Engaging Learning

This article was originally published on the Learning Plan blog and is posted here with permission from the author.

What can we learn from the learning experts? Who are the learning experts? We think we found one . . .

We recently found ourselves watching a university lecture from Stanford University about Human Behavioral Biology (see the lecture below) delivered by the esteemed professor Robert Sapolsky.

He introduces the lecture with a scenario, literally in the first 10 seconds of the lecture. No talk of learning outcomes, no talk of what the lecture was about. All of this information would have been available to the students before they walked in the class. They knew why they were there and how long they were going to be there for. No taking up learning time with information that would, and should have been readily available to the students before they walked in.