Why Learning Environments Deeply Matter

“Make sure to have a well lit room, a clean desk, and classical music playing softly in the background.” When I took a “how to study” course back in the 8th grade, these were the recommendations. These seem to be the standard words of wisdom we pass along to students, and to be fair, they can be helpful. For adult learners though, this isn’t enough and often times, isn’t necessarily feasible. When I say adult learners, what comes to mind is probably not an adult properly sitting up straight working at a presteen desk. I think of an overworked and stressed person on their 4th cup of coffee trying to learn on their lunch break or after they put their kids to bed. It is a rare commodity to find the perfect time and place to learn something new.

What will help you the most is to discover when, where, and how you learn best. Your learning environment deeply matters to how much information you can encode, store, and retrieve. These are, afterall, the three stages of memory. In essence, you need to learn how to create an effective learning environment. If you are like the busy adult I just described who is frustrated by making little progress in trying to learn something new, then this piece is for you. It’s also for the educator and instructional designer, who can help to guide learners down the right path. Let’s bust through some learning plateaus and finally move the needle forwards.

When thinking about learning environments, four spaces come to mind: headspace, physical space, social space, and virtual space. Let’s break each of these down and talk about not only their significance, but how to use them properly.

Headspace

When I say headspace, I’m not referring to the meditation app. I’m referring to someone’s state of mind. If adults have a desire to learn a new skill, this could be coming from a place of stress. They have a problem and by learning a new skill, it will help to solve that problem. Depending upon how severe the problem is will drastically impact their motivations to learn. Contrary to popular belief, stress isn’t a bad thing. The appropriate amount of stress can boost motivation, focus, awareness, drive, and push you in the right direction. Having too much will obviously lead to dangerous effects though.

All of this is to say that before you begin the task of learning a new skill, check in on yourself. Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs still holds true to this day. If your basic needs are not being met and you are finding yourself overwhelmed in a big ball of stress, you need to prioritize what really matters. It is perfectly okay to admit that you are not okay. After all, Elmo recently checked in to see how everyone was doing, and uh, let’s say that Elmo was not ready for the transparency of many people saying they weren’t doing that great:

Right now, I think of the massive layoffs in the news and seeing many people on LinkedIn saying about how they are already burned out from applying to hundreds of jobs. This is a whole separate conversation, but the best advice I’ve seen has been to allow yourself breaks and downtime to recover and to jump back in again when you are ready.

This same sentiment applies to learning. If you are having a ridiculously stressful day at work and you are then trying to force yourself to make progress on a skill, it’s not going to happen. You will make very little to no progress under these circumstances. It’s far more effective to shut it down for the day and by it, I mean your brain, and then to try again the following day. The message here is be aware of your mental state. Only you can take care of you and if the right conditions aren’t being met, your learning will come to a crashing halt.

Physical Space

Think of a time when you made tremendous progress on a project for work or school. Where were you? What was the environment like? Maybe you are thinking of an empty conference room, a library, a classroom, a kitchen table, or a quiet space at work. Whatever comes to mind, you can try to replicate this environment. If nothing comes to mind, that’s perfectly okay too. One thing I started to research online was how people create their perfect office setup to increase productivity, and wow, some people are extremely creative! While I don’t have the perfect office set up by any means, I did realize that there are some small changes that do make me focus more. This usually means a low overhead light, colorful light bars (I use Govee products), candles, and lofi music. You can see most of these things in my YouTube videos in the background. It sounds odd, but your area will absolutely make you more productive. If your working space needs an update, I’d recommend watching StudyMD’s video on his desk tour for some ideas.

While this physical space is your ideal learning environment, this isn’t always going to happen in the real-world. There will be times where you’ll have to learn on the fly and will probably be accompanied by a decent amount of stress. For instance, I commute to work and take a train. A train is not my ideal place to hammer out work under a deadline, but it has to be done. When I have these moments, I try to trick my brain into productivity. I guess you can call this a form of biohacking, but I really don’t like the connotation around that word. Anyway, I’ll put on a Study With Me video and just this act alone triggers me into getting my work done. The act of seeing someone work alongside me gives me the feeling of writing in a coffee shop and before I know it, I’m diligently plugging away.

