It’s Spring Break around here, which means a little extra family time before my son headed off to D.C. for a Model Arab League conference. Meanwhile, my daughter is in full swing of her final high school softball season, so if you need me anytime in the next month or two, there's a good chance you’ll find me at a softball field, cheering loudly and hoping the rain stays away.

Thanks for reading!
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Supported by iSpring

Most personalization advice for learning is still pretty hand-wavy. This free guide makes it more concrete, with four practical layers for building personalization around roles, performance, and real business needs—not just bigger course libraries or more AI. Worth a look.

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The Fluency Illusion

Your best training might be lying to your learners.

Not on purpose. But here's the uncomfortable truth: the cleaner and more polished your training feels, the more likely learners are to think they've learned even when they haven't.

This is the Fluency Illusion.

You've felt it yourself. You watched a tutorial, followed every step, and nodded along. It all made sense. Then you tried to do it alone and drew a blank. That's not a focus problem. That's the gap between recognition and recall. The content felt learned because it felt easy. But feeling easy and being retained are two completely different events.

​Research shows that high processing fluency — smooth design, familiar language, logical flow — triggers a genuine sense of mastery, independent of whether any real learning happened. Your brain confuses easy to follow with actually learned. So do your learners. So, probably, do you.

This explains something most L&D pros quietly know but rarely say out loud: strong satisfaction scores and weak behavior change often come from the same course. Learners rate the experience highly because it felt good: organized, clear, professional. The feedback isn't broken. The design is doing exactly what smooth design does.

The fix has a name: desirable difficulty. Robert Bjork's decades of research at UCLA show that the conditions that make learning feel easiest are often the ones that produce the weakest long-term retention. Slightly harder — not frustrating, just effortful — builds stronger memory traces. The struggle is the point.

Also supported by Neovation

If AI use on your team feels a little all over the place; different people, different tools, no real shared plan you’re not alone. This April 29 session helps you see where your team actually sits on the AI adoption curve and what to do next. Practical and timely.

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Three ways to build in the right kind of friction:

1. End with retrieval, not review.
   Instead of a summary slide, ask learners to recall three key ideas from memory before you show them anything.
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2. Space it out.
   Short practice bursts spread across days outperform one polished hour-long module. It feels less satisfying. It sticks more.
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3. Quiz before the lesson.
   Pre-testing on content learners haven't seen yet improves their later retention — even when they get it wrong.

None of these feels as good as a beautiful course. That's exactly the point.

Also supported by We Are Learning

If you're building scenario-based learning, this is for you. This simple 3-part checklist helps anyone using an authoring tool create scenarios in which learners can make choices and learn from the consequences. Less theory, more impact!.

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Worth your attention

Want to take a closer look? These are your best bets! ​
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When Learning Feels Right But Goes Wrong

Paul Kirschner connects fluency, desirable difficulties, and Roediger and Butler's work on learning paradoxes in one sharp piece. The key takeaway: what feels like effective learning often isn't, and both learners and designers are routinely fooled by the same illusions.

​See why designers fall for the same illusions as learners →​

Robert Bjork: A Guide to Desirable Difficulties

Bjork's research at UCLA over five decades directly contradicts how most training gets designed. This guide explains the critical difference between storage strength and retrieval strength, highlighting why the conditions that make learning feel easiest are often the same ones that lead to the weakest long-term retention.

​Meet the researcher behind the fix→​

Rethinking Training: The Benefits of Embracing Desirable Difficulties

Written specifically for workplace training contexts. It covers how learners unknowingly prefer the conditions that work against them and makes a practical case for interleaved practice, spacing, and testing as learning tools rather than just measurement instruments.

​Make the business case for productive struggle →​

The Bottom Line

Here's the question worth asking after your next course review:

Those aren't the same answer.

Want to go deeper on this? Chapter 1 of Think Like a Marketer, Train Like an L&D Pro covers the science of how people actually process information — and what that means for your design decisions.

🎵 Today I've tuned into the Gorillaz ​

📍Where I'll be next

• ​iSpring Days 2026, April 15-17 (Online)
• ​LearnTec, May 5-7 (Karlsruhe, Germany)
• ​ATD International Conference, May 17-20 (Los Angeles, CA)
• ​Canadian eLearning Conference, May 29 (Niagara Falls, ON)

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