Every day, employees waste approximately 11% of their time on unproductive learning. According to CEB Research, this misused time costs the average organization more than $134.5 million in employee productivity each year.
Many think the answer is improved content that’s more relevant. But the better answer is actually being more productive and efficient with your learning time, or being a better learner.
The reality is that most of us, even those of us who are in the HR or L&D fields, don’t know how to learn effectively.
Lucky for you, Degreed and Dr. Barbara Oakley are going to help you become a better learner in just 45 minutes.
6. HOW WELL DO YOU UNDERSTAND
HOW YOUR WORKERS LEARN?
Source: Towards Maturity, 2015 Benchmark Report, 11/2015
86% of best-in-class
L&D teams actively
seek to understand
how employees
learn what they need
to do their jobs.
86%
30%
Only 30% of
average learning
teams do.
7. ARE YOU READY FOR
TOMORROW’S LEARNERS?
Source: ATD / i4cp, Learners of the Future: Taking Action Today to Prevent Tomorrow’s Talent Crisis, 12/2015
Only 38%of L&D professionals
think their organizations are ready
for the learners of the future.
9. LEARNING
HOW TO
LEARN:
Barbara Oakley, PhD, PE
Professor of Engineering, Oakland
University, Rochester, Michigan
Visiting Scholar, University of California,
San Diego
Powerful Mental
Tools to Help You
Master Tough
Subjects
15. IT TAKES TIME
Weight lifter Sultan Rakhmanov, RIA Novosti
Focusing intently in ONE
session to figure something
out can create unnecessary
challenges
26. Qin, S., S. Cho, T. Chen, M. Rosenberg-Lee, D. C. Geary, and V. Menon. "Hippocampal-Neocortical Functional
Reorganization Underlies Children's Cognitive Development." Nat Neurosci (Aug 17 2014).
PRACTICE MAKES PERMANENT
Good morning, my name is Steve Nguyen and I’m a Director of Client Success at Degreed. We’re happy that you’ve taken some time to join us today.
I’d like to begin by providing some context about the world in which we live.
We now live in a world in which we’re all hyperconnected. Technology has given us unprecedented access to people and information like no other time in our history.
There really are no barriers to the ways in which people can create and share content.
Let’s just look at the plethora of content available to many of us today. And this doesn’t even really take into account the millions of videos on Youtube, or the countless articles we read, or the millions of podcast episodes we listen to.
I mentioned that we’re in a hyperconnected time with unprecedented access to content and information. Let’s look at how this progression has happened. Of course we started with simple ways of connecting like the phone and later email. [click]
But in a short span of time, we now have access to countless tools, apps, and programs that fight for our attention. [click]
Now, let’s imagine that this line represents the explosion in apps, tools, and the information that lies within. There’s a seemingly infinite number of ways for us to connect and learn. [click]
If this line represents the proliferation of products, apps, and features, this line represents our human ability to consume those things. [click]
We see that our ability to consume all this technology, all this information, is going in the opposite direction. [click]
We refer to what’s in the middle as the consumption gap. [click] Make no mistake that the top line will continue to rise. And as humans, we’ll never make it to the top line. But I believe it’s incumbent upon us as humans to look at ourselves and understand what individual and team behaviors need to be adjusted in order for us to be most efficient with the technology we do have available. We might not make it all the way to the top line, but what are the techniques we need to employ in order to be more efficient learners? How often do we pause and take inventory of whether the methods that used to work are still working?
This is what Dr. Oakley will be talking about today.
The research says that one essential place to start is by understanding how your workers really learn.
According to Towards Maturity, a research organization based in the UK, almost 9 out of 10 best-in-class L&D organizations do that.
If we look at what the study classified as “average” learning organizations, only 30% of those organizations make the effort to understand how their employees learn. [click]
So great job coming to today’s webinar. But realize that this is just a generic sample of the workforce. You should go back to work afterwards and start exploring what this all looks like in your organization.
Which leads to this. Without any understanding of how today’s workers learn, L&D professionals report that they DO NOT believe their organizations are ready to accommodate the learners of the future.
ATD – the Association for Talent Development – released some research that showed only 38% of L&D professionals think their comapnies are ready to meet the needs of tomorrow’s learners.