A special shout out to Sonya Edwards who mentioned that I was practicing a technique called Body Doubling. This means performing a task in the presence of another person to stay on track. I had a difficult time finding research around this technique (and if you find some, please share it with me). For the ADHD and self-help community, it seems to genuinely help. Of course, if you are the kind of person who needs the opposite with being completely alone to focus, then follow that path.

Social Space

Adults thrive when they learn together. It’s the essence behind the effectiveness of cohort-based learning. Yes, you can accomplish a tremendous amount on your own, but collaborating and sharing with like minded individuals will push your learning further. What’s interesting to ponder about is that as children, we are set up to constantly learn and interact with other kids. Classrooms, sports, clubs, music, and other communities created a social learning environment. By the time you reach adulthood, these all disappear unless you proactively create these social environments. When I launched Instructional Design Institute, I knew it had to be a cohort and to give students plenty of opportunities to work with one another. What I was not expecting was reading testimony after testimony specifically calling out the ability to work with other instructional designers as their favorite part of the learning experience. All this is to say that a social element has to be in the learning environment.

If you are finding yourself looking to create a new social space for working, I do have a few ideas. The first is that a bunch of you recommended to look into Focusmate, a virtual collaboration space where you are paired with another person, share your goals, and then start working away. Online working sessions have also been a common theme for many folks in the L&D community. Bela Gaytán hosts virtual working sessions and they seem to be really popular! You can give her a follow on LinkedIn to check them out. You should also check out my article on the impacts of joining a mastermind. It has truly helped me out over the years!

Virtual Space

Allow me to put on my instructional designer and online instructor hat for a moment. I cannot stress enough how much virtual spaces matter. If you have ever tried to learn on a clunky, broken, and confusing LMS before, you know just how distracting this can be. Your expectations and attention were laser locked on exploring the content, and instead, you need a complete tutorial on how to use the navigation. You can read many articles online discussing how F2F learning is far superior compared to online learning, and one of their points is how chaotic and mundane online learning can be. To be clear, I am quite vocal that this line of thinking is absolutely asinine, but I have seen so many organizations and institutions completely fall flat when it comes to setting up their learning experiences.

We have decades of research on how to design meaningful online learning experiences, and still so many organizations and universities don’t follow best practices. If you want your adult learners to succeed in an online learning environment, then you need to give them a fighting chance. Dumping everything into one module and hoping learners can figure it out is a sure fire way to destroy any chance of learning. As educators and designers, we need to remove barriers and challenges, not add to them.

So, if you are finding yourself in this position as a learner and your virtual space is a dumpster fire, what do you do? Well, you redo the learning environment’s structure to fit your needs. It’s completely unfair to ask this of you, but if you are determined, this is your next step. You can design an organized layout that works for you with creating your own Google Calendar, highlighting due dates, setting weekly goals, connecting with other learners in the class, etc. You could even take an extra step by reconfiguring the course layout with something more modern like Google Sheets, Miro, Figma, Trello, or another tool. There is also nothing wrong with printing everything out and using white boards and sticky notes. Many of my peers in grad school walked around with entire binders for each course. Whatever helps you to make sense of the chaos!

If you are looking for an LMS by the way, I recently switched all of Instructional Design Institute over to Brightspace and I couldn’t be happier. Their virtual spaces are clean, simple, and easy to follow along with from both an instructor’s perspective and a learner’s perspective. If you want to experience this yourself and learn a thing or two about designing meaningful learning experiences, our next cohort for IDI starts on March 4th. Be sure to apply today.

Remember, learning environments deeply matter. Small changes can lead to huge results. Give it a try and let me know how it goes.

Stay nerdy out there,

Luke

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