Next week, I have the pleasure of discussing the book, Design For How People Learn (Voices That Matter), with author Julie Dirksen. When first deciding on purchasing the book one key theme jumped out at me, The Learner’s Journey. See what Julie has to say about it: 
Julie Dirksen: Good morning. The Learner’s Journey is really just this idea that we’re trying to create an experience for the learner as we usually move from being an absolute novice all the way up to mastery. There are stages along that process, and the experience needs to change the further they move along the journey and the path. One of the questions is, is it a journey or is it more of an environment that we’re creating for people or experience that we’re creating for people that best fosters learning? A lot of people are really independent learners these days. That’s one of the things that the internet certainly encourages; being able to go “Oh, I need this thing. I guess I’ll Google it.”
When we’re thinking about learning experiences, are we creating a path for people or a journey for people? Or are we creating an environment that’s going to support them being self-directed in their own learning process.
Joe: So, in your mind, you’re really mapping out a learning journey the same way that I would think of the customer journey in marketing and maybe look at that learner experience a.k.a. customer experience along the way?
Julie: Yes, absolutely. One of the things you think a lot about is when somebody’s first starting out, they’re going to need a pretty directed experience. They’re going to need something where there’s a fair amount of structure. When you don’t know anything about a topic, you don’t know what you don’t know, so you need a lot more guidance.
But then as you move along the path, as you move along the journey, you’re going to have more opinions about what you’re interested in and you’re going to have more ability to decide which resources are useful to you and which resources are not useful to you.
So, one of the things about the learner journey is it’s usually moving along a path of a more controlled structured experience to having more autonomy and control over your environment as you go along.
You find Julie at usablelearning.com
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