Subject matter experts, survivorship bias and learning design
If the only people to make it to SME level are the ones who throw themselves in and have excellent knowledge retention, and they are rare, then even if the SMEs have an excellent understanding of the types of learner they were in the past, they will naturally fail to connect.
I was reading a LinkedIn post by Maryna Baltrukevich again, and its excellent comments, all about the difficulties of working with subject matter experts as a learning designer.
It made me wonder how much of the problem with subject matter experts (SMEs) providing direct education is about the Curse of Knowledge and how much it's simple survivorship bias (Newton, 1990).
Could it be that SMEs encounter issues in connecting with learners, not because they have trouble understanding that learners don't know what the SMEs know, but because they are accurately remembering what they were like at that stage of learning?
But if the only people to make it to SME level are the ones who throw themselves into the learning enthusiastically and have excellent knowledge retention, and they are rare (since not everyone becomes a SME), then even if the SMEs have an excellent understanding of the types of learner they were in the past, they will naturally fail to connect. The people they are teaching include all the people who will never become SMEs - might not need to or want to, even.
This matters, because if the issue was SMEs misunderstanding the nature of learning, then the solution would have been about educating SMEs on how people learn.
But if the issue is SMEs misunderstanding the nature of the learners, then the solutions look pretty different. They become about learning the reasons learners might be learning, the backgrounds of the learners, and what the learners hope to do with their new skills and understanding.
Only if the SMEs understand who the learners are, and what they want to achieve, rather than trying to replicate what worked for them, will they have a rewarding experience.
The solution is often still to work with a skilled learning designer, who can bridge the gap. But how we talk about it with SMEs would need to change. It would need to be less about educational theory and more about the audience and the teaching experience.
Originally published on my LinkedIn page on 3 October 2024.