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A learning meta-story

31 May 2017 by Clark Leave a Comment

Been thinking about how to generate meaningful learning in optimal (read: concise but effective) ways. And a lot of what I’ve been thinking about involves contextualized meaningful practice (no surprise there, eh?). So how might this play out? Thought I’d use a story to convey the experience I’m thinking of:

Pat logs on to the system, and notes that it’s time to take a crack at the next assignment. In it is a setup with a role for Pat to play. The story details a business situation: the organization, it’s current status, and a situation that’s occurred that requires an action. The details are exaggerated, so it’s a dire situation with a lot riding on the outcome. The instructions are phrased in the form of an email directly from the CEO, with pointers to some folks to talk to for assistance.

The necessity is for Pat to create a plan to address the need. In this case, it’s a marketing plan for a new product that has been the focus of most of the organization’s effort. With old products facing receding sales, this product has to succeed. The existing plan, legacy of a departed individual, is ‘old school’ and an up-to-date approach is needed. The indicated need is heavily aligned with this week’s topic of social-media marketing.

Pat starts work to create a document to send to the CEO. This includes making ‘calls’ (viewing videos of quick messages from the various roles involved including the product manager, the financial officer) to find out the parameters which are in play and to get expert knowledge. There are also some marketing materials available.

In previous assignments there were support tools about creating documents and about marketing plans, but this time such support isn’t available. Pat realizes that this being a more advanced cut through the topic, it’s time to start taking ownership of the process. The CEO has asked for an interim plan report before creating the entire marketing plan, and Pat uses previous materials and adapts them to create the plan.

Pat will get feedback from the CEO to incorporate in the plan before putting together the final submission. Ultimately, the success of the plan will be presented, and then feedback on the details of Pat’s submission. The document creation will be evaluated separately and in the context of previous documents required across this particular topic and previous ones, while the marketing plan itself will be evaluated in terms of it’s response to the context.

Several things to note here. The contextualized performance requirement isn’t unique, of course. This very much draws upon similar work seen in Roger Schank’s Story-Centered Curriculum and Goal-Based Scenarios. It differs in that subsequent assignments might use totally separate story settings. It’s similar also to work like Bransford, et al’s Anchored Instruction. The notion of embedding performance in context reflects research that shows abstract instruction doesn’t transfer as well. My own proposal (research, anyone?) is that the story should complete before the conceptual feedback is presented, or indeed that the story outcome includes the conceptual feedback in an intrinsic way.

The second important thing is that the document creation details are assessed separately, and tracked across other such assignments that might appear anywhere. The point is to develop meta-skills like digital document creation (and others such as presentations, working in groups, research, etc) as well as the domain skills.

I believe that we need learners to create complex work products that are challenging to auto-mark, because the outcomes are necessary. This means that you need people in the learning loop; totally asynchronous isn’t going to work to develop rich capabilities. I’m trying to figure out ways to approximate that with as little human intervention as possible because pragmatically we have more learning to achieve than we have resources to achieve that (at least until we get our priorities right ;).

Human Learning is Not About to Change Forever

26 April 2017 by Clark 1 Comment

In my inbox was an announcement about a new white paper with the intriguing title Human Learning is About to Change Forever. So naturally I gave up my personal details to download a copy. There are nine claims in the paper, from the obvious to the ridiculous. So I thought I’d have some fun.

First, let’s get clear. Our learning runs on our brain, our wetware. And that’s not changing in any fundamental way in the near future. As a famous article once had it: phenotypic plasticity triumphs over genotypic plasticity (in short, our human advantage has gained via our ability to adapt individually and learn from each other, not through species evolution). The latter takes a long time!

And as a starting premise, the “about to” bit implies these things are around the corner, so that’s going to be a bit of my critique. But nowhere near all of it. So here’s a digest of the nine claims and my comments:

