Not a teacher but an instructional designer. Digital courses tend to have very high dropout rates so my job is to design the best possible eLearning experience

Not a teacher but an instructional designer. Digital courses tend to have very high dropout rates so my job is to design the best possible eLearning experience with maximum information/skill retention. I credit my successes (apologies for the shamelessness but it's necessary to make my point!) to my being a learner myself. It's simply not enough to know pedagogical, cognitive and design theories and techniques, you really have to become a learner yourself in order to get better at educating. For example, in design stage where I'm scoping, scripting and storyboarding for a digital course, it's essential to keep close relationships with the subject matter experts and a sample of learners. For the latter, one-off interviews are simply not enough. It's much more revealing when you station yourself "in the field" to observe and interact directly, so that you deeply understand their problems, work environment and ways of working. Even if you gain no new information, the experience will shape your design decisions and help make the course more "human." But for subject matter experts, I tend to assume the role of the dumbest learner ever. Actually that's not very hard, I'm a slow learner myself! But by making no assumptions and asking the simplest questions, I find that I can get the course to flow better and much more easily digestible. Brief stints are still not enough though. Outside my professional life, I take a few online courses to help me stay grounded and informed of the best and worst techniques. (And learn new things!) So it really boils down to empathy. As educators we can suppose so much, but at the end of the day, it's the learners that receive it all. The closest we can get to understanding them is then to become learners ourselves.