evaluating learning.
Such as how and when to use tests.
It is a pleasure to welcome theauthor of Talk to the Elephant and the
(01:06):
focus of today's episode, her earlierbook, Design for How people Learn.
Julie Dirksen, welcome to the show.
Thank you for having me.
It's fantastic to have you on the show.
Let's give a little bit of abackground of your work, Julie.
These two books as well, I'veseen, they've been translated
into many languages as well.
Well established work all over the world.
(01:29):
Yeah.
Yeah.
Design for how people learn.
My first book came about because.
seemed to not have a good first bookin the field of learning design,
which is, you know, kind of that bookyou hand people when they say, oh, I
really need to learn about this topic.
And so for example, if you useexperience designer, people give you.
(01:50):
Don't make me think by Steve Krug.
And if people need help with graphicdesign, they give them the non-designers
design book by Robin Williams,or there's a couple others there.
And it seemed like learning designneeded a, a good first book, which
was, hopefully grounded in researchand evidence-based principles, but
was still really like accessible andreadable for somebody who didn't
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have an academic background.
'cause so many people wind up teachingthings because they know their topic
really well, but then they don'tknow how to translate it into a good
learning experience for other people.
I thought one of the things we'ddo was pull out pieces of the book.
The very first thing I jumpedahead, a couple of chapters was.
Something that you say most learningjourneys begin with, which is
(02:33):
communicating learning objectives.
And I thought we'd dothat for today's episode,
Yeah.
so we'll eat our own cooking,but here you say one of the rules
of training is that you tell thelearners what the objectives are.
And when you first startedtaking instructional design
classes, this was handed downas instructional design gospel.
(02:54):
I thought you'd share your thoughtson that because we all see that's
still on so many learning courses.
We see it virtually now.
We see it on social media courses wherethe first thing is you will learn.
Everybody knows that slide.
Right, right.
And the problem with learningobjectives is they often show up
in a lot of the course materialis that as instructional designers.
(03:16):
We have a fairly sort of stiff and formalway of writing learning objectives,
and that's useful to us in our internaljargon as designers because we wanna be
really precise about what we're doing.
and the issue with that is then these.
Stiff and kind of jargony learningobjectives that are written
(03:38):
for professionals who do this.
And, depending on your opinions aboutlearning objectives, , you've got
lots of, you know, sort of rules forhow they should be written and what's
a well-formed learning objective andshould it follow Bloom's taxonomy
and all of that kind of stuff.
But all of that's essentiallymeaningless to learners.
And so I would never suggest that it'sa bad idea to kind of give the learners
(04:01):
a bit of a signpost about here's what'scoming up and here's what you're gonna
do, and here's the standard of performancethat we're hoping will get people
to like, here's what you're gonna beable to do at the end of this course.
None of that is bad.
That's all.
Perfectly reasonable stuff to, tocommunicate to the learners, but
the fact that we just take our superjargony stiff learning objectives
(04:23):
and whack 'em on the first screen ofthe course like that's gonna somehow
communicate well to our learners just is.
I'm gonna, oh, let's call it misguided.
Cause if you were just going to explainto the learners, like you're talking to
a regular human, you wouldn't use thisformat, you wouldn't use this jargon.
You would explain it in a way that is,you know, easy for them to understand.
(04:48):
And so it's not that I dislike learningobjectives, it really is that I don't.
the fact that we're using ourformal method for defining learning
objectives as the main way thatwe're communicating to people.
'cause I think the first thing it tellsthem is like, this is gonna be formal
and academic and probably boring.
(05:11):
And one of the things on that,I was thinking about this, I was
thinking about when do I do that?
When I'm running a course, andit's usually because I'm asked to.
By the l and d leader or the HR leadwho's asked me to do a course, and
it actually feels foreign to do it.
It feels old school to do it.
So I wondered what a better way.
So little bit of pushback on that fromme to the l and d person is perhaps
(05:36):
advisable or even just to go, look,here are the outcomes, but I'm not gonna
overdo this when I'm running a course.
Would that be the best way to do it?
Yeah.
Yeah, I think so.
I mean, you know, the question isjust to ask yourself, is this the best
way to serve this particular learner?
Is this the best way to.
communicate that.
And, you know, um, I read an article notthat long ago, and it was by, um, one
(05:58):
of the heath brothers, either Chip orDan Heath, I can't remember, but he was
talking about the goal behind the goal.
And so we've got this wisdom thatwe put the learning objectives
at the beginning of the course.
Well, what's the goal behind the goal?
Is it that you want.
People to kind of have asignpost for what's coming up.
Is it that you want them to knowkind of what they're supposed
to achieve with this course?
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Is it that you want them to pay aparticular attention to certain things?
And then if you, if you're doing agood job of defining, well, why do you
wanna communicate these things at thebeginning of the learning objective?
And they can actually answerthat question, which they
can't always answer it.
but if other than like, well,that's the way we've always done it.
But if they have a purposefor it, then that can really
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guide the design decision of.
how you do it best, andwe have a lot of these.
Traditions or conventionsthat follow us around.
I was looking at, I, I advise a group,for an instructional design program at one
of the universities, and I was looking atsome of the syllabi for the courses and
you know, there's a constant complaintfrom faculty that the students don't read.
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The syllabi.
syllabus.
And I was looking at the syllabus andI'm like, I wouldn't read this either.
It's like nine pages of boilerplate,officially used language.
Before I finally get to the little bitthat I might actually care about, which
is what are the assignments gonna be, orwhat book do I need to buy, or what's the
course, you know, what's the course topic?
And so thinking about like what's mygoal in handing out a syllabus and what
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do I really want students to get to it?
You would design a very different.
Document or experience, dependingon how you'd answer those questions.
So it's always good when we're pushingback to be like, well, tell me,
tell me why do you want this here?
What are you trying to accomplish?
And then maybe we can thinkabout from a design perspective,
what's the best way to do that.
And I was thinking actually that thatgoing through that practice is just as
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useful for you being the instructor.
Yeah.
Because you're kind of going, okay, what,what do I want to impart to this audience?
I'm gonna move on becausethere's so much in the.
Book and we're barelygonna get even to touch it.
And it's, I love, by the way, the, thedrawings throughout the book as well.
Very simple, but really do get the pointsacross the metaphors, the analogies.
(08:10):
You do eat your own cooking in theway you've written this book as well.
But one of the things.
We need to consider you say, in ourlearner's journey is whether the new
learning is going to require doingsomething familiar in a new way.
And I thought how relevant thatwas in today's age of AI and
technology and digitalization.
(08:30):
And you say if people are required tochange the way they do things, then they
are going to stumble over old habits.
If they automatically do certainthings, they are going to have to make a
conscious effort to not do those things.
A process called unlearning, and we'vetalked about unlearning before on
the show, but it's such an importantpart of this, and as you say very
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clearly, it can make people grumpy.
Yeah.
Well it's, it's such an interesting oneto me because you know, one of the things
I hear a lot of times on, projects, wemight be like, updated safety guidelines.
And one of the things that people willtell me is like, you know, some of the
most experienced people are the worst.
They don't wanna change what, youknow, the way that they've done it
(09:11):
for 20 years, it's kind of like.
of course they don't, right?