Enhanced reality tools will transform the learning environment. Well, these tools will certainly augment the learning environment (pun intended :). There’s evidence that VR leads to better learning outcomes, and I have high hopes for AR, too. Though is that a really fundamental transition? We’ve had VR and virtual worlds for over a decade at least. And is VR a evolutionary or revolutionary change from simulations? Then they go on to talk about performance support. Is that transforming learning? I’m on record saying contextualized learning (e.g. AR) is the real opportunity to do something interesting, and I’ll buy it, but we’re a long way away. I’m all for AR and VR, but saying that it puts learning in the hands of the students is a design issue, not a technology issue.
People will learn collaboratively, no matter where they are. Um, yes, and…? They’re already doing this, and we’ve been social learners for as long as we’ve existed. The possibilities in virtual worlds to collaboratively create in 3D I still think is potentially cool, but even as the technology limitations come down, the cognitive limitations remain. I’m big on social learning, but mediating it through technology strikes me as just a natural step, not transformation.
AI will banish intellectual tedium. Everything is awesome. Now we’re getting a wee bit hypish. The fact that software can parse text and create questions is pretty impressive. And questions about semantic knowledge aren’t going to transform education. Whether the questions are developed by hand, or by machine, they aren’t likely on their own to lead to new abilities to do. And AI is not yet to the level (nor will it be soon) where it can take content and create compelling activities that will drive learners to apply knowledge and make it meaningful.
We will maximize our mental potential with wearables and neural implants. Ok, now we’re getting confused and a wee bit silly. Wearables are cool, and in cases where they can sense things about you and the world means they can start doing some very interesting AR. But transformative? This still seems like a push. And neural implants? I don’t like surgery, and messing with my nervous system when you still don’t really understand it? No thanks. There’s a lot more to it than managing to adjust firing to control limbs. The issue is again about the semantics: if we’re not getting meaning, it’s not really fundamental. And given that our conscious representations are scattered across our cortex in rich patterns, this just isn’t happening soon (nor do I want that much connection; I don’t trust them not to ‘muck about’).
Learning will be radically personalized. Don’t you just love the use of superlatives? This is in the realm of plausible, but as I mentioned before, it’s not worth it until we’re doing it on top of good design. Again, putting together wearables (read: context sensing) and personalization will lead to the ability to do transformative AR, but we’ll need a new design approach, more advanced sensors, and a lot more backend architecture and semantic work than we’re yet ready to apply.
Grades and brand-name schools won‘t matter for employment. Sure, that MIT degree is worthless! Ok, so there’s some movement this way. That will actually be a nice state of affairs. It’d be good if we started focusing on competencies, and build new brand names around real enablement. I’m not optimistic about the prospects, however. Look at how hard it is to change K12 education (the gap between what’s known and what’s practiced hasn’t significantly diminished in the past decades). Market forces may change it, but the brand names will adapt too, once it becomes an economic necessity.
Supplements will improve our mental performance. Drink this and you’ll fly! Yeah, or crash. There are ways I want to play with my brain chemistry, and ways I don’t. As an adult! I really don’t want us playing with children, risking potential long-term damage, until we have a solid basis. We’ve had chemicals support performance for a while (see military use), but we’re still in the infancy, and here I’m not sure our experiments with neurochemicals can surpass what evolution has given us, at least not without some pretty solid understanding. This seems like long-term research, not near-term plausibility.
Gene editing will give us better brains. It’s alive! Yes, Frankenstein’s monster comes to mind here. I do believe it’s possible that we’ll be able to outdo evolution eventually, but I reckon there’s still not everything known about the human genome or the human brain. This similarly strikes me as a valuable long term research area, but in the short term there are so many interesting gene interactions we don’t yet understand, I’d hate to risk the possible side-effects.
We won‘t have to learn: we‘ll upload and download knowledge. Yeah, it’ll be great! See my comments above on neural implants: this isn’t yet ready for primetime. More importantly, this is supremely dangerous. Do I trust what you say you’re making available for download? Certainly not the case now with many things, including advertisements. Think about downloading to your computer: not just spam ads, but viruses and malware. No thank you! Not that I think it’s close, but I’m not convinced we can ‘upgrade our operating system’ anyway. Given the way that our knowledge is distributed, the notion of changing it with anything less than practice seems implausible.

Overall, this is reads like more a sci-fi fan’s dreams than a realistic assessment of what we should be preparing for. No, human learning isn’t going to change forever. The ways we learn, e.g. the tools we learn with are changing, and we’re rediscovering how we really learn.

There are better guides available to what’s coming in the near term that we should prepare for. Again, we need to focus on good learning design, and leveraging technology in ways that align with how our brains work, not trying to meld the two. So, there’re my opinions, I welcome yours.

The change is here

1 March 2017 by Clark 2 Comments

For a number of years now (at least six), I’ve been beating the drum about the need for organizations to be prepared to address change. I’ve argued that things are happening faster, and that organizations are going to have to become more agile. Now we’re seeing the evidence that the change has arrived.

