TL:DR – Timing, pacing, and audience engagement are critical in both comedy and learning.
Great comedians don’t just tell jokes. They understand timing, audience connection, and how to lead people to a punchline with purpose. Instructional designers? We do the exact same thing. (Or at least we should!)
Just like in comedy, pacing matters. A dry delivery, poorly timed interactivity, or overwhelming information kills attention. Comedy teaches the comedian to read the room; translated into the realm of instructional designers, we learn to read the learner.
Will this hook the learner?
Will this confuse the learner?
Will this bore the learner?
Like a solid stand-up set, a good course contains callbacks, reinforcements of key ideas sprinkled throughout the curriculum in clever, subtle ways. Quality instructional design has a narrative flow, a confident voice, and ends with a punch (a takeaway).
Remember, IDs don’t simply deliver content, we perform it. Utilize the standup comic’s blueprint for a successful set by implementing rhythm, surprise, and emotion into your next training to make it stick.
Training Tip:
When possible, especially with Instructor-Led Training (ILT) and Virtual Instructor-Led Training (vILT), identify opportunities to seed an idea that you can later revisit or reference. This will help tie ideas and processes together as you weave these narrative threads from the beginning through to the end of the content.
One way to easily do this is to build progress scenarios, activities, and engagements around the same customer profile.
For example, if the original customer profile used for an activity was a college-age female, continue her narrative through your ID. Build upon your fictional female’s story. For the second activity, fast-forward your profile to post-college graduation and the start of her professional career. Later still, the same profile can marry or have children. By building upon the same customer profile, you can better control the pacing of your activities to match a “real-world scenario.”
All jokes aside (see what I did there?) The ID Department knows instructional design. Click here to discover how The ID Department can help you achieve Fortune 500-level results without Fortune 500 costs.
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