How to Get Your Learners to Remember More

Why your learners forget what you taught them

Everyone wants to build good e-learning courses, whether for sharing new information or changing workplace behaviors.  While not all e-learning objectives are the same, there are things you can do in your course design that help your learners recall the information and use it in the real world. 

To do this, you need to understand how the learner’s brain processes the e-learning course content.  In this post, we’ll do a quick overview of cognitive learning theory and how it relates to your e-learning courses.

How working memory and long-term memory work together

Learning is the process of taking information into your working memory and connecting it to what you already know in your long-term memory. Working memory is where all your active thinking happens. Long-term memory is where knowledge gets stored for later use. The challenge is that working memory has limits.

Think of it like a whiteboard. You can do a lot of work on a whiteboard, but you only have so much space. As you fill it up, you run out of room to do more work. You have to capture what’s important and clear space before you can keep going.

That captured information goes in a folder and filed away and gets attached to your long-term memory. When you need it later, you pull out the folder. That’s retrieval. That’s what you’re designing for when you build an e-learning course.

The problem cognitive load creates for your learners

You can only write so much on a whiteboard. At some point you run out of room. Which means you’re moving stuff around, erasing things, or just choosing not to add more.

When you overload the whiteboard that is your working memory, learning breaks down. This is called cognitive load. If working memory is processing too much at once, there’s no room to make sense of it, and nothing moves into long-term memory.

This is exactly what happens in courses stuffed with content. Screens full of bullet points, walls of text, audio narration with no breathing room. Learners are trying to take it all in while their working memory is already maxed out. The content goes in, and it doesn’t stick.

Your job as a course designer is to work with the brain’s limits, not against them.

Three design moves that help learners remember

The fix isn’t adding more content reviews or more quiz questions. It’s designing the course differently from the start. Three things make the biggest difference.

• The first is chunking content into smaller pieces. Group related ideas together and keep each chunk focused. Don’t cover everything at once. Smaller, related segments are easier for working memory to hold and process.
• The second is building on what learners already know. New information sticks better when it has something to attach to. Case studies and practice exercises that connect new material to real work situations help learners build on their existing understanding.
• The third is providing a real-world context for the content. The goal is for learners to be able to pull what they learned from long-term memory and use it on the job. Scenarios and problem-solving exercises help them practice that transfer before they leave the course.

Key takeaways

Look at your current course and pick one area to trim. What content is in there because a subject matter expert wanted it included, not because learners need it to do their job? Cutting unnecessary content reduces cognitive load without any other changes to your design. Then add one scenario or practice exercise that asks learners to apply what they just read. Small changes to structure make a measurable difference in how much learners retain.