They're very good at it.
It's very easy for them because one ofthe things that we know is, is people
get more and more practiced with abehavior in action or something.
It becomes more and more automaticand it actually gets stored
differently in the brain whenit becomes this automatic thing.
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You know, when you're first, whenyou first start out driving, you have
to think about every single thingyou're doing, which is exhausting.
And then after you've been driving fora decade or something, you do it really
automatically and you don't have tothink a lot about the active driving.
It just kind of happens and youcan think about other things.
But then if you have to change, so forexample, you go from a country where
(09:55):
you drive on the left hand side of theroad and now you're driving on the right
hand side of the road, or vice versa,that's almost harder than it was to learn
it in the first place because you'rehaving to battle all these automatic.
Impulses that you have about, andit just, everything feels wrong.
And when we do that to people that areexperts, you know that they've been doing
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something this way for a really long timeand they're very good at it, take them
back from this expert, you know, feelinglike experts, feeling very confident,
feeling very practiced in what they do.
And we throw them into a situationwhere they go back to feeling like.
Novice or, you know, and it all feelsawkward and it feels unpleasant, and
they're fighting it the whole time.
(10:36):
And that's a pretty bigidentity hit for people, right?
If I'm used to feeling very confidentand very expert, and I get thrown into
a situation where I feel really awkwardand uncomfortable, then you know.
I of course wanna go back tothe old way of doing things.
Of course I do.
(10:56):
And what I see happening is A, eitherwe don't acknowledge that in the
learning experience, we don't sort ofsay explicitly, yeah, this is gonna feel
uncomfortable, and we recognize that.
You know, that's because you're,you know, and you can even sort
of say like, that's because you'rereally good at doing it this way.
And we know that change is hard and sowe're gonna make sure that we're creating
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time and space and a safe place for you topractice and all of those kinds of things.
And the other thing aboutit is, is that we tend to.
Only maybe practice a newbehavior once or twice.
Well, like that's not enough tokind of start to undo a lot of this
automaticity and, build new habits.
just leaves the learner.
(11:37):
They're like walking out of the learningexperience at kind of the lowest point of
this, where their view of the world is.
That was a. It's super uncomfortable.
I don't like it.
You know, so then we're like, butthey're so resistant to change.
Well, of course they are.
I mean, you didn't, give them, Imean, you, the, so the challenge
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there is how do we give people enoughpractice so that they at least see
it getting a little bit better?
And how do we support that?
Where if.
I, I'm never gonna get back to thatlevel of automaticity and a learning
experience, but if I can at leastpractice it three or four or five times
and it starts to become a little bitmore familiar and a little bit easier,
(12:20):
then I'm at least leaving the room.
Or, you know, whether it's a virtual ora live classroom with a little bit of an
upward trajectory where I'm like, okay.
I see that it's getting better.
If I keep going with this, I will getcomfortable with this again, or it
will get easier, it will make sensefor me as opposed to kind of having
having people go back to the realworld that they're sort of lowest ebb.
(12:41):
, Of course there resistance to that.
Of course, they wanna go back tothe old way that they do things.
I think that's such an important point.
That's very understated, both by theteacher, so if you're the facilitator,
but also then by the organization.
So if the leaders tell the people this,I'd love you to share some suggestions
maybe for the leaders who are employing afacilitator to do some type of learning.
(13:04):
We're particularly, we're seeingin things like with things like I
mentioned there, AI or skills thatpeople are feel threatened by, that
they feel maybe I'm being trained,maybe I'm digging my own grave here.
But if they're empowered and theorganization realizes you're gonna
have to take a step backwards,you're gonna look silly.
You're gonna have to go rightback to learning because your
(13:27):
expertise is in a way now defunct.
The world has moved on.
And if an organization tolerates thatperiod, that messy middle between
one state and the next, I'd loveyou to share your thoughts on that.
Yeah.
And that's such an interesting question tome about the idea that people's expertise
is defunct and you know, because.
(13:49):
One of the really crucial parts of usingany of the large language model ai, and
I'm not really not qualified to talkabout any of the other forms of ai.
I mean, there are other types, but, one ofthe really crucial pieces of that is being
able to evaluate the output and say, yes,this is something that's, this is right.
Or this is not know, this is notquite right, and things like that.
(14:14):
And so.
The idea that like the AI is justgoing to replace that expertise
is a super interesting one to me.
But you know, oh, I mean, the challengewith the example that you're talking about
with the AI skills is some people's jobswill be eliminated because of AI skills.
And so we can tell them all wewant about, you know, like you
(14:36):
need to embrace it and it's coming,and you know, things like that.
And they may still beskeptical, rightly so.
But then there's the otherpiece, which is how do we.
do we leverage this as wellas possible and for things?
And so a lot of it is about findingthe example that is that can kind
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of step people through things.
So for example if I want you toadopt a new behavior, whether it's
using AI for something or it's maybelike, you know, if it's salespeople,
it might be a new sales model, or ifit's, it might be a new way of doing
like performance feedback for your.
People like there's a lot of thesecon training programs around things
like difficult conversations andstuff like that, in our ideal world,
(15:25):
people would go back and immediatelychange all their behavior and use
all of the new things and just do it.
But.
That's scary and it's intimidatingand it, there's a lot going on there.
And so one of the things I thinkthat we can do as learning designers
or facilitators is try to eitheridentify or help people identify for
themselves what are some baby stepswe can do where it's not that scary.
(15:50):
You could totally try it.
You can totally kind of go out there.
So maybe you don't change, youknow, you maybe don't jump into
the hardest conversation withyour most challenging employee.
learning a new feedback model, youfigure out, here's a couple ones that
I think I could use this format forwhere eh, you know, it's not a big deal.
It's just little things, you know.
(16:12):
And so then I can get comfortable withit on sort of a little bit more of the
easy setting before I sort of ramp up to.
So the hard setting for things
And, and that in anorganization, the leader, I feel.
Probably isn't going through the samelearning, so, you know, do you know this
one where my people aren't innovativeenough, or my people aren't X enough, and
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the leader books this session and thendoesn't attend the session themselves.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, and you know, the innovationone I, I always find fascinating
because organizationally we love tohear about innovative organizations.
There was a time in the, oh, the teenswhere somebody had written one of the
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books about like how Pixar the film studioworked and everybody wanted to like adopt
some of the practices that Pixar used.
And it's like.
hard part about that was that,you know, the culture had
to then support the changes.
We can't just have people say, wewant you to be more innovative.
We also need to then support innovativebehaviors and maybe culturally
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to support innovative behaviors.
We need to have the managergo to the training so they
know what people are learning.
Absolutely.
But we also need to recognizethat with innovation comes risk.
And so not every innovativeproject works and pe you know r
and d groups and, you know.
People who are genuinely like in thebusiness of innovation, know that
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and they know that there's going tobe, like, if they get one success for
every three failures, that's a prettygood ratio from their point of view.
But then we have people whoare like, we need to be more
innovative in our organization.
But the organization structurally isn'tset up to support it and reinforce.
Reinforce it when it happens.
And so , this employee who learned how tobe innovative shows up and their manager
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gives them nine reasons why the innovativeidea they wanna try isn't gonna work.
