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Crucial Topics, Snore-Worthy Training

Remember the phrase “death by PowerPoint?” When electronic slide presentations were the slick new technology, everyone wanted to throw as much information into a 60-slide deck as possible. Many trainings were heavy on data but didn’t inform or engage their audiences. 

Even if commuting seems old-fashioned, we still find ourselves “between things”: a slot of time before your next Zoom meeting, a few minutes in the waiting room, or those long stretches on hold with customer support. Waiting to get somewhere or for that next appointment to start consumes a frustrating — yet promising — amount of our precious time. 

Over the course of several roles I’ve served in education, it has been rewarding and exciting to see the increasing diversity of learners at every level. Yet even as the composition of the learners is changing, the design of the learning process remains relatively narrowly focused in ways that fall further and further short of inclusiveness. This disconnect makes learning more challenging just as the knowledge economy is demanding ever more and varied skills. 

As a learning designer, I ask a lot of questions. But the many “whats” and “whys” of my day-to-day work helping nonprofits deliver digital learning experiences all come back to two central questions: 

Just like an in-person community, an online community is a place for people to share their expertise and their dedication to a common mission. When Extension Engine partnered with Advancing Pretrial Policy and Research (APPR) to scale their in-person model, we realized that this nonprofit was connecting committed and knowledgeable stakeholders across the country. But they needed a communal space in which to learn from, encourage, and inspire one another.