OTA Education

Success for any customer can be simply described as helping them achieve their desired outcome. What most organizations forget, however, is the path to that outcome is just as critical as the outcome itself. For 2019, you will see great attention placed on that path. 

A great deal of research exists about how people learn. I had the privilege of spending 5 years working with Neuroscientist Dr. Matthew Peterson, and he taught me that we can even increase our neural growth by the things we do, like asking questions, observing a strategy, or even following good nutrition and sleep habits. I will not bore you with too much academic jargon, but just know that we will be optimizing our On-Demand courses by applying solid neuroscience principles to help our students achieve their goals.

The framework will enable students to:

• Experience content in ways that promote schema building
• Connect concepts to experiences that are vividly memorable
• Practice newly acquired skills in a meaningful and deliberate fashion
• Apply what they learned, justifying their reasoning and receiving informative feedback

Knowledge is not the desired outcome for most of our students, so we need to put newly acquired information to work in building skills. That's where deliberate practice with informative feedback is critical. OTA will become bullish in crafting engaging activities where students move beyond repetition and automaticity of facts, into applying those facts in new and novel situations. And since practicing wrong feels right, we will also build journeys with cognitive interventions for those who need help sticking with their plan.

To address the appropriate path part of our equation above, we will design for busy adults who tell us they want:

• easily digestible content that can be consumed in a setting
• logically sequenced learning activities
• rich and varied content
• user friendly and predictable navigation
• real-life examples
• mobile friendly responsive design

Finally, we know learning is a team sport. OTA will strengthen peer to peer support via online learning communities that are both aspirational and practical. Drawing on research, we will build tools that enable students to share results and learn from each other, thereby improving everyone’s experience and learning at OTA.