Well then it doesn't matter whatyou did in the training, if the
organization doesn't also havereinforcement mechanisms once
people are out of the training andin the real world to do the thing.
And it, it makes so much sense thatactually training people and unlearning,
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so the unlearning, relearning.
Process gets faster and faster astechnology gets faster and faster.
But I'm gonna, I'm gonna park thatfor the moment because there's so
much in the book and I, I reallywanted to come back to, okay, so.
Learning outcomes is one thing, andthat there's a huge benefit for that,
for the facilitator running a session.
But then there's also the importantwork of identifying and bridging gaps
(18:48):
because I'll tell you the way I learnedthis first, I remember doing a course
during COVID, during the pandemic, andit was an online course and I was taking
the course and it was in leadershiptraining, executive coaching, and I loved
the teaching styles of the lecturers.
I remember then going into my firstbreakout room and some of the other people
(19:09):
who were taking the course were like, ohmy God, these guys are awful, aren't they?
And I had such a moment, it was one ofthose moments to go, I can be looking
at the exact same thing, having atotally different experience, and I
assume others are having the same.
And I'm a lecturer myself, so I lecturein Trinity College here in Dublin, and
it made me, it gave me such empathyfor those students because they mark
(19:34):
you, almost like an Uber driver.
Right.
But at the same time, some of thosestudents, because they have such different
learning styles, some are from differentcountries, they have different learning
cultures in those different countries,
Yep.
and that has a dramatic effecton what they expect from you.
Some of them wanted to bereally taught by bullet point.
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Others love the way I style.
My style is more metaphorical and analogyand case-based and there was a huge
disparity between learning styles, andthis is where this piece you talk about
identifying bridging gaps comes in.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So the question is often, what'sthe gap between where people
are and where people need to be?
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And in, in my newer book, the Talkto the Elephant Design Learning
for Behavior Change, I bring over,there's been a lot happening in
behavioral science that hasn't beenmaking its way back to educational
settings and learning and development.
so the, the, that book is very muchabout what can we learn from behavioral
science and, the core model thatI use for a lot of the behavioral
(20:39):
science analysis is combi, which ispart of the behavior change wheel.
And it's Susan Mickey and her colleaguesout of University College, London's
Center for Behavior Change, but they, wejust kind of asked the basic question,
are people capable of doing this thing?
And if they aren't, then training'sa really great answer for it.
Right?
If they need to learn some informationor if they need to practice a skill, but
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then do they also have the opportunity?
So is the physical environment or likethe systems set up to support it, is
it something where it's supported by,the social culture of where people
are, and then are they motivated?
Do they have, is this part of their goals?
Is this part of their identity?
You know, is this somethingthat they genuinely wanna do?
And so that's one way to look at it.
(21:23):
In the design for how people learn.
Book i, I look at some gaps of,you know, is it a knowledge gap is
the only thing that stands between.
This person being not beingsuccessful now and being successful
in the future, if they just knowsomething, , will that fix it?
And the answer is usually not.
Usually.
Usually knowledge gaps aren'tthat hard to deal with.
Is it something where it's a procedureor a skill where people really have
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to practice it to get good at it, andthen we start to think about how do
we design good practice environments?
Is it a gap that's based on their habits?
Right?
Somebody can know that they shouldfloss their teeth every day.
They can know how to floss their teeth.
They can even reallywanna floss their teeth.
They can have genuine motivation aboutit, but they still don't manage it because
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it just doesn't become a habit for them.
And so if something needs to behabitual, then there are some strategies.
I think we're getting more as theresearch evolves, but there are some
strategies for how do we support peoplein habit development, but you have to
be really deliberate about that choice.
is it a gap of communication?
You know, we never gave you a clearstandard of what we were trying to
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do, or we didn't really communicatethe goals, or we didn't really
communicate in a way that you could like.
Understand if you're ontrack, those kinds of things.
is it a gap in the environment?
As I mentioned, there's a lot of behaviorswhere it would be much easier to fix
the computer system or to fix, somethingabout the physical environment to support
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the behavior than it is to try to fixthe human through some kind of training.
And we have a tendency when we'redesigning learning experiences
to really focus on the knowledge.
Like this is this vast body of knowledge.
I'm an expert, I built this up,I wanna communicate it to you.
But that really only addresses onenarrow kind of piece of the gaps.
And that knowledge may be absolutelynecessary for any of these other things
(23:14):
to happen, but being able to sort ofsay, okay, there's a knowledge component,
but also there's gonna be a skill.
So I need to build in practiceand there's gonna be a habit.
And so I need to figure out some ways tosupport people in that habit development.
And, know, maybe there'sa motivation issue.
They know what to do, butthey're still not doing it.
That, needs a lot of unpacking.
(23:36):
Usually that's what thewhole elephant book is about.
It actually, when it comes down to it, ishow do we unpack a lot of that and make
sure we're solving the right problem.
So, if I tell you that thisbehavior is really important and
it's super useful, but the truthis people are scared to try it.
The, it's useful message doesn't address.
That, I'm fearful of, of attempting this.
(23:58):
And so what you need theninstead is messaging around
how, Hey, there's baby steps.
You can try it out a little bit.
It's a safe thing to do.
We're gonna create an environment.
And so really it's a lot of this is about.
Not solving the wrong problem andmaking sure that you understand
where the, where the challengesare and how do you match to that.
And not everybody's in the same place.
(24:21):
You know, if you're creating a program toencourage people to exercise more, some
people may need practical assistance.
They just need somesuggestions and some help.
And, you know, some people maybeneed an accountability buddy.
Some people maybe reallyare concerned about.
Exercise being physically uncomfortableand they've got bad experiences in the
(24:41):
past and they need somebody to, you know,kind of be a, encouraging person and
to help them take the first few steps.
Some people may just need a newpair of shoes, you know, it.
The answer to what people needin different environments can be
radically different, and theirexpectations or their norms about
(25:02):
what they've experienced in the past.
If they've had a particular typeof schooling where they've been
successful, they're probably gonnabe disconcerted by a totally,
different, more conversational style.
If they're like, no, I knew what to do.
If it was a lecture, now I don'tknow what to do, I'm not sure
I'll be successful at this.
So.
Finding out where people are andmeeting them where they're at with
(25:23):
the, with a solution that fits them.
And this is an interesting andpotentially promising area with the
AI and with the idea that we mightactually genuinely adaptive learning
environments depending on, whatpeople either sees their own needs or
what we help them identify as needs.
You mentioned motivation thereand one of the key things about
(25:44):
motivation is the actual learner.
And unfortunately, it's very difficultto detect this, and as you say, when you
have an intrinsically motivated learner.
Thank the learning gods for those people,
Yeah.
And you're so lucky when you have them.
But then as somebody said to merecently, . You can't waterboard a horse.
So he was talking about youcan't bring a horse to water.
(26:07):
He said equally, can'ttorture the horse and
Mm-hmm.
waterboard it.
And he was talking about thosepeople who just either think they
know it, all or equally or , verysuccessful in their swimlane.
And don't think they need to learnanything beyond that swim lane.
Or maybe they're near retirement,maybe they're just had bad learning
(26:28):
experiences in their lives.
