CANCELLED: Design for Feelings: How to Create Emotionally Engaging Learning Journeys

Are you wondering how to best immerse learners in a learning experience? What about making them feel surprised, shocked, or even a bit frustrated? While curriculum and instructional designers often focus on behavioral and cognitive learning outcomes, little attention has been paid to the affect or emotional outcomes of learners. However, it is crucial to design for how learners might feel when they go through a learning journey. Designing an emotional learning experience can not only foster engagement but also spark deeper reflection, synthesis, and integration of what they have learned. How might we design emotionally engaging learning experiences for both in-person and online courses? What frameworks, strategies, and tools can we use to set emotional triggers and create memorable learning journeys? What are some best practices in the field that we can learn from?

In this session you’ll design an emotionally engaging learning experience for your target audience. You’ll first go through a few examples of how emotionally engaging learning experiences might feel. Then, you’ll learn how to define which emotions to trigger at what points in your learning journey. You’ll apply a five-step framework that guides you through identifying how your learners should feel at the beginning, middle, and end of the learning experience. Later, you’ll explore research-based strategies to design for emotions in both in-person and online learning, as well as a toolbox with activities to trigger the categories of emotions you target. Finally, you’ll learn from case studies on how several organizations successfully engaged learners through emotions, and best practices for implementing it in the field. You’ll leave this session with a new learning experience designed to be emotional and transformational for your learners, ready to be implemented in your work.

In this session, you will learn:

• A five-step framework to map out different emotions to trigger throughout your learning journey
• Research-based strategies to guide you through the design and development of emotional modules for in-person and online learning
• Tools and activities aiming to surface certain categories of emotions in learners
• Case studies on how organizations successfully engaged learners through emotions and improved learning outcomes