As social and environmental crises converge and crescendo, the need for radical change has never been more urgent. Amid this urgency, organisations dedicated to making positive change find themselves faced with the daily challenge of keeping their communities engaged, active and in good spirits.  While you may recognise that learning and unlearning have a role to play in the metacrisis, we believe it is by really understanding and embedding a learning-centric approach that change organisations can get to the root of sustainable engagement and impact. The current role of learning for socia ..read more

In this post, LearnJam’s Jo Sayers shares his reflections and learnings from a recent learning journey exploring his response to the metacrisis. The predicament we are in, of climate and social chaos, often leaves me worried and full of questions: In this time of converging crises, what actions make sense?  How do I find joy in my activism, while acknowledging the grief of our situation?  How do I talk about this with others in a way that doesn’t make them switch off? Over the last few years, and especially the last 6 months, I have been through huge personal change alongside the o ..read more

In this post, LearnJam’s Jo Sayers shares his reflections and learnings from a recent learning journey. In October 2023, I joined 11 others and together we embarked on a peer learning journey called a Huddle! The theme was Turning Points, and we each brought our own learning question or inquiry to guide us through the four and a half months together, supported by our peers, and hosted by the wonderful Kate Weiler.  Through LearnJam’s connections with Huddlecraft over the years I’d seen many people transformed by their Huddle experiences, and to be honest it felt like a relief to be finall ..read more

As we approach the longest night, and the end of the trip around the sun we call 2023, what feels worth noting? What do we wish for? Jo Sayers shares his 2023 reflections… It’s been a year of big change for LearnJam, and for me personally. There has been a lot of joy, and a realisation that there is much grief too; grief that I’m not fully connected to yet. Grief of a world ending, grief of the missed opportunities and the impacts on our children of the decisions we are making and not making, grief for the people suffering right now. It feels desperately sad and doomy, but in a way that I ..read more

You’ve probably heard the old adage, ‘less is more’. But how does this apply to learning design and content development? How might we go against our instinct to keep adding? Subtracting seems at odds with the world today and our inclination to add; especially where year-on-year growth is the aim of most organisations. There is often a feeling that the more we add, the more we are seen as having contributed. Subtraction generally takes more thought but is less tangible and harder to measure. Although society tends to overlook subtractive changes, subtraction can be a clever way to innovate. For ..read more

How might we best leverage video to create an active learning experience? In this post, we combine our learning design experience and expertise with Creative Listening’s, a video production company with more than 12 years’ experience. It’s not uncommon for clients to come to us with a series of videos that they want to turn into a learning experience. Whilst this can work out, thanks to some (expensive) video editing and structure imposed around the videos to turn what would otherwise be a very passive experience into an active one, it does feel akin to adding the windows to a house that hasn ..read more

To create learning experiences that work, we need to think beyond content creation. Learning experiences cannot be separated from the systems in which they are created – they are informed by the individuals that create them, the learning design principles and processes they apply, wider organisational ways of working, organisational purpose; and society as a whole. We describe these as your ‘learning design foundations’. Learning design foundations inform product and content development within an organisation. Strong foundations ensure a consistent level of quality and ensure that organisation ..read more

Last year, we wrote about the LearnJam team’s experience of transitioning to a 4-day working week. We restructured our time so that everyone could have Fridays off, allowing for rest, exercise, family time – whatever we needed to refresh, recover and avoid burnout. So far, we’ve been really pleased with the positive impacts of this move towards better work-life balance, as well as with the support and encouragement we’ve felt from so many people we know and work with. Cutting our hours was a huge part of us getting through 2021 and emerging healthier, more connected and more energised. But we ..read more

An effective learning journey needs to have a clear destination and a clear origin. Without these, it’s more or less impossible to make decisions about the sequence of learning interactions, modes and experiences a learner needs to move through in order to reach their goals.  Storyboarding is a great way to plot out that journey, and it helps uncover some other aspects of the course design that need to be taken into account early on, like the type of content that’s required, how learners are going to be expected to demonstrate their newly acquired knowledge or skills, how and when coach o ..read more

Why it’s something you need to be thinking about if you’re designing learning experiences The last year has seen an unprecedented rush to teaching, learning, and working online. This has highlighted – and also worsened – problems of access and inclusion for many learners worldwide.  The phrase “build back better” has frequently been used in reference to the global lockdown as a golden opportunity to reflect and improve on the way that various social and educational systems work. We can do better than just returning to how things were before.  But we think we should be aiming for more ..read more