How can we make learning fun? Whether you are in a formal school setting, or in an office, lifelong learning is core to success and that’s why it should be fun! The better curriculum and teachers can be at centring individual human experience in their design, the better learning individuals will be able to do.  

This week, Kelly is joined by Erin Huizenga, a teacher, designer, and co-owner/studio director at DeskLight. She designs to help people learn. She helps organizational leaders connect learner-centred research insights with design thinking to build new programs and tools. 

Erin believes listening well is a key skill not only to design but to business in general.  

Big Takeaways:  

• (13:20) "The mission and vision of DeskLight is really to work with learners across the lifelong learning spectrum. We don't just work in K-12. We don't just work in higher ed. We don't just work in learning and development and trainings... Something that we're thinking about as an insight for early learning could easily be a very cool, thoughtful thing that we can bring to a learning and development project because there's a lot of truth and similarity about how people learn as humans over the course of time as they age.” 
• (21:00) “K-12 schools have a need for problem-based learning and project-based learning. The skills that come from project-based learning and the confidence and the self-actualization and the relevancy of the learning and how students will ultimately remember those things better and more effectively than they would have if they learned it from a textbook or even from their teacher lecturing at them.” 
• (23:00) “Historically learning has been for the sake of some kind of objective that's part of the employee's job description...that's really changing where businesses, employers, big organizations are, starting to think more about how can we embrace and enrich this individual as a human and what they want to do with their lives and with their work. And how can we think about this more as an employee benefit and less of a thing that's about us as a business or organization.” 

LinkedIn @Erin Huizenga 

Desklightlearning.com