Julie Dirksen – författare

Book 1 of 3 in the Learning Design Essentials Library

Products, technologies, and workplaces change so quickly today that everyone is continually learning. Many of us are also teaching, even when it's not in our job descriptions. Whether it's giving a presentation, writing documentation, or creating a website or blog, we need and want to share our knowledge with other people. But if you've ever fallen asleep over a boring textbook, or fast-forwarded through a tedious e-learning exercise, you know that creating a great learning experience is harder than it seems.

 

In Design For How People Learn, Second Edition, you'll discover how to use the key principles behind learning, memory, and attention to create materials that enable your audience to both gain and retain the knowledge and skills you're sharing. Updated to cover new insights and research into how we learn and remember, this new edition includes new techniques for using social media for learning as well as two brand new chapters on designing for habit and best practices for evaluating learning, such as how and when to use tests. Using accessible visual metaphors and concrete methods and examples, Design For How People Learn, Second Edition will teach you how to leverage the fundamental concepts of instructional design both to improve your own learning and to engage your audience.

Book 3 of 3 in the Learning Design Essentials Library

Even in an AI‑driven world, skill development remains essential for people. Expertise is required not only to evaluate and apply AI outputs, but also to use AI thoughtfully in building human proficiency. Access to information alone has little value without the skills and judgment to apply it effectively.

Design for How People Build Skills shows how to design learning that builds real, measurable skills—not just knowledge. Drawing on research and real‑world practice, Julie Dirksen provides a practical framework for developing skills that transfer to the job and adapt to changing conditions.

Key Topics Covered:

Defining Skills That Matter: Learn how to identify true skills and distinguish them from knowledge or procedures. Designing Practice and Feedback: Create practice sequences, rubrics, and feedback loops that drive growth and fluency. Transfer and Context: Design learning that supports performance across tangible and variable work situations. AI and Skill Development: Use AI to enhance coaching and feedback while keeping human judgment central.

In this book Julie builds on the concepts discussed in her other books, Design for How People Learn (understanding learning) and Talk to the Elephant (creating behavior change), by addressing the next challenge: how to design learning that develops skills and capabilities that can be practiced, applied, and improved in real-life contexts. She addresses the gap between knowledge and skill and outlines the stages of skill development from novice to expert.

 

 

Book 2 of 3 in the Learning Design Essentials Library

What do you do when your learners know what to do but still aren't doing it?Training is created with the goal of changing learners' behaviors, but anyone who has created learning experiences knows that there's a big gap between knowing and doing. You can create an engaging learning experience that informs and helps people remember, but often those people go back to their regular world and continue to do things the same way they always have.

In the last few decades, the fields of psychology, behavioral economics, and other behavioral sciences have brought an enormous amount of scientific research into helping people with behavior change. Only a fraction of that research has made its way back into learning design.

Talk to the Elephant: Design Learning for Behavior Change shows you how to add critical tools to your learning design toolbox to affect behavior change. You'll find out how to use frameworks and strategies from behavioral science to help you research and analyze challenges, feel more confident that you're solving the right problem, and design and test solutions that can help people with difficult behavior changes.

By the end of this book, you'll be able to

Map the change journey of your learners and identify their path Assess and clearly communicate the value of the change Use motivation models to better understand what learners really care about Utilize evidence-based models like the COM-B Model to analyze behavior-change challenges Use a diagnostic checklist to determine whether you actually have a training problem Identify behavior-change techniques to address your specific challenges

Products, technologies, and workplaces change so quickly today that everyone is continually learning. Many of us are also teaching, even when it''s not in our job descriptions. Whether it''s giving a presentation, writing documentation, or creating a website or blog, we need and want to share our knowledge with other people. But if you''ve ever fallen asleep over a boring textbook, or fast-forwarded through a tedious e-learning exercise, you know that creating a great learning experience is harder than it seems. In Design For How People Learn, Second Edition, you''ll discover how to use the key principles behind learning, memory, and attention to create materials that enable your audience to both gain and retain the knowledge and skills you''re sharing. Updated to cover new insights and research into how we learn and remember, this new edition includes new techniques for using social media for learning as well as two brand new chapters on designing for habit and best practices for evaluating learning, such as how and when to use tests. Using accessible visual metaphors and concrete methods and examples, Design For How People Learn, Second Edition will teach you how to leverage the fundamental concepts of instructional design both to improve your own learning and to engage your audience.