Calling all digital content creators, teachers, corporate development facilitators, podcasters and anyone who has to teach anything to anyone! “Engaging Your Audience…With Learning! (But It Doesn’t Feel Like Learning)” in Hilton Galleria Friday at 2:30 PM gave sage advice on how to give your audience the information they need or want to know while keeping it palatable and engaging.

Fruity Snacks, who has a Masters of Education in Instructional Design, kicked off his first panel in the Digital Media Track with the insight that “Learning is not just knowledge acquisition; learning is changing behaviors.”

Snacks built the foundation of how to change behaviors by explaining what a cognitive load is (in corporate speak we call this bandwidth). Cognitive load is the effort used by a human to temporarily hold and process information. This theory was proposed by John Sweller, a psychologist that Snacks confirmed just this morning was still the only one being spoken about in the panel that is still kicking it. Sweller’s theory is the basis for all learning design.

Snacks put this theory in practical terms with shapes. He put three shapes up on the screen and asked us to memorize them with their colors in order. Super easy. His next screen he showed 10 shapes of different colors and asked us to memorize them – a little harder but doable.

The next slide had 18 shapes, and we were asked the same task – impossible, the overwhelm of which is exactly what should be avoided for your audience. He gave three tips for maintaining engagement with your content while avoiding overwhelm:

• Pacing: slow down, but not too much. You can speed through anecdotes and supporting items but really give time for what you want your audience to remember or sink in.
• De-clutter: minimize distractions in what you’re trying to teach and ensure that the only thing onscreen is what you want your audience to focus on.
• Keep it short (but not that short): Snacks recommends that you keep your digital content to 3–7 minutes. Any longer and you’ll lose your audience, any shorter and what you’re trying to convey won’t sink in.

It’s important to keep in mind that people are interesting creatures. Many studies have been done about how people remember things. From these studies come the primacy and recency effect – essentially that people remember the beginning of a series and the end of a series. The middle can get a little fuzzy.

Keeping your audience engaged through the fuzzy bit can be simple. Tell your audience what they should do first and then remind them what they did last. This will clue your audience into what they should look for throughout your content and give them enough information to be able to recall what you said at the end.

The next thing to worry about is how people tend to forget things. Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850-1909, so sadly no longer kicking it) provided us with the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve. This curve shows that people quickly lose newly learned information over time unless they actively review it. This doesn’t need to mean that your audience should keep coming back to the same material in order to learn; you can give easy touchpoints to help your learnings stick:

• Posts, polls, quizzes: post a poll on Instagram that references your earlier content
• In-media call-back: “Last episode, we chatted about…”
• Shorts/Reels/TikToks: intentionally use these tools as a supplement to your fuller form content

Of course, don’t forget the power of your community. Your audience and community members can play a key role in strengthening the reach of your teaching.

Lev Vygotsky, the final psychologist Snacks spoke about (also not kicking it after an unfortunate battle with tuberculosis… in 1934) gave us the theory of Zones of Proximal Development.

The zones fall in circles within in each other. Center circle is “What someone can do,” middle circle is “What someone can do with help,” and the outer circle is “What someone can’t do.” The Zones theory can be applied to learning theory in that our communities can have someone who is categorized as “More knowledgeable other” help “Someone” move from the outermost circle to the inner.

Snacks recommends that we lean on our communities to find those “More knowledgeable other”s and give them the space to lead the “Someone”s. This can be through chats, comments, on social media or wherever you host your audience.

The aptly named panel wrapped with three succinct key takeaways:

1. Be aware of length, pacing, and focus.
2. Don’t forget reminders, primacy, and recency.
3. Encourage your community to talk to each other.

The room learned a lot but it really didn’t feel like learning.

Please note that psychologists’ living status was a call out by Snacks – I’m usually not this invested but it felt important to mention given the emphasis of each during the panel.