So we don't know how to dealwith those people, but we do
come across them every so often.
And I wondered, had you anyadvice for our audience on that?
Yeah.
You know, the sort of the single pieceof advice , you know, a lot of times
when you're working with a subjectmatter expert, it's frustrating to them
because they're like, it's so obvious.
How can a new person not understand this?
(26:50):
And we talk about the curseof expertise where people have
this really expert viewpoint of.
Of a topic, and it's very difficult forthem to remember what it was like to not
know this stuff and to have to learn it.
And so the, a couple of questions thatI've definitely added to my process
when I'm working with stakeholders orsubject matter experts is, okay, great.
(27:13):
And how long did it takeyou to get good at that?
Right.
So it might be somebody talkingabout, you being good at
project management or something.
And I'm like, all right, so howlong does it take you to get
good at project management and.
And they're like, oh, well probably itwas like two years before I was really
comfortable and I'm like, okay, great.
So let's look at yourarc over those two years.
Can you tell me what kinds of learningexperiences you had that really
(27:37):
helped it all come together for you?
And so, you know.
They are like, why can't you just do atwo day course on project management?
And these people aren't, you know,getting to where I want them to be.
Well, if you remind them that ittook them two years to get good at
something, then two days is suddenlylike we're having a little bit of a
different conversation you know, as alearning designer, I can maybe take two
(27:59):
years and bring it down a little bit.
If we make really good deliberate ddesign choices, maybe we can get people
to that level in a year, but I'm notgonna get them there in two days.
And so.
If you can get them to kind ofthink through their own process
of how did they learn this?
How did they get good at this?
Then that can really help them wrap theirhead around the idea that like, oh, we're
(28:20):
gonna have to figure out how do we supportsome similar experiences for these novice
learners as we, as we get to this point.
Because, you know, one of the classicthings with subject matter experts
is they wanna just take all thisknowledge outta their head and just
hand it to somebody who's, uh, new.
And why, why wouldn't that ever, you know,why would, what could be wrong with that?
(28:42):
Why wouldn't that ever work?
And people logically know, but thatyou can't just overwhelm a new learner
with an enormous pile of contentthat they can't do anything with.
But getting them to relax andsort of ease into it by thinking
about their own recollections hasbeen a super useful tool for me.
Let's share one of your, as afinale, your analogy of the closet.
(29:06):
'cause it speaks very much to thisidea of being the expert where how to
help novices structure their closets.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The process of remembering somethingis we encode it into memory, then we
store it, and then at some point laterwe retrieve that, that information.
so if you're an expert in something,when somebody gives you a new piece
(29:29):
of information, you have, yourbrain is like one of these really
beautiful California closets.
It's probably an American company,but these beautiful closets with
like tons of categories and it's allsorted and everything's in its place.
And so when somebody hands you, ablue sweater, you know exactly where
to put the blue sweater because youhave sweaters over here and it's
off season items and it's blue.
(29:50):
But it's also this kind of.
Texture and, this kind of weight.
And so you know exactly where that goes.
And so then when you have to comeback later and find the blue sweater,
where you would store it becauseyou have this really beautiful, well
organized closet for this topic.
So, for example it could be anything.
It could be your knowledgeof like hip hop music, right?
(30:12):
I do not know a lot about hip hop music.
I've got basically like the earlyrap that was coming up when I was a
teenager and then everything else.
So I essentially havetwo shelves for this.
And if you tell me about somebody.
Any hip hop person, I'm like, I guessit goes out on the second shelf.
But basically all of the contentthat I would receive about
that is a big pile of stuff.
(30:34):
And if I had to come back and retrievethat information later, all I can do is
like paw through the big pile of stuff.
'cause I don't have avery sophisticated closet.
I don't have a lot of categories.
I don't know where to put thisinformation or what to do with it.
But if somebody's, a hip hoprecord producer, they've got this
beautiful closet, but what we.
What we have is the experts wanna justclear all the stuff off all the shelves
(30:59):
and just hand it to you in a big pile.
But you know, the new person can onlykind of like throw it on the floor.
And like I said, hopefully kindof like scramble through it to
see if they can find it againwhen it comes time to retrieve it.
And the things that helppeople build shelves are.
Usually doing things with the information.
Like you can give them some organizers,you can help them think about,
(31:21):
how do I structure this problem?
Or how do I think about it?
You can give them some processesand that'll help them build
some shelves in their closet.
But really the way that people buildshelves is that they, they interact with
the material in some meaningful way.
They use it to do a task.
They have to solve problems with it.
You know, any of those kinds of things.
And that's what really helps themthis more sophisticated understanding
(31:44):
of all of the pieces in the worldand all of that kind of thing.
And so if we want people to be able tobecome better learners of something,
we have to support that process too.
So I can't just hand youa bunch of information.
I have to create experiences whereyou are figuring out what to do
with the information, because thathelps you, build the shelves and
(32:05):
start building out your own moresophisticated closet for the topic.
Beautiful.
And for people who wanna find outabout your closet and where to find
out how to tidy the closet, where'sthe best place for people to reach
out and tell us about some of theprojects you're working on today.
Yeah, so I am at usable learning.comand actually the projects that I'm
(32:28):
working on right now is creatingsome coursework both online and some
virtual classroom classes around.
Helping people withinstructional design topics.
I'm trying to figure out, is there stillgonna be a need for this in the age of ai?
But I think there is.
We know that with the ai, we need peoplewho can judge the outputs of the ai.
(32:52):
So even if the AI is doing the workfor you, you still have to have
a sense of what good looks like.
So you can find me@usablelearning.com.
I am going to be loading some onlinecourses I've went up, but we're gonna
revise it@designbetterlearning.com.
And I'm also doing some classesin things like, oh, memory
(33:13):
and coding and, attention.
For, the Learning Development Accelerator.
And there's links on my website to that.
And I'm gonna be doing, an online classin the fall about, in the fall of 2025
about designing for behavior changeand kind of as learning designers,
how do we need to think about that?
(33:35):
But then you can always find thebooks designed for how people
learn and talk to the elephants.
Design learning for behaviorchange on most of the retailers.
Your Amazons and, any other placethat you would go to buy books.
Author of Today's FocusDesign for How people Learn.
Julie Dirksen, thanks forjoining us on Inside Learning.
Thank you so much for having me.
(33:55):
This has been a very fun conversation.
Thanks for joining us on Inside Learning.
Inside Learning is brought to you by theLearnovate Center in Trinity College.
Dublin Learnovate is funded byEnterprise Ireland and IDA Ireland.
Visit learnovate center.org to find outmore about our research on the science
of learning and the future of work.
The Inside Learning Podcast is broughtto you by the Learnovate Centre.
Learnovate's research explores the powerof learning to unlock human potential.
Find out more about Learnovate's researchon the science of learning and the
future of work at LearnovateCentre.
org.
A successful learning experience doesnot just involve a learner knowing more.
It's about them being able todo more with that knowledge.
(00:23):
Sometimes a learner's main gap isknowledge, but more frequently knowledge
and information are just the suppliesThe learner needs to develop new skills.
