Regulations in the healthcare industry are constantly being updated to ultimately provide the best possible care to patients. Every single one of these changes cascades into multiple process updates: how can a company be sure to always be compliant with these new rules?
Especially in the Pharmaceutical industry, the training provided to employees is key to have a successful adoption. Planning and facilitating scientific training has become quite complex in the past years: the employees that need to be trained belong to generations that have seen a technological evolution as never before. Younger generations have known nothing but digital technologies, while the older ones might look at them with a mix of curiosity and diffidence. But can these technologies, e.g. Virtual Reality, e-learning and gamification, really help employees in the healthcare industry to retain information better than old-fashioned teaching methods?
Science, as always, can enlighten us.
In a recent study, prof. Richard E. Mayer explains how our brain actually retains information better when it is conveyed through multimedia. The so-called "Cognitive theory of multimedia learning" describes five principles to take into account when creating e-training material:
- The redundancy principle teaches us that people learn more deeply via the use of narration and graphics, rather than via narration, graphics and on-screen text;
- The signaling principle instructs us to use cues to highlight essential information;
- The temporal contiguity principle underlines how graphics and related narration should be shown simultaneously;
- Similarly, the spatial contiguity principle explains how learning is facilitated when images and related key words are shown in close proximity to each other;
- The coherence principle proposes to eliminate distracting objects (e.g. unnecessary pictures, busy layout, excessive animations) from the training material.
By obeying these simple principles, it is possible to effectively train a multigenerational audience with one method, whether it is during a simple slide presentation or by making use of the latest digital technologies.
Source: Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning (Richard E. Mayer, professor in Educational Psychology at the University of California).