Three Common Mistakes When Developing a Learning Experience

Recently we were hired by a firm that produces an executive education certificate program for Product Leaders. What’s amazing about this program is that it’s for Product Leaders, by Product Leaders; it’s taught by guest faculty members who are themselves high-level executives in the same field. Everything the participants learn is specific and relevant to their context, and they get the benefit of interacting with many proven leaders who have “gone before them,” so to speak. The challenge the firm had was that in the participant feedback these executives—though clearly smart, and experts in their area—weren’t all receiving high marks for their approach to teaching.

Just as not every individual contributor will be a fantastic manager, not every leader will be a fantastic teacher. Fortunately, these are skills that can be developed and there are rules of thumb that can be applied to ensure that content experts can jump into the role of inspiring and engaging a new generation of folks in their area of expertise. 

Here are a few of the common mistakes we see leaders fall into when creating learning experiences.

Too much time presenting

The first inclination many of us have, when developing a learning experience, is to start by building a presentation or lecture. The problem with a presentation is that it is a passive experience for learners. The onus is on each individual learner to wrangle and direct their focus to the presenter… and if the presenter is less than stellar, that can be a tall order. Additionally, presentations are notoriously bad at allowing space for learners to truly process and internalize the information they receive.

Often, the first step away from a pure presentation is to ask the audience a direct question and wait for an answer. This approach suggests a glimmer of interactivity, but all too often, the speaker hears crickets. The group hasn’t been primed to truly engage, and they’re deciding if it’s worth the energy to come up with an answer, let alone offer it aloud. If we’re lucky, we get a few learners willing enough to play that they’ll lob an answer back to the front of the room, but the design of the experience isn’t really set up for true engagement, and it’s easy for learners to multitask or simply zone out.

As much as you can, when designing a learning experience, limit your presentation time. As a rule of thumb, we recommend that if you HAVE to present, do so in bite-sized chunks that are no more than 10 minutes long before switching gears to some form of intentional participant engagement.

Too much information, not enough time to learn it

We’ve all experienced slides that are overloaded with too much text, or so many slides the presenter ends up clicking past several of them. Too much information and not enough time to get through it all is an all-too-common mistake for presenters. But it can also show up in interactive moments of your learning experience. If you set up a 15-minute small group activity that begins with a case study that takes 10 minutes to simply read, you’ll be limiting how well the participants can process that information and do something useful with it before the time is up.

The amount of information an expert wants to share in their area of expertise is infinitely more than what can truly be learned in a concrete and finite amount of time. The key to great workshop design is being crystal clear on what information is important, and what is simply nice to have. The important information is what you build into your materials: your activities, takeaways, etc. The nice-to-have information is what you insert on the fly as facilitator comments if time permits and participants indicate their readiness and curiosity.

Overdependence on a slide deck

Another challenge for content experts who are trying to convey information in a learning environment is the tendency to lean on a slide deck as the primary way of sharing content. This is a legacy of the traditional, lecture-style learning, and it has its advantages. Slide decks are easy to edit right up until the last minute, they’re extremely low cost, and they scale infinitely with the number of people in the room. The problem with them is they’re a passive learning tool that requires the audience to all sit facing the front of the room (or screen) rather than leaning in and engaging with the content (and each other).

There are a couple rules of thumb when thinking about a slide deck. The first is, just don’t. Don’t use a deck whenever you can get away with it. When you must use a deck, use it to support your high-level flow, most important moments and convey activity mechanics (what to do, for how long, etc.). 

Then, think about how you can convert what’s in deck into an interactive format that allows participants to truly engage:

• If your slide has a list it’ll likely translate to a card activity relatively easily. Put each bullet on its own card, and title the card deck the title of your slide. In this format your participants are presented with the same information, but now you can have them discuss the content via a few discussion questions, rank or debate the items on the list, etc.
• If your slide (or series of slides) showcases a diagram or structure of some kind, this information will likely translate to a visual or poster. Split participants up into breakouts and have them mark up the visual using markers or a digital whiteboard tool.

Slide decks are easier to avoid in many in-person learning environments because you can easily leverage a variety of handouts and materials to allow participants to discover and interact with information. Virtually, slide decks become more valuable because participants need more support to be set up for success. In those cases, be sure your deck is designed to support your activities and conversation rather than be the main attraction.