The Need

Learning is hard, it is a challenge.

Students will study subjects for up to three years but still need to ‘cram’ before the exams, only to forget the majority of what they learned again a few weeks later; the learning has not stuck.

But why is this?

To understand, it is necessary to examine learning at its most fundamental level.

When we learn we engage the learning process with our conscious mind, our short-term memory, also known as our working memory.

The short-term memory has considerable limitations.

Firstly, it has low processing power. Research in the 1950 revealed that the short-term memory can only deal with seven, plus or minus two, bit of information at anyone time. This is known as the Magic Number Seven or sometimes as Miller’s Law, after the psychologist who discovered it. Although Miller’s Law has been widely accepted, more recent studies have suggested that the Magic number could be 5, or even 4! So, we cannot take in very much information at any one time.

Secondly, as the name suggests, the short-term memory degrades rapidly. The Ebbinghaus forgetting curve suggests that we loose 79% of what we learn within 31 day.

All teaching methods, past and present, primarily address the short-term working memory. That is why learning, and therefore teaching, is so hard.

Lastly, we have limited powers of concentration. Although figures vary, it is estimated that the average attention span of a two-year-old is around five minutes and this increases to 20 minutes for adults, and yet most lessons or training sessions are a minimum of 40 minutes long and can be several hours long. We simple are not capable of taking in information over such time frames.

Download™ embeds knowledge directly into the long-term memory. The long-term memory is, by one estimate 300,000 times faster than the short-term memory and, it does not degrade.

That is why Download™ can deliver high quality learning outcomes, quickly.