Almost two-thirds of people in their survey believe that the ways workers learn and develop are evolving. But most are not doing much to evolve or adapt. [click]
So it’s time to get back to the basics. We all hustle around trying to juggle numerous job priorities. We are pulled in many directions at work and at home. We’ve made assumptions that the way we’ve always done things will continue to work. But recall, we live in a time in which our old ways of learning won’t cut it any more. In a world where there is immense demands on our attention, let’s take a moment to really, truly understand how to learn more effectively.
And with that, I’m honored to introduce Dr. Barbara Oakley…
Brain’s activity is enormously complex. Even hearing a single word generates a swarm of activities…. But we can simplify things by using a metaphor or a hint of story—
Brain’s activity is enormously complex. Even hearing a single word generates a swarm of activities…. But we can simplify things by using a metaphor or a hint of story—
From http://www.scarysymptoms.com/2012/10/why-some-athletes-have-higher-resting.html
(Set finish time--
transcranial two-photon microscopy
The importance of the hippocampal system for rapid learning and memory is well recognized, but its contributions to a cardinal feature of children’s cognitive development—the transition from procedure-based to memory-based problem-solving strategies—are unknown. Here we show that the hippocampal system is pivotal to this strategic transition. Longitudinal functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in 7–9-year-old children revealed that the transition from use of counting to memory-based retrieval parallels increased hippocampal and decreased prefrontal-parietal engagement during arithmetic problem solving. Longitudinal improvements in retrieval-strategy use were predicted by increased hippocampal-neocortical functional connectivity. Beyond childhood, retrieval-strategy use continued to improve through adolescence into adulthood and was associated with decreased activation but more stable interproblem representations in the hippocampus. Our findings provide insights into the dynamic role of the hippocampus in the maturation of memory-based problem solving and establish a critical link between hippocampal-neocortical reorganization and children’s cognitive development.
The left picture symbolizes the compact connections between synapses when one chunk of knowledge is formed. Solving problems in math and science is like playing a song. The more you practice, the firmer and darker your mental patterns become. Mental practice—practicing solutions to problems in your head—is very effective.
When we first look at material, it seems disjointed, as shown by the puzzle pieces on the left. Just memorizing a fact (center) without understanding or context doesn’t give us any sense of what’s really going on, how the concept works, or how the concept fits together with the other concepts you are learning. Chunking (right) allows us to bind different pieces of information together in one logical whole, making it easier to remember, and also making it easier to fit the chunk in to the larger picture of what you are learning.
Chess masters have some 100,000 to 300,000 chunks at their fingertips
Chunking takes time, practice, and sleep
Experts create a library of chunks. If you have a library of concepts and solutions internalized as chunked, firm patterns in your L-mode, you can easily skip to the right solution to a problem by listening to the whispers from your right mode. Your R-mode can also help you connect two or more chunks together in new ways to solve unusual problems. Concept mapping seems to be an attempt to build these types of R-mode connections. You can see from this illustration that concept mapping is good—if you already have a command of the basic underlying patterns you are trying to link.
If you have a library of concepts and solutions internalized as chunked, firm patterns in your L-mode, you can easily skip to the right solution to a problem by listening to the whispers from your right mode. Your R-mode can also help you connect two or more chunks together in new ways to solve unusual problems. Concept mapping seems to be an attempt to build these types of R-mode connections. You can see from this illustration that concept mapping is good—if you already have a command of the basic underlying patterns you are trying to link.
“Fast” thinkers surprisingly often jump to conclusions—their Ferrari-like brains whiz by so fast that they miss things, and they move forward with false assumptions. Slow thinkers are like hikers—they don’t move so fast, but they are able to see the interesting rabbit trails, to stop and take in the smells of the forest….
“Fast” thinkers surprisingly often jump to conclusions—their Ferrari-like brains whiz by so fast that they miss things, and they move forward with false assumptions. Slow thinkers are like hikers—they don’t move so fast, but they are able to see the interesting rabbit trails, to stop and take in the smells of the forest….
That’s our story for today. Thank you very much.
If you’d like to get credit for this webinar on Degreed, you can get to know us a little better at get.degreed.com.
Either way, we’ve got time for a few questions now…