LEARNING & CREATIVITY

In order for your online training to be most effective, you should seek those courses created by instructional designers who incorporate creativity into their learning designs. 

Creativity, born from the designer’s imagination, is the single most important quality that distinguishes those courses with which your trainees will fully engage during the learning process.

Imagination is the catalyst that drives creativity. 

In his book, THE DRAMATIC IMAGINATION, one of America’s greatest 20th Century scenic artists, Robert Edmond Jones, defined that process most appropriately when he wrote, “Imagination is the faculty for realization.”

In other words, no one can create anything indelibly meaningful unless their imagination can foresee that created object or concept already realized in their own mind.

Charlotte Jirousek’s “Art, Design and Visual Thinking, (a Cornell University interactive textbook) defines “creativity” as follows:

“Creativity is a quality that is highly valued, but not always well understood. Those who have studied and written about it stress the importance of a kind of flexibility of mind. Studies have shown that creative individuals are more spontaneous, expressive, and less controlled or inhibited. They also tend to trust their own judgement and ideas– they are not afraid of trying something new.
 
A common misunderstanding equates creativity with originality. In point of fact, there are very few absolutely original ideas. Most of what seems to be new is simply a bringing together of previously existing concepts in a new way. Psychologist and author Arthur Koestler referred to this merging of apparently unrelated ideas as bisociation. The fact that creative thinking is based on a knowledge of previous work in one’s field is the justification for teaching the history and foundations of a given field as a resource for future research and creative work. It is possible to develop ones ability to think intuitively and creatively.  .  .  .
 
Thus creativity is the ability to see connections and relationships where others have not. The ability to think in intuitive, non-verbal, and visual terms has been shown to enhance creativity in all disciplines. It has also been shown that the creative process is very similar in all fields.”

Today, classroom training is all about e-Learning.  And, too often, conversions of other materials (i.e., PowerPoint presentations) have all but drowned out creative instructional design.

But, online learning can be (and, should be) engaging.  It need not be simply a litany of factual information.  It is capable of inviting the learner into the learning process.  The instructional designer’s use of creativity will be the key.

As Robert W. Weinberg tells us in his book, “CREATIVITY – BEYOND THE MYTH OF GENIUS, “.  .  .  ‘creative’ refers to novel products of value  .  .  .”

Your key will be to recognize those e-Learning designs of merit.

               — Bill Walton, co-Founder, ITC Learning

      February 26, 2018

      www.itclearning.com/blog/  (Mondays & Wednesdays)

  “THE WORLD RELIES ON THE HANDS OF ITS MEN AND WOMEN”

 (This is a personal blog.  Any views or opinions represented in this blog are personal and belong solely to the blog owner, jhbillwalton@gmail.com, an independent consultant.  They do not represent those of people, institutions or organizations that the owner may or may not be associated with in a professional or personal capacity.)