There are two senses in which learning is dead: the more superficial sense - 'education is dead' - in which a bunch of more or less dysfunctional practices are coming to an end, and the second more profound sense in which learning as an activity is draining from our future like water down a plughole.
Why is education on the way out and what is to be done about it? It's on the way out (whether we mean public or corporate) because we mistakenly thought learning was knowledge-transfer. This meant that a lot of education ended up being 'content dumping': basically exposing people to information in the misguided belief that people would a) remember it and b) this would change their behaviour somehow. We all sort of knew this was a waste of time, but we carried on doing it anyway.
Of course a significant part of education today is not content-dumping - it's hands-on, learning-by-doing. The good news is that this will likely grow as business become more interested in hiring people who have already demonstrated they can do something, over people who have paid for a certificate in something largely unrelated. For educational institutions it's now just a question of business agility. (More specifically, from a public education standpoint this equates to a shift to a task-centered ‘learn-earn’ gradient with challenges and cohorts of increasing sophistication, and away from a content-centered lecturer-student model).
The second death is harder to spot: there are lots of people who work in learning who have an unshakeable faith in learning as an essentially human pursuit. They say things like 'we will need to learn even more in future' or 'humans learn all the time'. I find it odd that on the one hand they accept the inevitability of advancing automation and on the other imagine we will still feel compelled to develop our capabilities somehow. Maybe pause to consider some likely future trends:
- typing: you won't need to learn
- driving: you won't need to learn
- foreign languages: you won't need to learn
- how to use a computer: you won't need to learn
- reading and writing: you (probably) won't need to learn
- medical diagnosis: you won't need to learn
What exactly is it that you think you will need to learn about in future? Snapchat? The banjo? UX is essentially learning elimination: when people talk about the 'zero learning curve OS' they literally mean a system you don't need any special training to use - like a driverless car or an iPad. Learning is cognitively effortful, largely arises out of necessity – and we are enthusiastically ironing out all those necessities in pursuit of an easier life (and commercial advantage).
I confess I struggled to imagine things that people will still need to learn in future. I came up with a list, but I’m not 100% convinced about those:
-walk
-talk
-eat
-relate to people
Noticeably these are things that we learn (for the most part) before we are really aware of our own existence.
Some of you will protest along the lines: 'but where will we get our future Brins & Pages?'. The gap between the highly capable elite and the highly incapable masses is set to widen dramatically (in line with earnings), and that peculiar kind of capability stems from obsessive passion (so typically in spite of education rather than because of it). I suspect there will always be a tiny minority of outliers sufficiently passionate to learn about something.
So what can we - learning professionals - do? There's some good news:
The first thing we can do is develop performance support: in a world where people learn less we can actually enhance employee performance - even as their capability is declining sharply - by designing performance support and guidance. Imagine an HR manager no longer able to read and write, but capable of asking questions of their Amazon-style AI assistant and applying this guidance to meetings.
The shift from learning to performance support is also good news for businesses, who are already scratching their heads and wondering where they will get capable people in future. Answer: they won't need them, because you will have designed performance support (this is how satellite navigation works for car drivers, for example). This is, frankly, pretty good timing since businesses have just about twigged that training wasn't adding much value anyway. But it's an interesting shift – one no longer talks about 'developing capability', just 'improving performance'.
The other thing we can do is experience design: whether in a public education context or corporate. For a while at least some things will require a level of capability – and building experiences which provoke people to develop these capabilities will still be needed. Experience design incorporates 'learning by doing' but is much broader. A memorable story can be an experience, for example. (There's a diagram here).
Sometimes people imagine that experience design is just a new word for training (just as they imagine resources is just another word for 'micro-learning'). Having completed a few experience design projects, the real differences only tend to surface where someone says 'so what are the learning objectives?' or 'what are the topics?'. There are no learning objectives; there are no topics. Instead, we consider what we want people to be able to do, the likely challenges in doing these things, and the experiences that will best mimic these challenges. So instead of a course with content and activities, we typically have an experience with challenges and resources.
Again, this is good news for learning professionals on two counts: it represents the resurrection of face-to-face at a time when some were worried that elearning would remove the need for it, and for people used to designing engaging activities, experience design is not a big stretch.
Let’s run this through a topical example: cyber-attack. Cyber-attack is something you might hire people to do. You probably wouldn’t trust universities to develop this capability, but you might turn to an organisation that offers these skills, and which functions by taking people with demonstrable skills (that they have picked up of their own accord) and surrounding them with colleagues and challenges of increasing sophistication – effectively blurring the lines between simulation and reality (and between learning and earning).
Things change slowly, I know. And marketing can hold back the tide of progress awhile. But there are those of us who worry about the future and those of us who tackle the everyday - and probably we need each other.
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