If you are a UK business that wants your employees to be more effective at their jobs, then you are going to need to develop excellent corporate training programmes.
When doing this, you need to consider not just what they are being taught but also how the knowledge is being administered to them - at the core of which is the question of active vs passive learning.
Over the years, plenty of educational research has concluded that the former is more effective as a vehicle for learning than the latter. Yet, passive learning is still widely embraced as the primary method of training by many companies across England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales, mainly for cost reasons.
However, in this post, we want to give you a clearer understanding of why active learning might be the best results-based strategy to adopt for your company’s training programmes.
At the end of the day, adopting it could be the difference between meeting your organisation’s strategic, marketing and operational goals or not.
In the context of the workplace, passive learning is a form of teaching that involves reading certain materials or listening to a tutorial, much like the way we were taught in school.
It comes with the expectation that the employee will understand and assimilate what is taught to them and retain it as knowledge.
Communication is typically one way from the trainer, and the responsibility for learning falls squarely on the shoulders of staff members, who ideally are engaged and attentive.
Once the passive learning training has been completed, employees may be tested to gauge how much knowledge they have retained and, therefore, how successful the training programme has been.
Active learning differs from passive learning in that it empowers your employees to be a part of the instructional process. It can do this in is several different ways, including through class discussions, hands-on experiments, peer-to-peer debates, specific challenges or learning games, or by applying a concept to a relatable scenario.
In the corporate sense, the concept of active learning is based on engaging your employees to take a more dynamic role in understanding what is being taught to them rather than just listening or taking notes.
Often, this works in conjunction with a learning management system.
There is a clear difference between the methodologies of active and passive learning.
The former encourages employees to take a more hands-on approach to understanding what is being taught to them. Typically, through various methods, such as discussions, practising, experimentation and other knowledge retention tools.
Crucially, with active learning, employees also often have a say in what and how they will be taught, thanks to training methods that can be customised to their preferred ways of learning.
By contrast, passive learning operates through a process where knowledge is relayed to staff members in a manner that does not involve them at all.
Generally, this is conducted through videos, demonstrations, manuals and lecture-style training presentations, which they are expected to take in by watching, listening or reading.
While there is a place within the corporate environment for both methods of training, educational experts and an increasing number of HR executives agree that the results of active learning far outweigh those achieved by passive learning in most situations.
So, why is that?
Well, the reason why the levels of knowledge retention from active learning differs from passive is down to several factors.
Below are five of the main reasons why:
The concept of passive learning is based around one-way communication where the employee is expected to take in knowledge by attending lectures, reading books or via online courses.
As it is essentially a self-learning process, its success in terms of knowledge retention depends very much on the employee's commitment and dedication.
With active learning, though, you are more likely to have better results because the method of teaching involves regular communication between the employee, their colleagues and the instructor.
This leads to a situation where staff members play just as proactive a role as the trainer in making sure what is being taught sticks in the mind.
When employees are trained through a passive learning approach, the instructor exercises complete control over what materials are offered. Therefore, individuals are expected to memorise the most important pieces of knowledge from them, which can be problematic if they are not engaged with it.
However, those who are taught via an active learning method are encouraged to seek further resources that can help them better understand the knowledge they need to retain.
During passive learning-inspired training programmes, the teacher is seen as the expert on the topic.
While this might well be the case, their position as an authority actually limits the amount of information that employees have access to. This, in turn, can impact the degree to which they can comprehend what is being taught to them.
This doesn’t happen in active learning because the person running the course is more of a facilitator than an instructor. This means their role is to create the best environment possible for employees to gain new knowledge.
Often, this is done by encouraging people to engage in the training course in a way they are more responsive to.
Thanks to technology and different ways of thinking, there are many different ways of gaining knowledge now than there have ever been.
Despite this, passive learning still centres around listening, watching, observing and reading as the best way to gain knowledge. While you can learn a lot in these ways, they are not the only methods you can adopt to generate a deep understanding of a topic.
Through a range of other non-traditional processes, including experimentation and creation, employees are provided with more flexible modes of learning in which to take in information.
While some employees might prefer to commit knowledge to memory by passively receiving it, most workers will retain it better if it is administered through active learning.
Overall, this is because people tend to retain knowledge on a long-term basis if they are actively involved in how it is taught to them.
For this reason, if you want your employees to build up their knowledge bases to be more effective in their roles for your company, designing training programmes based on active learning is the best way to go.
Here are some answers to questions that people in the UK frequently ask when trying to understand active vs passive learning.
The main difference between active and passive learning is that the former is learner-centred, and the latter is teacher-centred.
Active learning comes in many different forms. But some of the most effective are games, peer teaching roleplays, internet forums and case studies.