Using Twitter to help learners retain knowledge

Here’s a question for you: “What is the best way of stopping people forgetting things after learning?”

Think about this for a moment before looking ahead if you can.

I hope your answer is something like this: by asking them questions over time after the learning takes place.

When you learn something, you connect two or more concepts in memory. And when you are asked a question about what you have learned, you have to search your memory to find the answer. This searching makes the connection in memory stronger, so in the future you will be more likely to remember what you have learned rather than forget it. If you’re not familiar with this important idea, see these white papers by learning expert Will Thalheimer for more information:  The Learning Benefits of Questions and Measuring Learning Results.

If your learners go on to another course or go back to work, it’s not always easy to reach them to stimulate their memory with follow-up questions. Here’s where Twitter comes in: it can be a great tool for sending follow up questions.

1. Have your learners follow you on Twitter, either on your main account, or on a subsidiary account made for each course.
2. Post short questions as tweets to stimulate people’s memory. Remember, even thinking about the answer can help reinforce the learning. You could post the right answer the next day.
3. Follow these up with quizzes in Questionmark Perception. You can post links to to these assessments in your tweets. With the new support of mobile devices in Perception version 5, your learners can access these quizzes from mobile devices as well as PCs and Macs, and take the quizzes from their home or while traveling.

Shortening a question into 140 characters is usually possible, and it’s easy to compress a URL to Perception’s open access entry point (open.php) to fit within a tweet. For instance the URL http://bit.ly/ElectricQuiz links to one of Questionmark’s sample assessments on Electricity Skills.

I hope this idea helps. And in case you’ve forgotten, what is the best way of helping people remember after learning?