Neuropsychology & e-learning: tips to improve content retention

When you develop an e-learning, you naturally want the information you share to stay with the student. That he or she remembers, applies and transmits the information. How can you apply modern psychological insights into e-learning that achieve exactly THIS?

By focusing on the unconscious brain. The brain that responds to stimuli. That helps us survive.

And how does this have to do with e-learning?

It's all about emotion.

When you really know how to trigger something with your student, it is more likely that:

1. they participate in your e-learning at all
2. the e-learning actually stays with them and brings about change.

How do you trigger emotion in e-learning?

Then you can do it in various ways. In this blog, we'll give you some tips based on neuropsychology.

1. Research your target group

What's up with your target group? What pain, anxiety and challenges do they experience in their daily lives?

For example, if you want to develop an e-learning for cashiers in your company, you can imagine that angry customers are a daily trigger, for example.

Or long queues, complicated questions or a high workload.

Start with this. a handy one”hack” that you can apply here is to apply the pre-assessment. The student thus reflects on where he or she is NOW, what his or her current situation is. And therefore also what he or she still needs to learn.

2. Capture the emotion

On the very first screen that the student (in this case the cashier) sees, the above situation and the associated emotion must be directly reflected. For example, use an image or a short video that depicts a chaotic Saturday morning.

Preferably use a video or a series of photos of your actual store — so that the student recognises his or her workplace immediately. This ensures that this situation on the screen is actually experienced as stressful and that the brain immediately wants to run away from it (flight) or solve the situation (fight).

3. Convince the student of the need

When the brain is then in this fight-or-flight mode, the e-learning can be experienced as a 'fight' response.

“Today I'm going to learn how to prevent or better deal with this situation in the future”.

This gives a huge motivation boost!

To do this, you can schedule a moment of reflection in the e-learning. Make the student aware of the reasons why he or she chose the e-learning.

The clearer this is in the foreground, the greater the involvement in the training.

4. The student is not alone

In our previous blogs, we already described that connection and connection are necessary to achieve a good learning result.

When the student acknowledges that the e-learning may offer a solution to the problematic situation they experience (perhaps daily), it is important to make them feel that what they are experiencing is quite normal and that they are not the only ones experiencing it.

You can achieve this in various ways:

1. Ask the student questions (for example: how often do you experience this situation?) and based on their answer (every day, at least twice a week, rarely), you can then decide the rest of the e-learning. Make sure that there is always an appropriate answer available that appears automatically (for example: “how annoying that you experience this every day, how do you feel about this/how do you think this is coming?” followed by a subsequent multiple choice question to determine where the student is currently developing).
2. You can imagine the stressful scenario in the discussion chat discuss with each other, giving students the opportunity to indicate how much they experience this situation and how often and how they feel about it. It is important, however, that it does not become an endless lament about the work of the cashiers, so actively monitor the discussion so that you can intervene where necessary and keep the discussion constructive and educational.
   

5. Make the link with practice

When the cashiers go through the e-learning, it is important that they are regularly reminded of the original stressful scenario and clearly see and experience that they are currently learning skills not to experience this situation again.

The more realistic these scenarios are and reflect reality, the better.

For example, if the cashiers have completed the “customer interaction” module and have been able to role-play practice how to deal with an angry customer, present them with the first scenario again.

How would they approach this situation now? What have they learned that they can now apply to give the situation a different, positive twist?

6. Direct remuneration

When the student shows that he or she has indeed learned something from the e-learning, reward them by showing that when they apply learned skills, the situation is more positive, for both the employee and the customer.

The brain registers this as success and this is motivating to actually apply this behavior in the future.

The post-assessment is ideal for this purpose. Especially when the student has also completed the pre-assessment (see tip 1), the progress that the student has made becomes very clear and the student sees how far he or she has come.

In short, emotion is very important in e-learning. When our unconscious brain is addressed and we actually experience why we want to learn certain knowledge and skills through e-learning, we are much more likely than feeling motivated and achieving a good learning result.

In other words: use neuropsychology to improve your e-learning!

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