The Big Question
Learning Circuits published their big question, and I’ve been enjoying reading other people’s responses, so I thought I’d take a crack at it myself.
If you peer inside an organization in10 years time and you look at how workplace learning is being supported by that organization, what will you see? What will the mix of Push vs. Pull Learning; Formal vs. Informal supported by the organization? Are there training departments? What are they doing? How big are they as compared to today? What new departments will be responsible for parts of workplace learning? What will current members of training departments be doing in 10 years?
The technology for training delivery will be beside the point.
It wasn’t that long ago that you had two choices for seeing a movie – catch it at the theater or wait until it hit broadcast television. Nowadays, you can watch a movie projected on film, digitally projected on IMAX, from a DVD on your TV, on your ipod or on your computer. And a lousy movie seen on IMAX is still a lousy movie.
We can deliver training content in formal classrooms, through informal mentoring programs, through the computer, ipods, cell phones, virtual worlds, siftables…and in ten years who knows what other means of delivery will be available to us. Even if we’re plugging in cables into the backs of peoples heads to deliver information by then, we’ll still have to guard against lousy information.
Harold Jarche says in this video on the big question “they don’t teach people how to use e-mail any more. In ten years they won’t have to teach people how to put an instructional video online.” He’s right – but the technology will still be less important than the content itself.
Instructional design will focus less on providing information and more on vetting information.
Information is no longer the scarce resource it was 100 years ago – or even 20 years ago. We’ve gone from 3 TV channels to 3,000, from newspaper delivery to tools like this one that lets you click on any city in the world and see the front page of that city’s newspaper.
The challenge for instructional designers is no longer finding some relevant information on an obscure topic. Wikipedia does that for us. The challenge becomes identifying the most important content, the facts and information that will best support the performance the organization needs to drive business results. Ruth Clark tells us that people learn more from a short description of how something works than from a longer description of how something works. Learning professionals can weed through the nice to haves and create a program that best meets the needs of the business and the learner.
Analytics will improve the way learning plans are established within organizations – for those organizations willing to make the up-front investment in putting them together.
Companies like Amazon, Blockbuster, and others have created algorithms to help identify books and movies you might like based on what you’ve gotten in the past. At DevLearn last fall, Pattern Hunter talked about a company that was doing the same thing with informal learning bites, allowing employees to rate them and the stuff people like will float to the top. Of course there is a danger in this – as I discussed in this post, and as Jay Cross says in the video referenced above, “Good entertainment is not always good learning.”
A lot of the responses, like this one from Dave Wilkins over at the Social Learning Blog, suggest that companies that still want to use “expert developed” training are laggards who don’t get it. He also suggests that top-down talent management is for those who don’t mind being left behind. While I see what he’s saying, I think he and many others overestimate the tolerance large organizations will have for the chaos created by allowing individuals to chart their own course.
But, as Jim Kirkpatrick said at last Friday’s CIASTD meeting (which I’ll blog about soon), today’s business environment is like wet cement – easy to make a lasting mark. (Of course, he didn’t mention that wet cement can also be called, well, quicksand. But we all had that part figured out already.)
March 22nd, 2009 at 2:07 pm
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