Two recent reports highlight the awareness. Gallup released a report on The State of the American Workplace recently that talks about the lack of engagement at work. Deloitte also released a report, Rewriting the rules in the digital age, that documents trends shifting the office environment. With different perspectives, they both overlap in discussing the importance of culture. It’s about creating an environment where people are empowered and enabled to contribute.

The Gallup report concludes with new behaviors for leaders and managers. The first point for leaders is to use data and focus on culture. This, to me, involves leveraging technology and creating an environment. L&D could be leading using performance data captured through the ExperienceAPI, and facilitating the culture shift in courses and developing coaching. Their prescription for managers is to move to be coaches (and again, L&D should be both developing the skills and facilitating the processes). And employees need to take ownership of their own development, which means L&D should focus on both meta-learning and ensuring resources (curation and creation) as well.

The second report is the more interesting one for me, because it’s about the trends and the ways to adapt. The top two trends are the Organization of the future (c.f. The Workplace of the Future :) and Careers and learning. The former is about redesigning organizations to become agile. The latter is about a redefinition of learning. They are a wee bit old-school, however, as while they do discuss innovation throughout, it isn’t a core focus and their definition of learning doesn’t include informal learning. It’s still a top-down model. But again, clear opportunities for L&D.

The key leverage points, to me, are learning and technology. And here I mean more self-directed and collaborative learning conducted not formally, but facilitated. Social learning really can’t be top-down! Important technologies are for communicating and collaborating, as well as tools to search and find resources.

And while the focus is on HR, including recruitment and leadership, I reckon that L&D should have a key place here, as indicated. The world’s changing, and L&D needs to adapt. It’s time to innovate L&D to support organizational innovation. Are you ready?

Learning Strategy Issues

7 December 2016 by Clark Leave a Comment

Online Educa logo The other thing that I was involved in at Online Educa in Berlin was a session on The Flexible Worker. Three of us presented, each addressing one particular topic. One presentation was on collaborating to produce an elearning course on sleeping better, with the presenter’s firm demonstrating expertise in elearning, while the other firm had the subject matter expertise on sleep health. A second presentation was on providing tools to trainers to devolve content development locally, addressing a problem with centrally-developed content. My presentation was on the gaps between what L&D does and how our brains work, and the implications. And, per our design, issues emerged.

The format was interesting: our presentations were roughly 10 minutes each. And we were using a tool (sli.do) to collect and rank questions. Then we had the audience work at their tables (in the round) to come up with their answers to the top questions, which we then collected and the panelists riffed on the outcomes. We got through three questions as a group, and I thought the outcomes were quite interesting. In short, as a rapporteur at the closing business session, I suggested that the topic ended up being about flexible work, not flexible working.

The top question that emerged had to do with how to support effective search (after I expounded on problem with the notion that it all had to be in the head). The sourced answers included crowd-sourcing the tags for finding objects, using a controlled vocabulary, and auto-analyzing the content to determine tags. I suggest a hybrid solution, in general. The interesting thing here was the audience picking up on the need to go beyond courses and start looking at resources.

The next question was how to move from a training to a performance culture. And it was another exciting development to hear them thinking this way. The solutions offered included coaching, supporting the importance of self-learning (meta-learning, yay!), and working both top-down and bottom-up. I also suggested that measuring was a likely catalyst that could begin to draw attention to outcomes (just as I reckon competencies are the lever in higher-ed).

The third question was about ensuring quality in a localized learning environment (e.g. user-generated content). The concern was that the knowledge of learning design wouldn’t necessarily be widespread. Suggestions included making the content editable for collaborative improvements, or using rankings, and scaffolding of improvement through the community. Here too, a focus on learning itself could assist.

What’s encouraging to me is that each of these questions was really about moving to a transformative viewpoint. The audience was clearly thinking ‘beyond the course’. They were focusing on supporting performers in learning, and resources, and leveraging the community, all activities consonant with the revolution.

An interesting aside came in the closing session. Several folks were mentioning a need for change, and an audience member asked “why?” He was a consultant, and his clients already seemed to be moving forward. I suggested he was seeing the best, and that many folks were not there (mentioning the Towards Maturity data as well as the problems I identified in the beginning of the Revolution book. And it’s a problem that too many people don’t yet see the missed opportunities and don’t feel the pain (and are frankly not looking).

