What makes educational content good?

When we think about educational text for adults, we have to remember that they (and we) are self-directed people. They are not babies who need step-by-step hand-holding. They want to be prepared to do something with that content (with a few specific exceptions).

That's why they are less tolerant of filler content, confusing language and anything without a practical application. While a teenager studying for the SAT will read, reread and wonder what's wrong with them for not understanding the text, an adult will criticize the author and skip to the next paragraph.

That kind of approach is what, at the end of the day, sets educational content apart from a blog post written by a marketer.

So there are three principles our content should meet.

1. They provide instruction. In other words, it's clear what the learning in that piece of content is.
2. They are contextualized. Adults like examples, applications and even a bit of theory (respecting principle 1).
3. They support heutagogy. This is self-directed learning. Adult audiences like to apply content on their own: frameworks, links, recommendations, books and so on.

Educational content has to be actionable

Understanding what "actionable" means (what we call instrumentalization) is the first step in turning "normal" content into educational content. After that, we just have to adjust it for our audience and make it rich.

At the end of the day, people consume your content to meet a need of their own. Unlike high school or university, where students are forced to follow a path, with educational content they choose it.

That's why it's not only the content of the text that matters, but also how it's presented. This will be far more relevant when you get into the topic of promoting courses, especially for instructional designers.

Making content actionable means writing content that provides instruction, meaning what the person should do.

You can absolutely write content that tells the origin story or has a big theoretical arsenal in the middle, but make that clear. Give the person the option to skip it. You can do that with formatting.

Educational content has context

Now that you know what makes educational content work, we need to make it rich, meaning well illustrated.

Adults love examples and associations. This is a very powerful weapon to use with our audience because, unlike children and teenagers, adults have a lot of life experience and we can take advantage of it. Not only that, but adult learners are constantly comparing what we say with what they have lived through.

Can't you remember trainings you've attended in the past where you doubted what the speaker was saying because you had lived through different (even opposite) things? That happens because, even if the instructor has a lot of experience and study behind them, the example (or application) they gave didn't match your experience.

Even though adults don't like too much rambling, it's important to give context. And context comes in two forms:

• The theory behind it: where did this come from, and who is saying it? Often it comes as an authority figure (I hold position X, so I know what I'm talking about) or as the story of how the idea came about (I was facing X, then I had to arrive at conclusion Y).
• Examples. We love practicality and applicability. It's no coincidence that technical books that cover a topic tend to be packed with examples. To help you put that framework, tool or matrix into practice, the author gives a series of different contexts. The framework applied to services. The framework applied to products. The framework applied to startups. And so on.

The goal of giving context is to increase the degree of heutagogy (our next topic), combined with the instrumentality of the content. In other words, to provide self-applicable instruction.

Educational content supports the learner's heutagogy

One of the biggest dangers of studying only pedagogy, which is where most training comes from, is that teaching tends to be centered on the teacher. They are the ones who must teach all the content. That fits early childhood education very well, where children need to be guided.

Thinking about the heutagogy of your content will help you create content that learners can reinterpret on their own and use in their day-to-day. It also saves you from having to build so many examples and templates for each case. You'll create a "general" model that can be interpreted.

Adults, especially in the workplace, run into obstacles and want to solve them in a practical way. For that, they turn to more direct content.

For the vast majority, frameworks and models they can apply to many situations are very useful. That's why we see so many canvases (value proposition, business canvas and the like), SPIN selling, BANT and so on. All of these are tools and frameworks that explain a concept and can be applied to a wide range of situations.

To get there, you need to build on four principles, the 4 A's of heutagogy.

• Applicability (breadth): the content can be applied in known and unknown scenarios. In other words, it isn't super specific. With your content, learners can pick up the basic principles and remember them when a new situation shows up (as opposed to models that only work for today's scenarios).
• Awareness (self-reflection): the content prompts reflection on the subject. The opposite would be content with only one way to do something, like hammering a nail. That's an instruction: you grab the hammer in a specific position and apply force against the nail. Learners don't just think about the example(s) at hand, they reflect on what they are learning (metacognition).
• Attitudinal: for it to work, the content should encourage learners to reflect on their own behavior as well as their knowledge. In other words, they will learn technical content, but also learn holistically, changing their behavior and attitude toward certain things.
• Autonomy: finally, one of the central principles of heutagogy is that it isn't necessarily linear. Learners can approach it from many angles. A quick example is this course you're taking. It started with some simple concepts to level the knowledge, but you can take it in any order and explore whatever catches your attention most.

To create content that supports heutagogy, it's important, of course, to understand instructional design so you can build models that can be applied in different contexts.

There are specific questions you can use to check whether the 4 A's of heutagogy were applied, but the central premise is to create content that readers can "help themselves to."

(If you look closely, the 4 A's themselves follow these principles.)

Heutagogy puts the learner in the director's chair of their own learning, so educational content must be prepared for autonomous learners with minds of their own, as opposed to linear content, providing tools for them to study. That way, the instructor's role is to guide the learner and explain how to use those tools correctly.