Book Review - Design For How People Learn by Julie Dirksen

14 Oct 2024 06:52 PM By Suraj
My verdict - If you are someone who is even remotely connected to creating learning materials or courses of any kind, please do read this book. 



As part of our work at CoolCoach, we had to design courses that helped sports persons from low-income families gain employment as entry level fitness coaches at gyms and fitness centres. Given my limited knowledge and skills in course design, I hired a team which had experience in corporate training, curriculum design and teaching low-income students.  To my surprise, the team did not know of any framework to design such courses and it showed in the quality and effectiveness of the courses they built. 

This is when I discovered Julie Dirksen’s book on Design For How People Learn. I bought the book as soon I read the contents and I was not disappointed. Julie provides a simple, and, effective framework to design learning materials and courses. The book is easy to read and Julie does a stellar job of providing just enough theory and a lot of practical suggestions on how to apply the theory in real world settings. Rather than getting lost in academic definitions (curriculum vs syllabus) or context specific details (best UI for desktop vs mobile learning), Julie ensures that the reader gains the confidence to build an effective course by following her framework. 

In addition to her framework, I appreciated how Julie recommends starting the course design process by first understanding the student you are designing for. This insight forced my course design team to spend time understanding the student they were designing for. For example - we knew that the majority of the sports persons we intended to recruit had not even cleared high school. We had also learned that one of the reasons they didn’t do well academically was that they had limited academic skills. Following Julie’s plan, my design team had to factor these aspects of our students. 

In my line of work, I meet a lot of people who cannot stop talking about how they are re-imagining education but usually are short on how they will take their lofty ideas and turn them into effective learning experiences for students. I wish all of them read Julie’s book. 

Suraj