So, there are opportunities to start taking small steps in the direction of taking on a bigger perspective and making the role of L&D more strategic. It first takes an awareness of the problems (my old line: “L&D isn’t doing near what it could and should, and what it is doing it is doing badly, other than that things are fine” :), and then a strategy to move forward. The strategy depends on where the organization is to begin with, but there are systematic principles to guide progress. That’s what I do, after all! It’s nice to see awareness growing. So, are you ready to start taking some positive steps?

Thoughts on Learning Design Strategy

29 November 2016 by Clark 4 Comments

At the DevLearn conference, I ran a Morning Buzz on Learning Design Strategy. I’m happy to say that the participants threw in lots of ideas, and I thought they were worth capturing. I started with a set of questions to address, so I’ll go through their comments in roughly that order (though we didn’t exactly follow this structure):

What is learning design strategy?

I had in mind the approach taken by an organization to their learning design. Attendees suggested it’s your goals and approach, ensuring you are delivering effectively. It’s also your review approach, and metrics. These are all elements that indeed contribute to strategy.

What gaps are we seeing in learning design strategy?

The participants offered up a suite of places that were problems, including aligning with organizational goals and access to support measuring impact, both of which are indeed strategic issues. They also raised problems with prioritization of the demands, the need to move beyond just courses, and the lack of learning design knowledge. All are real problems.

What do we need to be able to improve?

The audience offered up a number of suggestions. For one, there was a desire for strategies (probably more tactics) for doing beyond ‘the event’. Support for selling changes in the way of doing things was mentioned as well. The shift to self-learning was mentioned, leading to concern over how to support this. Attendees also mentioned a need of awareness in designing ‘backwards‘. Finally, a culture of learning was expressly discussed.

What are possible solutions?

The participants offered a suite of suggestions. One was adopting a learn-apply-perform model, which another termed a learn-practice-demo. Both were getting at the need for active practice and an ability to actually demonstrate performance. There was also a mention of looking to social networks and peer recommendations to lower the demand and facilitate self-learning. A culture shift was suggested, supported by the methods used to teach! A final solution was to move quickly to mentoring, which implicitly suggests including mentoring in the design.

Steps to take to move forward?

I also wanted to know what how they might move forward, and what they needed. Two clear suggestions emerged. One was for examples, and I reckon both of better learning designs, and approaches to implement those learning designs in organizations. The other was for tools. Here it was clear that they weren’t talking about tools to develop learning, but tools to support them doing good design, and following processes.

At the end I left with mixed feelings. It’s good to know that the problems I see are reflected in what the practitioners reports; we see the same problems It’s also sad that these problems exist. I do believe that the Serious eLearning Manifesto is one piece of support. And I’ve written on practices (e.g. with SMEs), but it’s clear that some practical scaffolding would help. I’ve worked with a few organizations, but I’m struggling to find ways to help more. (Maybe this is the topic of my next book?) So, what ideas do you have?

(I’m offering a webinar next week that will address these issues, if you’re serious about making changes.)

Measuring Culture Change

1 November 2016 by Clark Leave a Comment

Someone recently asked how you would go about measuring culture change, and I thought it’s an interesting question. I’ll think ‘out loud’ about what might be the possibilities. A learning culture is optimal for organizational innovation and agility, and it’s likely that not all elements are already in place. So it’s plausible that you’d want to change, and if you do, you’d like to know how it’s going.

I think there are two major categories of measures: direct and indirect. Direct measures are ones that are impacting the outcomes you’re looking for, and indirect ones are steps along the way. Say, for instance, one desirable outcome of a learning culture would be, well, learning! In this case, I mean the broad sense of learning: problems solved, new designs generated, research answering questions. And indirect would be activity likely to yield that outcome. It could be engagement, or social interaction, or… If we think of it in a Kirkpatrickian sense, we want to generate the indirect activity, and then measure the actual business impact.

What direct measures might there be? I can see time to solve customer problems or problems solved per time. And/or I might look at the rate of research questions answered. Or the rate of new product generation. Of course, if you were expecting other outcomes from your culture initiative, you’d naturally want aligned methods. You could just be concerned with employee engagement, but I’m somewhat inclined (and willing to be wrong) to think about what the outcome of increased engagement would be. It could also be retention or recruitment, if those are your goals.

These latter – engagement, recruitment, retention – are also possible indirect measures. They indicate that things are better. Another indirect but more targeted measure might be the amount of collaboration happening (e.g. the use of collaboration tools) or even activity in social networks. Those have been touted as the benefits of building community in social media, and those are worthwhile as well.

