In this blog series, Kevin Maye, takes a look at some learning theories and how we can use them to improve Learn My Way.
We started to review how we use a variety of learning theories and practices back in January of this year. So going into the second half of the year we thought it would be good to review our progress to date.
We've considered many things.
Have we done things?
Some of these we could see how we already included them in Learn My Way or our other resources and materials.
Some, like reflection, we want to add to our 'repertoire' but we'll need to get other people involved to make it happen.
There's also a few things that we've tried out and we're starting to see some results. That means working out how to interpret some of the results that aren't black and white.
To give an example, we now direct people to try a real internet search in one of the topics of our guide to NHS Choices.
That hasn't changed how many people finish the course which we thought it might. But does this mean people have great support from Online Centres that keeps them on track or just that they don't feel ready to try that link and explore. We need to go and see the centres that use this guide and their learners to find out.
Have we learned things?
Yes!(phew). There are a lot of connections between learning theories and practices. If we notice something that might help with one it might detract from, or enhance, another.
We also realised that our responsibility to use these theories and techniques to the benefit of our learners is huge. So we need to understand them and trial things more than ever.
We also realised that we need to 'close the loop' when we try new things. Planning review and analysis of any experiments we try up front would help later.
What's coming next?
When we looked at reflection we had some ideas for how we could try to prompt this.
We need to do some testing of the way we'd like to do this. We'll also need to set up some reporting to see if reflecting in this way is working.
We will need to help to create this from our digital team. But as we're creating some new or updated content across the summer we can design reflection in from the start.