Understanding Empathy

Personalize The eLearning Experience Through A Culture Of Empathy

personalize-elearning-experience-culture-empathy

How Empathy Can Enable A Personalized eLearning Experience: Having empathy and understanding what empathy is, means that you have the ability to see the world through the eyes of another and understand and share their feelings. Lots of people have the capacity to empathize. You could say it’s in our nature, allowing us to build prosperous relationships amongst various societies. To paraphrase Daniel H. Pink, successful people in this age of information overload will be those who can understand their peers and care for them. Empathy is the ability to step into another person’s shoes and experience their feelings. Empathy is not a standalone concept.

The design should be from a user’s perspective to anticipate their problems and come up with a product/service that helps.
Stories are the path to understanding.

Empathy In Learning

For learning to be empathetic, it has to understand the learners’ mindset, working environment, challenges and factor them in to offer a solution. It should build a personal connection with them.

This is how it can be done in eLearning:

Personalize the learning experience
Offer simple and open navigation
Reinforce knowledge with diagnostic feedback

Personalize The Learning Experience

This isn’t rocket science. Ask for the learner’s name at the start of the course and use it to address them periodically for the assessments, while sharing tips or summarizing the key points. This will build a connection between the learner and the course. Offering additional resources in multiple formats will give learners the flexibility of accessing the one in their preferred format. For example, do you need to offer a glossary of terms? Offer learners links to a PDF, a podcast, and an infographic. Use ice breakers that list learners’ common challenges or the questions they might have. Seeing their issues in the course will build an immediate rapport and give the assurance that their concerns are being addressed allaying fear.

Offer Simple And Open Navigation

Adults are self-directed and dislike being restricted in their learning. An effective eLearning course gives them the option to access the sections of the course they are interested in, instead of forcing them to go through the entire course. Put yourselves in the learners’ shoes and empathize. You surely wouldn’t want to look for a needle in a haystack!

Some tips to ensure a memorable learning experience:

Structure the course into well-defined sections, each covering one learning point completely so that learners don’t have to scramble around different sections for one topic.
Ensure navigation is easy to use, with a simple, well-labeled menu (learners shouldn’t need to access the Help screen to figure out how to use the menu).
Ensure screen titles in the menu are of the same length and parallel in structure.
For interactivities, let learners proceed to the next slide if they wish to without forcing them to visit all sections.
Provide links to additional resources in the Resources section, rather than in individual slides, so that they are available throughout the course.

Reinforce Knowledge With Diagnostic Feedback

Feedback can be an extremely useful mechanism to close the learning cycle and show them the big picture, yet again. Instead of feedback that just says, “You are right” or “Sorry, you are wrong,” invest a little in offering feedback that’s true to its name. Feedback should tell learners why they are either right or wrong, along with the reasons. Informative assessments, give learners a detailed explanation about why a particular choice is correct or incorrect. In summative assessments, once done, give them the option of revisiting the slide where the learning point was discussed.

Authoring tools now give the flexibility of including audio, video clips, and hyperlinks along with the text.
Leverage these elements to offer learners a detailed explanation on the topic, along with related resources.

Being empathetic and having empathy matters. Learn about how to utilize the ability to step into another person’s shoes and experience their feelings by downloading this free eBook: “eLearning Design And The ‘Right’ Brain.” It will further help you become a ‘Right’ brain expert; and, moreover, learn how its role in learning can be of use to you.

Photo of Sushmitha Kolagani

By: Sushmitha Kolagani

Source: https://elearningindustry.com/

In a fractured world, can we hack our own sense of empathy and get others to become more empathic? Professor, Department of Psychology, Stanford University Jamil Zaki is an assistant professor of psychology at Stanford University. His research examines social cognition and behavior, especially how people understand and respond to each other’s emotions. This work spans a number of domains, social influence, prosocial behavior, and especially empathy (see ssnl.stanford.edu for details). In addition to studying the mechanics of empathy, Dr. Zaki’s work focuses on helping people empathize better. For instance, new research from his lab examines how to encourage empathy for people from distant political and ethnic groups, and also how caregivers and healthcare professionals can effectively empathize with their patients while maintaining their own well being. http://ssnl.stanford.edu ~~~ This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx

Real Reason You Should Make Empathy Your Mantra – Lambeth Hochwald

The capacity to understand or feel what others experience AKA ’empathy’ isn’t usually a word that’s associated with business but it should be because good bosses know that empathy is one of the best management tools they have.

But Michael Ventura, author of Applied Empathy: The New Language of Leadership (Touchstone), publishing this week, believes this word is one that can help us better connect to clients, attract the right talent, ignite a spirit of creativity and identify opportunities for growth and there are three definitive ways to up your empathy quotient.

I’m a big proponent of this word and consider it a mantra in all of my interactions, whether I’m interviewing someone who may not be as media-trained as a corporate bigwig or a vendor helping me sort out a billing issue.

That’s why I really wanted to speak with Ventura, an entrepreneur and creative director who founded Sub Rosa, a strategy and design practice, in 2009. He considers it his mission to demonstrate the ways in which empathy–the ability to see the world through someone else’s eyes–can be the key to your company’s innovation, growth and success.

“Empathy isn’t about being nice and it’s not about pity or sympathy either,” Ventura says. “It’s about understanding–your consumers, your colleagues and yourself–and it’s a direct path to powerful leadership.”

How to Step Up Your Empathy

To put yourself on that path, solicit feedback on your own leadership and create moments where you and your team can talk candidly about their needs and how they best thrive.

“Until we make an investment in ourself and the people we work with, we are at a disadvantage,” Ventura says. “Candid conversation, thoughtful listening, self-observation and a willingness to improve/evolve our approach as we grow are all key factors in delivering empathic leadership to our organizations.”

In looking back at the work he has done with his clients over the years, Ventura says that his best work was done when he and his principals were at their most empathetic selves.

“We got out of our own shoes and met with the people with whom the work intersected, whether that was consumers, partners or shareholders,” says Ventura whose firm counts among its clients a variety of Fortune 500 companies (GE, Google, Nike), the United Nations, the Obama Administration and start-ups like Warby Parker.

And, like any good coach knows, the way you get the most out of your players is by knowing how to inspire and motivate them, Ventura says.

“Some may benefit from instruction, while others thrive on pressure,” he says. “Great leaders take the time to truly understand their teams and bring forth leadership that matches their needs and aligns to the overall goals of the company.”

The ability to apply empathy and understand the ways in which it applies to leadership and staffing decisions is ‘where the rubber meets the road,’ Ventura says.

This means looking deeply at company values, the ways teams are structured, the way meetings are run and the way products are developed.

Focus on the Four Ps

“Everything that is core to your business can be considered,” he says. “We typically bundle these into four ‘Ps’ – people, processes, principles and product/service. Taking that empathic point of view that you’ve unearthed in your research and conversations can help to infuse these core pillars of the business with more meaning.”

Best of all, even the most cynical hardwired entrepreneurs can learn to be more empathic but there is one caveat: “Empathy is a muscle like anything else and if you don’t use it, it will atrophy,” Ventura emphasizes.

And, ironically, empathy begins with a look in the mirror.

Ventura stresses that it’s key to find ways to get out of your own perspective every day. This includes talking to people who are unlike you on your team.

“Journaling, meditation or other forms of self-reflection are key tools that you can use to better understand your own personal biases,” Ventura says. “This can also help you come to grips with your own limitations while still leading with confidence and empathy.”

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