As a process, I think about what I might do before, during, and after any culture change initiative. I’d probably want a baseline to begin with, and then regular (if not continual) assessments as we go. I’d take small steps, perhaps in one unit to begin, and monitor the impact, tuning as I go along. Culture change is a journey, not an event, after all ;).

So ok, that’s off the top of my head, what say you?

Ambiguity Denial Syndrome?

23 June 2016 by Clark 2 Comments

I was talking with a colleague at an event one of the past weeks, and I noted down the concept of ambiguity denial syndrome. And I’m retrospectively making up what we were talking about, but it’s an interesting idea to me.

So one of the ways I start out a talk (including later today for a government agency) is to talk about chaos. I use a fractal, and talk about the properties a fractal has. You know, that it’s a mathematical formulation that paints an image from which patterns emerge, yet at any point you really don’t know where it’s going to go next.

I use this to explain how our old beliefs in an ability to plan, prepare, and execute were somewhat misguided. What we did was explain away the few times it didn’t work. But as things move faster, the fact that things are not quite as certain as we’d believe means we have to become more agile, because we can less tolerate the mistakes.

The point I’m making, that the world increasingly requires an ability to deal with ambiguity and unique situations. And our learning designs, and organization designs, and our cultures, need to recognize this. And yet, in so many ways, they don’t.

At the individual level, we’re not equipping folks with the right tools. We should be providing them with models to use to interpret and adapt to situations (explain and predict). Our learning designs should have them dealing with a wide variety and degrees of certainty in situations. And we should be testing and refining them, recognizing that learners aren’t as predictable as concrete or steel. Instead we see one-shot development of information dumps and knowledge tests, which aren’t going to help organizations.

At the interpersonal level, we should be facilitating people to engage productively, facilitating the development of viable processes for working and learning together. We know that the room is smarter than the smartest person in the room (if we manage the process right), and that we’ll get the best results when we empower people and support their success. We need them working out loud, communicating and collaborating, to get the best. Instead, we still see top-down hierarchies and solo work.

In short, we see people denying the increasing complexity that the world is showing us. Implicitly or explicitly, it’s clear that many folks believe that they can, and must, control things, instead of looking to adapt on the fly. We have new organizational models for this, and yet we’re not even seeing the exploration yet. I acknowledge that change is hard, and navigating it successfully is a challenge. But we have lots of guidance here too.

Too many processes I see reflect industrial age thinking, and we’re in an information age. We have greater capacity amongst our people, and greater challenges to address, with less tolerance for mistakes. We need to address, even embrace ambiguity, if we are to thrive. Because we can, and we should. It’s the only sensible way to move forward in this increasingly complex world. So, are you ready?

Learning in Context

4 May 2016 by Clark 1 Comment

In a recent guest post, I wrote about the importance of context in learning. And for a featured session at the upcoming FocusOn Learning event, I’ll be talking about performance support in context. But there was a recent question about how you’d do it in a particular environment, and that got me thinking about the the necessary requirements.

As context (ahem), there are already context-sensitive systems. I helped lead the design of one where a complex device was instrumented and consequently there were many indicators about the current status of the device. This trend is increasing. And there are tools to build context-sensitive helps systems around enterprise software, whether purchased or home-grown. And there are also context-sensitive systems that track your location on mobile and allow you to use that to trigger a variety of actions.

Now, to be clear, these are already in use for performance support, but how do we take advantage of them for learning. Moreover, can we go beyond ‘location’ specific learning? I think we can, if we rethink.

So first, we obviously can use those same systems to deliver specific learning. We can have a rich model of learning around a system, so a detailed competency map, and then with a rich profile of the learner we can know what they know and don’t, and then when they’re at a point where there’s a gap between their knowledge and the desired, we can trigger some additional information. It’s in context, at a ‘teachable moment’, so it doesn’t necessarily have to be assessed.

This would be on top of performance support, typically, as they’re still learning so we don’t want to risk a mistake. Or we could have a little chance to try it out and get it wrong that doesn’t actually get executed, and then give them feedback and the right answer to perform. We’d have to be clear, however, about why learning is needed in addition to the right answer: is this something that really needs to be learned?