That is just a flavor of what we'regonna cover in today's episode based on
the book that shows how we can use thekey principles behind learning memory
and attention to create materials thatenable an audience to both gain and
(00:46):
retain knowledge and skills we share.
This new edition includes techniquesfor using social media for learning,
as well as two brand new chapterson designing for habit and the best
practices for evaluating learning.
Such as how and when to use tests.
It is a pleasure to welcome theauthor of Talk to the Elephant and the
(01:06):
focus of today's episode, her earlierbook, Design for How people Learn.
Julie Dirksen, welcome to the show.
Thank you for having me.
It's fantastic to have you on the show.
Let's give a little bit of abackground of your work, Julie.
These two books as well, I'veseen, they've been translated
into many languages as well.
Well established work all over the world.
(01:29):
Yeah.
Yeah.
Design for how people learn.
My first book came about because.
seemed to not have a good first bookin the field of learning design,
which is, you know, kind of that bookyou hand people when they say, oh, I
really need to learn about this topic.
And so for example, if you useexperience designer, people give you.
(01:50):
Don't make me think by Steve Krug.
And if people need help with graphicdesign, they give them the non-designers
design book by Robin Williams,or there's a couple others there.
And it seemed like learning designneeded a, a good first book, which
was, hopefully grounded in researchand evidence-based principles, but
was still really like accessible andreadable for somebody who didn't
(02:13):
have an academic background.
'cause so many people wind up teachingthings because they know their topic
really well, but then they don'tknow how to translate it into a good
learning experience for other people.
I thought one of the things we'ddo was pull out pieces of the book.
The very first thing I jumpedahead, a couple of chapters was.
Something that you say most learningjourneys begin with, which is
(02:33):
communicating learning objectives.
And I thought we'd dothat for today's episode,
Yeah.
so we'll eat our own cooking,but here you say one of the rules
of training is that you tell thelearners what the objectives are.
And when you first startedtaking instructional design
classes, this was handed downas instructional design gospel.
(02:54):
I thought you'd share your thoughtson that because we all see that's
still on so many learning courses.
We see it virtually now.
We see it on social media courses wherethe first thing is you will learn.
Everybody knows that slide.
Right, right.
And the problem with learningobjectives is they often show up
in a lot of the course materialis that as instructional designers.
(03:16):
We have a fairly sort of stiff and formalway of writing learning objectives,
and that's useful to us in our internaljargon as designers because we wanna be
really precise about what we're doing.
and the issue with that is then these.
Stiff and kind of jargony learningobjectives that are written
(03:38):
for professionals who do this.
And, depending on your opinions aboutlearning objectives, , you've got
lots of, you know, sort of rules forhow they should be written and what's
a well-formed learning objective andshould it follow Bloom's taxonomy
and all of that kind of stuff.
But all of that's essentiallymeaningless to learners.
And so I would never suggest that it'sa bad idea to kind of give the learners
(04:01):
a bit of a signpost about here's what'scoming up and here's what you're gonna
do, and here's the standard of performancethat we're hoping will get people
to like, here's what you're gonna beable to do at the end of this course.
None of that is bad.
That's all.
Perfectly reasonable stuff to, tocommunicate to the learners, but
the fact that we just take our superjargony stiff learning objectives
(04:23):
and whack 'em on the first screen ofthe course like that's gonna somehow
communicate well to our learners just is.
I'm gonna, oh, let's call it misguided.
Cause if you were just going to explainto the learners, like you're talking to
a regular human, you wouldn't use thisformat, you wouldn't use this jargon.
You would explain it in a way that is,you know, easy for them to understand.
(04:48):
And so it's not that I dislike learningobjectives, it really is that I don't.
the fact that we're using ourformal method for defining learning
objectives as the main way thatwe're communicating to people.
'cause I think the first thing it tellsthem is like, this is gonna be formal
and academic and probably boring.
(05:11):
And one of the things on that,I was thinking about this, I was
thinking about when do I do that?
When I'm running a course, andit's usually because I'm asked to.
By the l and d leader or the HR leadwho's asked me to do a course, and
it actually feels foreign to do it.
It feels old school to do it.
So I wondered what a better way.
So little bit of pushback on that fromme to the l and d person is perhaps
(05:36):
advisable or even just to go, look,here are the outcomes, but I'm not gonna
overdo this when I'm running a course.
Would that be the best way to do it?
Yeah.
Yeah, I think so.
I mean, you know, the question isjust to ask yourself, is this the best
way to serve this particular learner?
Is this the best way to.
communicate that.
And, you know, um, I read an article notthat long ago, and it was by, um, one
(05:58):
of the heath brothers, either Chip orDan Heath, I can't remember, but he was
talking about the goal behind the goal.
And so we've got this wisdom thatwe put the learning objectives
at the beginning of the course.
Well, what's the goal behind the goal?
Is it that you want.
People to kind of have asignpost for what's coming up.
Is it that you want them to knowkind of what they're supposed
to achieve with this course?
(06:18):
Is it that you want them to pay aparticular attention to certain things?
And then if you, if you're doing agood job of defining, well, why do you
wanna communicate these things at thebeginning of the learning objective?
And they can actually answerthat question, which they
can't always answer it.
but if other than like, well,that's the way we've always done it.
But if they have a purposefor it, then that can really
(06:39):
guide the design decision of.
how you do it best, andwe have a lot of these.
Traditions or conventionsthat follow us around.
I was looking at, I, I advise a group,for an instructional design program at one
of the universities, and I was looking atsome of the syllabi for the courses and
you know, there's a constant complaintfrom faculty that the students don't read.
(07:02):
The syllabi.
syllabus.
And I was looking at the syllabus andI'm like, I wouldn't read this either.
It's like nine pages of boilerplate,officially used language.
Before I finally get to the little bitthat I might actually care about, which
is what are the assignments gonna be, orwhat book do I need to buy, or what's the
course, you know, what's the course topic?
And so thinking about like what's mygoal in handing out a syllabus and what
(07:25):
do I really want students to get to it?
You would design a very different.
Document or experience, dependingon how you'd answer those questions.
So it's always good when we're pushingback to be like, well, tell me,
tell me why do you want this here?
What are you trying to accomplish?
And then maybe we can thinkabout from a design perspective,
what's the best way to do that.
And I was thinking actually that thatgoing through that practice is just as
(07:49):
useful for you being the instructor.
Yeah.
Because you're kind of going, okay, what,what do I want to impart to this audience?
I'm gonna move on becausethere's so much in the.
Book and we're barelygonna get even to touch it.
And it's, I love, by the way, the, thedrawings throughout the book as well.
Very simple, but really do get the pointsacross the metaphors, the analogies.
(08:10):
You do eat your own cooking in theway you've written this book as well.
But one of the things.
We need to consider you say, in ourlearner's journey is whether the new
learning is going to require doingsomething familiar in a new way.
And I thought how relevant thatwas in today's age of AI and
technology and digitalization.
(08:30):
And you say if people are required tochange the way they do things, then they
are going to stumble over old habits.
If they automatically do certainthings, they are going to have to make a
conscious effort to not do those things.
A process called unlearning, and we'vetalked about unlearning before on
the show, but it's such an importantpart of this, and as you say very
(08:51):
clearly, it can make people grumpy.
