(From the Institute of Learning Practitioners) -- Following on from Craig Rispin’s mind-expanding presentation at the Future of Learning Conference, Dr Denise Meyerson outlined the top seven trends in workplace learning.

1. It’s a numbers game

Trainers and facilitators need to remember these numbers: 90, 20, 8, 6.

• 90 minutes is the ideal chunk of time for participants can learn and understand

• 20 minutes is how long participants can listen and retain information

• 8 minutes is the length of time you can talk for before before they stop listening. We are trained to focus for just eight minutes due to decades of TV watching, where ad breaks occur approximately every eight to ten minutes.

• 6 is the ideal number of times to present information to make sure a learner remembers the content.

Where the overall purpose of training is to ensure that change takes place in the workshop so that people can apply that learning in the workplace, the questions are why does behaviour not change post-training, why do trainees meet resistance to change, or is it simply that they don’t know how to change? One key obstacle is that learners don’t recall what happened during the training sessions – and this puts the onus on trainers and facilitators to find ways to make learning stick!

Another factor in our short attention span is a biological reason: when we’re awake, the part of the brain responsible for keeping us conscious and aware, the Reticular Activating System (RAS), is turned on. It is also responsible for our ability to notice what is happening around us. But we lose focus when things stay the same – that is, we don’t pay attention to what doesn’t change. So the challenge for facilitators is to keep things changing so that learners’ RAS keep firing so they stay alert to the learning! Learning tools like video and working in pairs help to change the learning environment and keep learners engaged, to stop them going on autopilot.

It’s essential that trainers and facilitators keep learning themselves, to acquire new tools that will help them keep ensuring the training sticks!

2. The webvolution model

The web is having a massive impact on the whole education industry. On April 22 1993 the web browser was born. Less than twenty years later, in 2012, Facebook is the fifth largest ‘continent’  in the world with over 800 million ‘citizens.'