There's No Such Thing as Learning Content*

I walk into work one day and a colleague says ‘That tie doesn’t go with that shirt.’ I learn something, and my behaviour changes. Was that comment ‘learning content’?

The point, of course, is that there is no such thing as learning content – micro or otherwise. There is just learning and content: we learn, and whether or not a piece of content helps us to learn, helps us not to learn, or is merely useless depends entirely on the context. In general, our learning is driven by the challenges we face, not by content.

Seems pretty obvious; but it points to a central flaw in educational practice – namely that most education (corporate or otherwise) starts with the content rather than the context.

The problem is that instead of asking ‘what might be useful to know in this situation?’ people tend to ask ‘how can we get people to remember this stuff?’ It turns out if you ask the former question you tend to end up with resources, and if you ask the latter you tend to end up with courses.

So is this a problem for businesses that offer libraries of ‘learning content’?

Yes it is. There are some things that you can guess pretty much everyone wants to learn about - things like: ‘how to get on with people’ or ‘how to use Facebook’. However these days people can learn about these things for free – so your business opportunity is with the things they can’t learn about for free - such as organisation-specific policies. Unfortunately these aren’t the kinds of things you can have a library of – since they depend on context-specific design (i.e. asking people ‘what challenges are you facing?’ and designing with these in mind).

As a result, lots of organisations buy libraries of learning content, only to find that employees find them irrelevant or unhelpful. The content problem is often compounded by format problems: if you need a quick refresher on the key points of your organisation's performance management process 10 minutes before a meeting, then a 20 minute elearning course on general principles is hardly going to help.

The practical take-away: stop producing learning content. Instead, take time to understand the problems people are facing, and design resources that help them. Alternatively, create experiences that challenge people to care about something that they didn’t care about before.

There really are only two things to do.

*This post arose from a twitter exchange with Charles Jennings. Thanks, Charles, for the inspiration.