Yeah.
Well it's, it's such an interesting oneto me because you know, one of the things
I hear a lot of times on, projects, wemight be like, updated safety guidelines.
And one of the things that people willtell me is like, you know, some of the
most experienced people are the worst.
They don't wanna change what, youknow, the way that they've done it
(09:11):
for 20 years, it's kind of like.
of course they don't, right?
They're very good at it.
It's very easy for them because one ofthe things that we know is, is people
get more and more practiced with abehavior in action or something.
It becomes more and more automaticand it actually gets stored
differently in the brain whenit becomes this automatic thing.
(09:35):
You know, when you're first, whenyou first start out driving, you have
to think about every single thingyou're doing, which is exhausting.
And then after you've been driving fora decade or something, you do it really
automatically and you don't have tothink a lot about the active driving.
It just kind of happens and youcan think about other things.
But then if you have to change, so forexample, you go from a country where
(09:55):
you drive on the left hand side of theroad and now you're driving on the right
hand side of the road, or vice versa,that's almost harder than it was to learn
it in the first place because you'rehaving to battle all these automatic.
Impulses that you have about, andit just, everything feels wrong.
And when we do that to people that areexperts, you know that they've been doing
(10:16):
something this way for a really long timeand they're very good at it, take them
back from this expert, you know, feelinglike experts, feeling very confident,
feeling very practiced in what they do.
And we throw them into a situationwhere they go back to feeling like.
Novice or, you know, and it all feelsawkward and it feels unpleasant, and
they're fighting it the whole time.
(10:36):
And that's a pretty bigidentity hit for people, right?
If I'm used to feeling very confidentand very expert, and I get thrown into
a situation where I feel really awkwardand uncomfortable, then you know.
I of course wanna go back tothe old way of doing things.
Of course I do.
(10:56):
And what I see happening is A, eitherwe don't acknowledge that in the
learning experience, we don't sort ofsay explicitly, yeah, this is gonna feel
uncomfortable, and we recognize that.
You know, that's because you're,you know, and you can even sort
of say like, that's because you'rereally good at doing it this way.
And we know that change is hard and sowe're gonna make sure that we're creating
(11:17):
time and space and a safe place for you topractice and all of those kinds of things.
And the other thing aboutit is, is that we tend to.
Only maybe practice a newbehavior once or twice.
Well, like that's not enough tokind of start to undo a lot of this
automaticity and, build new habits.
just leaves the learner.
(11:37):
They're like walking out of the learningexperience at kind of the lowest point of
this, where their view of the world is.
That was a. It's super uncomfortable.
I don't like it.
You know, so then we're like, butthey're so resistant to change.
Well, of course they are.
I mean, you didn't, give them, Imean, you, the, so the challenge
(12:00):
there is how do we give people enoughpractice so that they at least see
it getting a little bit better?
And how do we support that?
Where if.
I, I'm never gonna get back to thatlevel of automaticity and a learning
experience, but if I can at leastpractice it three or four or five times
and it starts to become a little bitmore familiar and a little bit easier,
(12:20):
then I'm at least leaving the room.
Or, you know, whether it's a virtual ora live classroom with a little bit of an
upward trajectory where I'm like, okay.
I see that it's getting better.
If I keep going with this, I will getcomfortable with this again, or it
will get easier, it will make sensefor me as opposed to kind of having
having people go back to the realworld that they're sort of lowest ebb.
(12:41):
, Of course there resistance to that.
Of course, they wanna go back tothe old way that they do things.
I think that's such an important point.
That's very understated, both by theteacher, so if you're the facilitator,
but also then by the organization.
So if the leaders tell the people this,I'd love you to share some suggestions
maybe for the leaders who are employing afacilitator to do some type of learning.
(13:04):
We're particularly, we're seeingin things like with things like I
mentioned there, AI or skills thatpeople are feel threatened by, that
they feel maybe I'm being trained,maybe I'm digging my own grave here.
But if they're empowered and theorganization realizes you're gonna
have to take a step backwards,you're gonna look silly.
You're gonna have to go rightback to learning because your
(13:27):
expertise is in a way now defunct.
The world has moved on.
And if an organization tolerates thatperiod, that messy middle between
one state and the next, I'd loveyou to share your thoughts on that.
Yeah.
And that's such an interesting question tome about the idea that people's expertise
is defunct and you know, because.
(13:49):
One of the really crucial parts of usingany of the large language model ai, and
I'm not really not qualified to talkabout any of the other forms of ai.
I mean, there are other types, but, one ofthe really crucial pieces of that is being
able to evaluate the output and say, yes,this is something that's, this is right.
Or this is not know, this is notquite right, and things like that.
(14:14):
And so.
The idea that like the AI is justgoing to replace that expertise
is a super interesting one to me.
But you know, oh, I mean, the challengewith the example that you're talking about
with the AI skills is some people's jobswill be eliminated because of AI skills.
And so we can tell them all wewant about, you know, like you
(14:36):
need to embrace it and it's coming,and you know, things like that.
And they may still beskeptical, rightly so.
But then there's the otherpiece, which is how do we.
do we leverage this as wellas possible and for things?
And so a lot of it is about findingthe example that is that can kind
(15:00):
of step people through things.
So for example if I want you toadopt a new behavior, whether it's
using AI for something or it's maybelike, you know, if it's salespeople,
it might be a new sales model, or ifit's, it might be a new way of doing
like performance feedback for your.
People like there's a lot of thesecon training programs around things
like difficult conversations andstuff like that, in our ideal world,
(15:25):
people would go back and immediatelychange all their behavior and use
all of the new things and just do it.
But.
That's scary and it's intimidatingand it, there's a lot going on there.
And so one of the things I thinkthat we can do as learning designers
or facilitators is try to eitheridentify or help people identify for
themselves what are some baby stepswe can do where it's not that scary.
(15:50):
You could totally try it.
You can totally kind of go out there.
So maybe you don't change, youknow, you maybe don't jump into
the hardest conversation withyour most challenging employee.
learning a new feedback model, youfigure out, here's a couple ones that
I think I could use this format forwhere eh, you know, it's not a big deal.
It's just little things, you know.
(16:12):
And so then I can get comfortable withit on sort of a little bit more of the
easy setting before I sort of ramp up to.
So the hard setting for things
And, and that in anorganization, the leader, I feel.
Probably isn't going through the samelearning, so, you know, do you know this
one where my people aren't innovativeenough, or my people aren't X enough, and
(16:34):
the leader books this session and thendoesn't attend the session themselves.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, and you know, the innovationone I, I always find fascinating
because organizationally we love tohear about innovative organizations.
There was a time in the, oh, the teenswhere somebody had written one of the
(16:55):
books about like how Pixar the film studioworked and everybody wanted to like adopt
some of the practices that Pixar used.
And it's like.
hard part about that was that,you know, the culture had
to then support the changes.
We can't just have people say, wewant you to be more innovative.
We also need to then support innovativebehaviors and maybe culturally
(17:17):
to support innovative behaviors.
We need to have the managergo to the training so they
know what people are learning.
Absolutely.
But we also need to recognizethat with innovation comes risk.
And so not every innovativeproject works and pe you know r
and d groups and, you know.
