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L&D Studio

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Insights
from global thought leaders

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Stella Collins

  • LinkedIn
Co-founder and Chief Learning Officer
Stellar Labs

"We need to move away from a reliance on content or expecting people to learn a new skill rapidly.

Neuroscience tells us to reduce cognitive overload with concrete chunks of information and to build in opportunities for active practice, feedback and reflection."

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AI can facilitate learning transfer when it’s used with transfer in mind. The three key levers for effective transfer are people motivated to apply their learning, learning activities designed with transfer in mind, and for the organisation to give people repeated opportunities and support to actively process and use new information or skills at work.

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Too often, AI is simply used to produce content faster which is insufficient for learning transfer. Fortunately, coupled with a good grounding in learning science AI can support the full transfer process.

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At Stellar Labs, we use AI to ask designers what skill they need to build and then generate  observable, behaviour-based transfer objectives – what do you want these people to do as a result of the training? This is very different to a topic-based approach to training which tends to create an emphasis on information sharing rather than learner activity.

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AI can summarise and chunk complex information which reduces cognitive overload. It can generate relevant multi-media content from business-specific documents rather than relying on generic materials. It can rapidly design decision-making scenarios, activities to practice techniques, work-based actions to apply learning in the workplace and questions for spaced repetition. These techniques ensure learners reinforce new skills at optimal intervals, promoting long-term retention and allowing them to apply skills in real-world settings​​​. AI can be used as a personal skills coach offering structured guidance and support on the job – it never gets tired or has a bad day, though you have to be careful of its inbuilt biases.

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In a real world use case, our Stellar Labs platform which is neuroscience-based and AI-accelerated reduces training design time for a pharmaceutical company from months to days.  Subject matter experts (SMEs) used to spend valuable time creating slides and repeatedly sharing the same information with new teams. Now they simply validate and edit an AI-generated learning journey which can be easily personalised to each team and ready to deploy in days. Because the system is behaviour-based learners gain practical experience through guided practice and work-based actions, and the AI-enhanced spaced repetition boosts skill retention. Transfer is measurable because AI supports data capture and analysis. The SMEs are available for constructive mentoring and support, but they don’t spend days repeating the same information and can get back to their specialist roles rapidly.

Designing impactful L&D interventions really comes to life when we tap into how our brains naturally learn best. Neuroscience isn’t just theory—it’s an incredibly practical guide to building learning experiences that genuinely stick.

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Start with neuroplasticity, which is the brains ability to adapt and build new neural pathways in response to changes in the environment – it’s the foundation of learning. But making those changes requires time, effort and energy from our brains. Recognising this helps us focus on the process of learning rather than learning events. We need to move away from a reliance on content or expecting people to learn a new skill rapidly. Neuroscience tells us to reduce cognitive overload with concrete chunks of information and to build in opportunities for active practice, feedback and reflection. Because learning is effortful people have to be motivated to persist, particularly when it comes to practice, so make sure learning is relevant and timely and supported. Provoke the brain's reward system, fuelled by dopamine, with curiosity, praise, visible progress, social connection, problem solving and feedback.

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Attention is the gateway to memory. Our brains pay attention to what’s new and relevant so learning needs to include elements of novelty but also to be connected to what people want to do.  Stories, personalised case studies and activities that are ‘desirably difficult’ keep us paying attention.

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Our brains are better at forgetting than remembering so people need to work to remember. Recall beats recognition every time because it basically activates connected neurons more often.  Use spaced repetition to help people recall key information at specific, increasing intervals over time to beat the forgetting curve. Sleep is essential for shifting short-term memories from our hippocampus into long term memories distributed across our brains. No sleep means no learning.

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Mix things up with Emotions, multiple senses and movement to activate more parts of the brain, building strong and varied brain connections and creating multiple access points to the information and skills we learn. Since real-world context is key, embedding learning in situations where people will use it helps boost transfer. Imagine learners practicing skills in settings that feel familiar—they’re far more likely to retain and apply what they’ve learned.

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When we train people we are literally encouraging them to change how their brains are wired so it’s up to us to know how that process works and to work with it, not against it.

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