I had this reaction when I was talking about how meeting the needs of businesses and meeting the needs of learners are very different things - something beautifully illustrated by Jane Hart's Learning in the Workplace 2013 survey In essence learners find training of little value, but love Google, blogs etc. This notwithstanding the projected rapid growth of the elearning industry. And it's easy to see why (I thought) - elearning meets the need of the business to reduce training costs and improve business assurance (content), whilst learners themselves find that other digital tools meet their needs in the moment (context).
But it does leave me wondering about the future for us learning professionals - mainly because my impression is if you are trying to do the kinds of things that are liked by learners, near everything has to change. What we need to do is something that Christopher Emdin calls 'magic' - which is not terribly helpful if you don't know how to do it, but indicative of just how much there is to learn.
PostScript : the diagram begs the question 'what is the overlap?' - and I guess the answer is 'performance' - employees are just trying to 'get stuff done' (lifehack) & organisations want them to 'do stuff a certain way'. That these are drifting further apart - that education is drifting further from learning - are ultimately consequences of a misunderstanding of the mechanics of learning & a correspondingly weak story regarding the impact of 'learning'(educational) interventions.
It would appear Jane's survey would reinforce the belief that the more natural, independently driven ways of learning (through and with others and experiences) are preferred. With that, the role of learning professionals would need to shift to helping people connect and share experiences as part of the connection equation. Additionally I'd add that educational systems (pre-employment) needs to also shift focus on helping people understand learning and learning how to learn as well as critical thinking to better guide people through the volumes of information being made available... Until that happens it will ideally fall upon those best positioned; the organizational learning professionals.
ReplyDeleteI agree. It just looks like such a gap: learning professionals helping people learn how to network? Teaching them how to learn? Really? There are still a great many people working in education who are distributing content. Where learning is directly addressed it is generally though the lens of 'learning styles' - a discredited and misleading approach. It just looks like a convention drifting further from reality.
ReplyDeleteMy point is regarding something I see a lot in organizations and in our profession. People really don't know how to use the new tools of networking to connect in a way that is meaningful to their work and helps them build networks that inform their practice more deliberately. And in education, there is not enough attention put on helping students understand the learning process, to be conscious of it because as you said there are still a great many who are distributing content over helping people move through the sea of content to find what is most valuable. Anyway, I appreciate your post. Rare that one leaves me pondering for several days. :)
ReplyDeleteIt's not eLearning as a whole that's failing to close the performance gap. It is the poor use of the technology. I'm agreeing that the designers seldom listen to the listeners. But they do so because when the learners turn to Google, they find misinformation that can cause more damage than boredom can.
ReplyDeleteAll organisations create "policies and procedures," which they then place online. Many organisations will then tell their employees that it is their responsibility to know the policies and procedures that are applicable to them. And then...? How many employees venture forth to ready these P&Ps? A scant few.
Employees more frequently turn to their co-workers to learn how things are done, co-workers who very likely have also not read their P&Ps. They run the risk of learning the wrong things. Should employees turn to the internet to learn how things are done, they may find something that works in another place and time, but not now. Laws have changed. Cultures differ. These independent learners may not know this, however, and that's when the trouble can ensue.
So then, yes, someone goes off and designs a compliance course that addresses the policies that are already online. And it's eLearning that gets the bad name.
Perhaps this isn't a fair analogy. The above issue is a systemic problem where the leaders aren't indicating the importance of their staff learning the P&P's because they're relegating this message to one paragraph in an Employee Handbook. So then the eLearning becomes the organisation's way of stating: "Look. We've put this information out here for you. You need to know it."
But look. This can still be done in a way that provides context to important content. The training should look like a stand-alone assessment, with eLearning courses that are assigned when an employee fails to answer the associated questions properly.
This is one example of how eLearning can work towards both business' and learners' advantage. I challenge those who are sick of eLearning to find others.