People who are genuinely like in thebusiness of innovation, know that
(17:41):
and they know that there's going tobe, like, if they get one success for
every three failures, that's a prettygood ratio from their point of view.
But then we have people whoare like, we need to be more
innovative in our organization.
But the organization structurally isn'tset up to support it and reinforce.
Reinforce it when it happens.
And so , this employee who learned how tobe innovative shows up and their manager
(18:04):
gives them nine reasons why the innovativeidea they wanna try isn't gonna work.
Well then it doesn't matter whatyou did in the training, if the
organization doesn't also havereinforcement mechanisms once
people are out of the training andin the real world to do the thing.
And it, it makes so much sense thatactually training people and unlearning,
(18:25):
so the unlearning, relearning.
Process gets faster and faster astechnology gets faster and faster.
But I'm gonna, I'm gonna park thatfor the moment because there's so
much in the book and I, I reallywanted to come back to, okay, so.
Learning outcomes is one thing, andthat there's a huge benefit for that,
for the facilitator running a session.
But then there's also the importantwork of identifying and bridging gaps
(18:48):
because I'll tell you the way I learnedthis first, I remember doing a course
during COVID, during the pandemic, andit was an online course and I was taking
the course and it was in leadershiptraining, executive coaching, and I loved
the teaching styles of the lecturers.
I remember then going into my firstbreakout room and some of the other people
(19:09):
who were taking the course were like, ohmy God, these guys are awful, aren't they?
And I had such a moment, it was one ofthose moments to go, I can be looking
at the exact same thing, having atotally different experience, and I
assume others are having the same.
And I'm a lecturer myself, so I lecturein Trinity College here in Dublin, and
it made me, it gave me such empathyfor those students because they mark
(19:34):
you, almost like an Uber driver.
Right.
But at the same time, some of thosestudents, because they have such different
learning styles, some are from differentcountries, they have different learning
cultures in those different countries,
Yep.
and that has a dramatic effecton what they expect from you.
Some of them wanted to bereally taught by bullet point.
(19:56):
Others love the way I style.
My style is more metaphorical and analogyand case-based and there was a huge
disparity between learning styles, andthis is where this piece you talk about
identifying bridging gaps comes in.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So the question is often, what'sthe gap between where people
are and where people need to be?
(20:17):
And in, in my newer book, the Talkto the Elephant Design Learning
for Behavior Change, I bring over,there's been a lot happening in
behavioral science that hasn't beenmaking its way back to educational
settings and learning and development.
so the, the, that book is very muchabout what can we learn from behavioral
science and, the core model thatI use for a lot of the behavioral
(20:39):
science analysis is combi, which ispart of the behavior change wheel.
And it's Susan Mickey and her colleaguesout of University College, London's
Center for Behavior Change, but they, wejust kind of asked the basic question,
are people capable of doing this thing?
And if they aren't, then training'sa really great answer for it.
Right?
If they need to learn some informationor if they need to practice a skill, but
(21:02):
then do they also have the opportunity?
So is the physical environment or likethe systems set up to support it, is
it something where it's supported by,the social culture of where people
are, and then are they motivated?
Do they have, is this part of their goals?
Is this part of their identity?
You know, is this somethingthat they genuinely wanna do?
And so that's one way to look at it.
(21:23):
In the design for how people learn.
Book i, I look at some gaps of,you know, is it a knowledge gap is
the only thing that stands between.
This person being not beingsuccessful now and being successful
in the future, if they just knowsomething, , will that fix it?
And the answer is usually not.
Usually.
Usually knowledge gaps aren'tthat hard to deal with.
Is it something where it's a procedureor a skill where people really have
(21:46):
to practice it to get good at it, andthen we start to think about how do
we design good practice environments?
Is it a gap that's based on their habits?
Right?
Somebody can know that they shouldfloss their teeth every day.
They can know how to floss their teeth.
They can even reallywanna floss their teeth.
They can have genuine motivation aboutit, but they still don't manage it because
(22:07):
it just doesn't become a habit for them.
And so if something needs to behabitual, then there are some strategies.
I think we're getting more as theresearch evolves, but there are some
strategies for how do we support peoplein habit development, but you have to
be really deliberate about that choice.
is it a gap of communication?
You know, we never gave you a clearstandard of what we were trying to
(22:30):
do, or we didn't really communicatethe goals, or we didn't really
communicate in a way that you could like.
Understand if you're ontrack, those kinds of things.
is it a gap in the environment?
As I mentioned, there's a lot of behaviorswhere it would be much easier to fix
the computer system or to fix, somethingabout the physical environment to support
(22:52):
the behavior than it is to try to fixthe human through some kind of training.
And we have a tendency when we'redesigning learning experiences
to really focus on the knowledge.
Like this is this vast body of knowledge.
I'm an expert, I built this up,I wanna communicate it to you.
But that really only addresses onenarrow kind of piece of the gaps.
And that knowledge may be absolutelynecessary for any of these other things
(23:14):
to happen, but being able to sort ofsay, okay, there's a knowledge component,
but also there's gonna be a skill.
So I need to build in practiceand there's gonna be a habit.
And so I need to figure out some ways tosupport people in that habit development.
And, know, maybe there'sa motivation issue.
They know what to do, butthey're still not doing it.
That, needs a lot of unpacking.
(23:36):
Usually that's what thewhole elephant book is about.
It actually, when it comes down to it, ishow do we unpack a lot of that and make
sure we're solving the right problem.
So, if I tell you that thisbehavior is really important and
it's super useful, but the truthis people are scared to try it.
The, it's useful message doesn't address.
That, I'm fearful of, of attempting this.
(23:58):
And so what you need theninstead is messaging around
how, Hey, there's baby steps.
You can try it out a little bit.
It's a safe thing to do.
We're gonna create an environment.
And so really it's a lot of this is about.
Not solving the wrong problem andmaking sure that you understand
where the, where the challengesare and how do you match to that.
And not everybody's in the same place.
(24:21):
You know, if you're creating a program toencourage people to exercise more, some
people may need practical assistance.
They just need somesuggestions and some help.
And, you know, some people maybeneed an accountability buddy.
Some people maybe reallyare concerned about.
Exercise being physically uncomfortableand they've got bad experiences in the
(24:41):
past and they need somebody to, you know,kind of be a, encouraging person and
to help them take the first few steps.
Some people may just need a newpair of shoes, you know, it.
The answer to what people needin different environments can be
radically different, and theirexpectations or their norms about
(25:02):
what they've experienced in the past.
If they've had a particular typeof schooling where they've been
successful, they're probably gonnabe disconcerted by a totally,
different, more conversational style.
If they're like, no, I knew what to do.
If it was a lecture, now I don'tknow what to do, I'm not sure
I'll be successful at this.
So.
Finding out where people are andmeeting them where they're at with
(25:23):
the, with a solution that fits them.
And this is an interesting andpotentially promising area with the
AI and with the idea that we mightactually genuinely adaptive learning
environments depending on, whatpeople either sees their own needs or
what we help them identify as needs.
You mentioned motivation thereand one of the key things about
(25:44):
motivation is the actual learner.
And unfortunately, it's very difficultto detect this, and as you say, when you
have an intrinsically motivated learner.
