Who remembers Trigonometry?

I knew it back to front at one time (well good enough to pass an exam at least), but I can’t remember a thing about it today. It’s a great example of the forgetting curve. Of course, because I’ve not had cause to apply it to my daily life, I’ve simply forgotten it.

In traditional learning methods, such as lectures or classes, the knowledge starts by drastically rising as a plethora of information is being process and stored in our short-term memory. It is then down to revising the content over and over again to slowly transition this information into our long-term memory, a process which most find boring, repetitive and in most cases difficult. I think I speak for most of us when I say studying and revision was the bane of my existences going up and I often think back, as a lean coach, to determine if this method was really the most efficient way of learning.

So when we’re thinking about training, it’s important to focus on the tools we’ll actually use – and get learners applying those tools as soon and as often as possible…’

In today’s world, teaching has advanced so far, now there are multiple ways to learn; by listening, observing, speaking, reading or even by doing! As someone who has taught, and been taught, Lean and Six Sigma as well as many other techniques, I found that, even till today, most Continuous Improvement training still uses the same out-dated learning techniques even teaching in a similar classroom approach that I remember from when I was back at school!

This is when I had the idea for Click2 Learn, to bring people and businesses Continuous Improvement training with modern learning techniques, designed to make information easily retainable. This can be applied to any business, at anytime, from anywhere, but you still get that feeling of the coach being in the room with you. The method we use to teach our courses has you learning in incremental bite-sized lessons that not only allows you to work around busy work schedules but swaps out the “hike up mount revision for stepping stones over the lake of learning.” As the creator of the forgetting curve, Hermann Ebbinghaus, once said, as demonstrated by the graph in this article.

The forgetting Curve, sometimes referred to as the information retention curve, is the decline of knowledge after learning over a period of time.