If you had to fix a fault with your washing machine, how would you do it? How about if you wanted to choose a good hotel for your holiday? Help your daughter with her homework on ‘The Egyptians’?
Our everyday lives have been simplified by a wide variety of tools and resources that we use to get stuff done. We don’t worry much about memorising things – we know how to figure it out.
But our work lives haven’t changed much: the easiest way to get stuff done is generally still to ask the person next to you.
Over the past few months I’ve had the privilege of talking with a wide variety of organisations - large and small, public and private - all of who are grappling with the challenge of modernising learning. They are awash with concepts like 70/20/10, blending, micro-learning, gamification, virtual reality, informal learning, social technologies, automation and personalisation.
The advice I give them is simple:
Shift from courses to resources.
It doesn’t matter what technology or approach you are using: if you are still trying to push information rather than help people get stuff done, it won’t work.
So what does a shift from courses to resources mean?
First and foremost it means being user-centered in the way you design things. Really find out what problems people have, what motivates them, and how you can help.
It means taking a fresh look at your capabilities as a learning organisation: whether you have people and suppliers who know how to design and build resources.
It means setting aside conventions, fads and distractions and worrying less about new ways to force people to memorise things and more about how to help people get stuff done.
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