Thank the learning gods for those people,
Yeah.
And you're so lucky when you have them.
But then as somebody said to merecently, . You can't waterboard a horse.
So he was talking about youcan't bring a horse to water.
(26:07):
He said equally, can'ttorture the horse and
Mm-hmm.
waterboard it.
And he was talking about thosepeople who just either think they
know it, all or equally or , verysuccessful in their swimlane.
And don't think they need to learnanything beyond that swim lane.
Or maybe they're near retirement,maybe they're just had bad learning
(26:28):
experiences in their lives.
So we don't know how to dealwith those people, but we do
come across them every so often.
And I wondered, had you anyadvice for our audience on that?
Yeah.
You know, the sort of the single pieceof advice , you know, a lot of times
when you're working with a subjectmatter expert, it's frustrating to them
because they're like, it's so obvious.
How can a new person not understand this?
(26:50):
And we talk about the curseof expertise where people have
this really expert viewpoint of.
Of a topic, and it's very difficult forthem to remember what it was like to not
know this stuff and to have to learn it.
And so the, a couple of questions thatI've definitely added to my process
when I'm working with stakeholders orsubject matter experts is, okay, great.
(27:13):
And how long did it takeyou to get good at that?
Right.
So it might be somebody talkingabout, you being good at
project management or something.
And I'm like, all right, so howlong does it take you to get
good at project management and.
And they're like, oh, well probably itwas like two years before I was really
comfortable and I'm like, okay, great.
So let's look at yourarc over those two years.
Can you tell me what kinds of learningexperiences you had that really
(27:37):
helped it all come together for you?
And so, you know.
They are like, why can't you just do atwo day course on project management?
And these people aren't, you know,getting to where I want them to be.
Well, if you remind them that ittook them two years to get good at
something, then two days is suddenlylike we're having a little bit of a
different conversation you know, as alearning designer, I can maybe take two
(27:59):
years and bring it down a little bit.
If we make really good deliberate ddesign choices, maybe we can get people
to that level in a year, but I'm notgonna get them there in two days.
And so.
If you can get them to kind ofthink through their own process
of how did they learn this?
How did they get good at this?
Then that can really help them wrap theirhead around the idea that like, oh, we're
(28:20):
gonna have to figure out how do we supportsome similar experiences for these novice
learners as we, as we get to this point.
Because, you know, one of the classicthings with subject matter experts
is they wanna just take all thisknowledge outta their head and just
hand it to somebody who's, uh, new.
And why, why wouldn't that ever, you know,why would, what could be wrong with that?
(28:42):
Why wouldn't that ever work?
And people logically know, but thatyou can't just overwhelm a new learner
with an enormous pile of contentthat they can't do anything with.
But getting them to relax andsort of ease into it by thinking
about their own recollections hasbeen a super useful tool for me.
Let's share one of your, as afinale, your analogy of the closet.
(29:06):
'cause it speaks very much to thisidea of being the expert where how to
help novices structure their closets.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The process of remembering somethingis we encode it into memory, then we
store it, and then at some point laterwe retrieve that, that information.
so if you're an expert in something,when somebody gives you a new piece
(29:29):
of information, you have, yourbrain is like one of these really
beautiful California closets.
It's probably an American company,but these beautiful closets with
like tons of categories and it's allsorted and everything's in its place.
And so when somebody hands you, ablue sweater, you know exactly where
to put the blue sweater because youhave sweaters over here and it's
off season items and it's blue.
(29:50):
But it's also this kind of.
Texture and, this kind of weight.
And so you know exactly where that goes.
And so then when you have to comeback later and find the blue sweater,
where you would store it becauseyou have this really beautiful, well
organized closet for this topic.
So, for example it could be anything.
It could be your knowledgeof like hip hop music, right?
(30:12):
I do not know a lot about hip hop music.
I've got basically like the earlyrap that was coming up when I was a
teenager and then everything else.
So I essentially havetwo shelves for this.
And if you tell me about somebody.
Any hip hop person, I'm like, I guessit goes out on the second shelf.
But basically all of the contentthat I would receive about
that is a big pile of stuff.
(30:34):
And if I had to come back and retrievethat information later, all I can do is
like paw through the big pile of stuff.
'cause I don't have avery sophisticated closet.
I don't have a lot of categories.
I don't know where to put thisinformation or what to do with it.
But if somebody's, a hip hoprecord producer, they've got this
beautiful closet, but what we.
What we have is the experts wanna justclear all the stuff off all the shelves
(30:59):
and just hand it to you in a big pile.
But you know, the new person can onlykind of like throw it on the floor.
And like I said, hopefully kindof like scramble through it to
see if they can find it againwhen it comes time to retrieve it.
And the things that helppeople build shelves are.
Usually doing things with the information.
Like you can give them some organizers,you can help them think about,
(31:21):
how do I structure this problem?
Or how do I think about it?
You can give them some processesand that'll help them build
some shelves in their closet.
But really the way that people buildshelves is that they, they interact with
the material in some meaningful way.
They use it to do a task.
They have to solve problems with it.
You know, any of those kinds of things.
And that's what really helps themthis more sophisticated understanding
(31:44):
of all of the pieces in the worldand all of that kind of thing.
And so if we want people to be able tobecome better learners of something,
we have to support that process too.
So I can't just hand youa bunch of information.
I have to create experiences whereyou are figuring out what to do
with the information, because thathelps you, build the shelves and
(32:05):
start building out your own moresophisticated closet for the topic.
Beautiful.
And for people who wanna find outabout your closet and where to find
out how to tidy the closet, where'sthe best place for people to reach
out and tell us about some of theprojects you're working on today.
Yeah, so I am at usable learning.comand actually the projects that I'm
(32:28):
working on right now is creatingsome coursework both online and some
virtual classroom classes around.
Helping people withinstructional design topics.
I'm trying to figure out, is there stillgonna be a need for this in the age of ai?
But I think there is.
We know that with the ai, we need peoplewho can judge the outputs of the ai.
(32:52):
So even if the AI is doing the workfor you, you still have to have
a sense of what good looks like.
So you can find me@usablelearning.com.
I am going to be loading some onlinecourses I've went up, but we're gonna
revise it@designbetterlearning.com.
And I'm also doing some classesin things like, oh, memory
(33:13):
and coding and, attention.
For, the Learning Development Accelerator.
And there's links on my website to that.
And I'm gonna be doing, an online classin the fall about, in the fall of 2025
about designing for behavior changeand kind of as learning designers,
how do we need to think about that?
(33:35):
But then you can always find thebooks designed for how people
learn and talk to the elephants.
Design learning for behaviorchange on most of the retailers.
Your Amazons and, any other placethat you would go to buy books.
Author of Today's FocusDesign for How people Learn.
Julie Dirksen, thanks forjoining us on Inside Learning.
Thank you so much for having me.
(33:55):
This has been a very fun conversation.
Thanks for joining us on Inside Learning.
Inside Learning is brought to you by theLearnovate Center in Trinity College.
Dublin Learnovate is funded byEnterprise Ireland and IDA Ireland.
Visit learnovate center.org to find outmore about our research on the science
of learning and the future of work.
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