3 Rules of 3

We recommend what we call the OTrain 3 rules of 3.

The first is fairly common in the training space. That is:

1. Tell them what you are going to tell them
2. Tell them
3. Tell them what you told them.

We also overlay this process with the 2hd rule, which is theory, example activity.

Each time you move from Theory, to Example, to Activity, you provide a new re-engagement point. You also build on the knowledge and learning from the previous section (even though in all three cases you are building on the same learning).

For example if you were creating a short course on financial management and you were talking about how to read or structure a Profit and Loss statement, you might start by talking about the five key areas of the profit and loss statements.

Revenue – all the money that comes into the business, is represented on the profit and loss as revenue and usually would appear at the top of the statement.

Cost of Goods sole – what it costs you to produce the goods sold.

Gross profit – the money left over when you subtract your cost of goods sold from your revenue.

Expenses – the money you spend to run the operation that are not related to the cost of goods. This might include wages, rent etc.

Net profit/loss – whats left once you remove the expenses from the Gross profit.

Now in this example this is “theory” and whilst it provides a clear overview, for most people this would still be somewhat confusing. It does not provide all the detail required to get a full understanding of the concept. So we would suggest you follow this up with an example. Something like the following:

For the example of a coffee shop – your revenue might be all the money that you take through the till, and the eftpos machine, that is all the money the customer pays you for your product.

Cost of goods sold would be things like milk, coffee beans, paper cups and cakes. The direct cost of the goods your selling

Gross profit is whats left after you’ve paid for all your milk and beans form the money you’ve collected.

Your expenses might be things like rent, staff wages and your radio advertisements and your Net Profit (or loss) would be whats left after you take all your expenses from your Gross profit.

Now this example builds on the theory provided early and allows the student to start to build some ideas in their mind. You can reinforce this learning and ideas by adding an activity. In this care you might have something like a drop and drag activity with a list of receipts and invoices and ask the student to drag them into one of 5 columns. Perhaps you have a picture of some loose change and an eftpos recipt. These would need to be dragged into the revenue column. Maybe an invoice for sugar satchels and tea bags – these would need to go into the Cost of Goods column etc, etc.

This approach of theory, example and activity builds and reinforces the points by providing similar information to the key points in different formats. It also re-engaged the student. As they go from understanding the theory to visualising the example to actually engaging in the activity they re-engage and that keeps them learning and interested.

Rule 3 – 3 minutes – approximately 3 minutes of content and reengage 450 words. This equates to about 1 full page of text. Remember when you put training online you typically reduce delivery time by 2/3. This means what we cover online in 3 minutes, would normaly take closer to 9 or 10 minutes in the class room. Thats a lot of contnet to consume in one hit, which is why we need to re-engage. Not only does re-engaging allow the student a chance to refocus or use a different part of the brain, it allows the brain time to organise and file the first bit of content, before we start loading it up again.

Of course there are many more 'rules' or concepts for creating great online training, but hopefuly these 3 rules of 3 will give you a good start, and a strucuture to start building your online training course.