303 Starting with Empathy
2:30 PM - 3:30 PM Tuesday, March 27
Instructional Design
Salon 9
Every session and course you build is intended to improve people’s work performance in some way. So, before jumping into building the content, it is vital to find ways of seeing things from the learning audience’s point of view. Doing this well improves their learning experience, ensuring they get the right content and just what they need.
Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of others. During this session, you’ll explore ways of using empathy to see things from the learners’ points of view—and how to use that insight to craft better learning experiences. You’ll explore techniques and determine ways of answering important questions about your learning audience. For example: What do the learners already know? How do they feel about having to complete the content? Are they clear about the way they’ll use the content in their work?
In this session, you will learn:
- About the importance of beginning with empathy
- How to ask better questions to get better answers
- How application of real-world experience improves the learning experience
- How an empathy-centered approach can raise the level of learning retention
Audience:
Novice to intermediate designers, developers, and managers.
Dawn Mahoney
Owner
Learning In the White Space
Dawn J. Mahoney CPTD is a talent development professional who is passionate about developing people through better learning content, better learning strategy, and better dialog. In 2015, Dawn founded Learning In the White Space, a boutique consultancy devoted to planning a learning strategy and bringing it to life. Dawn writes the "Last Word" column in Training Magazine and is the author of Lean Learning Using the ADDIE Model.