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For "learn at your own pace" trainings, the key to ensuring people take the entire thing and do the labs is to make each training "course" very small and consum

For "learn at your own pace" trainings, the key to ensuring people take the entire thing and do the labs is to make each training "course" very small and consumable in a short period of time. Have it focus on a specific thing someone would want to do within the domain of the greater problem. This lets people pick and choose which isolated topics (can have pre-req's) they need to take and because they can learn the task quickly they have a high rate of completion. Creating mountains for people to climb isn't always the best approach. By creating a series of small foothills, learners can pick and choose which tasks they need experience on and I believe this also leads to better skill retention.

dibstern 8y ago
I couldn’t agree more - I’ve made most progress in MOOCs whenever there is a set of relatively small but valuable, achievable goals. And I’m pretty sure the MOOCs I ran out of time for required big chunks of work.
- j45 8y ago
  Moocs are designed after lectures, lots of time invested to extract knowledge. Flipping the classroom means having concise entry points to all the lessons which a learner can more broadly dip into.
bluGill 8y ago
While your point is valid, the counter is there are some difficult things that would never be done. Some problems are hard or take a long time. "War and Peace" is not a book you can study as a single short task. Breaking it down doesn't work because every class assumes you have read it recently and done the previous class - we would end up with thousands of people who complete just one or two classes and very few who complete the entire sequence. If completion is the goal we would still fail. Maybe you can call some units optional, but the value requires you to complete most of the sequence.
- j45 8y ago
  Agreed, but you can break down all large tasks into small ones. We don't read war and peace in one sitting either, we read part of a chapter. Likewise working through materials can be done in smaller pieces while part of a larger whole. The monolith structure of a course that can't be broken down is the challenge.
  - bluGill 8y ago
    Right, but if you read chapter one of war and peace you can't take a year off and then read chapter two. Not only would you never finish, but you would forget to much that the whole wouldn't make sense. If you are going to read the book you can take it chapter by chapter, but you should finish in a couple weeks at worst.

dibstern 8y ago

I couldn’t agree more - I’ve made most progress in MOOCs whenever there is a set of relatively small but valuable, achievable goals. And I’m pretty sure the MOOCs I ran out of time for required big chunks of work.

j45 8y ago
Moocs are designed after lectures, lots of time invested to extract knowledge. Flipping the classroom means having concise entry points to all the lessons which a learner can more broadly dip into.

bluGill 8y ago

While your point is valid, the counter is there are some difficult things that would never be done. Some problems are hard or take a long time. "War and Peace" is not a book you can study as a single short task. Breaking it down doesn't work because every class assumes you have read it recently and done the previous class - we would end up with thousands of people who complete just one or two classes and very few who complete the entire sequence. If completion is the goal we would still fail. Maybe you can call some units optional, but the value requires you to complete most of the sequence.

j45 8y ago
Agreed, but you can break down all large tasks into small ones. We don't read war and peace in one sitting either, we read part of a chapter. Likewise working through materials can be done in smaller pieces while part of a larger whole. The monolith structure of a course that can't be broken down is the challenge.
- bluGill 8y ago
  Right, but if you read chapter one of war and peace you can't take a year off and then read chapter two. Not only would you never finish, but you would forget to much that the whole wouldn't make sense. If you are going to read the book you can take it chapter by chapter, but you should finish in a couple weeks at worst.