I want to go a wee bit further, though; can we build it around what the learner is doing? How could we know? Besides increasingly complex sensor logic, we can use when they are. What’s on their calendar? If it’s tagged appropriately, we can know at least what they’re supposed to be doing. And we can develop not only specific system skills, but more general business skills: negotiation, running meetings, problem-solving/trouble-shooting, design, and more.

The point is that our learners are in contexts all the time. Rather than take them away to learn, can we develop learning that wraps around what they’re doing? Increasingly we can, and in richer and richer ways. We can tap into the situational motivation to accomplish the task in the moment, and the existing parameters, to make ordinary tasks into learning opportunities. And that more ubiquitous, continuous development is more naturally matched to how we learn.

Working wiser?

12 January 2016 by Clark Leave a Comment

Noodling: I’ve been thinking about Working Smarter, a topic I took up over four years ago. And while I still think there’s too little talk about it, I wondered also about pushing it further. I also talked in the past about an interest in wisdom, and what that would mean for learning. So what happens when they come together?

Working smarter, of course, means recognizing how we really think, work, and learn, and aligning our processes and tools accordingly. That includes recognizing that we do use external representations, and ensuring that the ones we want in the world are there, and we also support people being able to create their own. It means tapping into the power of people, and creating ways for them to get together and support one another through both communication and collaboration. And, of course, it means using Serious learning design.

But what, then, does working ‘wiser’ mean? I like Sternberg’s model of wisdom, as it’s actionable (other models are not quite specific enough). It talks about taking into account several levels of caring about others, several time scales, several levels of action, and all influenced by an awareness of values. So how do we work that into practices and tools?

Well, pragmatically, we can provide rubrics for evaluation of ideas that include considerations of others inside and outside your circles of your acquaintances, and in short- and long-term timeframes, and the impacts on existing states of affairs, ultimately focusing on the common good. So we can have job aids that provide guidance, or bake it into our templates. These, too, can be shown in collaboration tools, so the outputs will reflect these values. But there’s another approach.

But, at core, it’s really about what you value, and that becomes about culture. What values does the organization care about? Do employees know about the organization’s ultimate goal and role? Is it about short-term shareholder return, or some contribution to society? I’m reminded about the old statements about whether you’re about selling candles or providing light. And do employees know how what they do fits in?

It’s pretty clear that the values implicit in steps to make workplaces more effective are really about making workplaces more humane, that is: respecting our inherent nature. And movements like this, that provide real meaning, ongoing support, freedom of approach, and time for reflection, are to me about working not just smarter but also wiser.

We can work smarter with tools and practices, but I think we can work better, wiser, with an enlightened approach to who we are working with and how we work to deliver real value to not only customers but to society. And, moreover, I think that doing so would yield better organizational outcomes.

Ok, so have I gone off the edge of the hazy cosmic jive? I am a native Californian, after all, but I’m thinking that this makes real business sense. I think we can do this, and that the outputs will be better too, in all respects. No one says it’d be easy, but my suspicion is it’d be worthwhile.

2015 Reflections

31 December 2015 by Clark 3 Comments

It’s the end of the year, and given that I’m an advocate for the benefits of reflection, I suppose I better practice what I preach. So what am I thinking I learned as a consequence of this past year? Several things come to mind (and I reserve the right for more things to percolate out, but those will be my 2016 posts, right? :):

The Revolution is real: the evidence mounts that there is a need for change in L&D, and when those steps are taken, good things happen. The latest Towards Maturity report shows that the steps taken by their top-performing organizations are very much about aligning with business, focusing on performance, and more. Similarly, Chief Learning Officer‘s Learning Elite Survey similarly point out to making links across the organization and measuring outcomes. The data supports the principled observation.
The barriers are real: there is continuing resistance to the most obvious changes. 70:20:10, for instance, continues to get challenged on nonsensical issues like the exactness of the numbers!?!? The fact that a Learning Management System is not a strategy still doesn’t seem to have penetrated. And so we’re similarly seeing that other business units are taking on the needs for performance support, social media, and ongoing learning. Which is bad news for L&D, I reckon.
Learning design is rocket science: (or should be). The perpetration of so much bad elearning continues to be demonstrated at exhibition halls around the globe. It’s demonstrably true that tarted up information presentation and knowledge test isn’t going to lead to meaningful behavior change, but we still are thrusting people into positions without background and giving them tools that are oriented at content presentation. Somehow we need to do better. Still pushing the Serious eLearning Manifesto.
Mobile is well on it’s way: we’re seeing mobile becoming mainstream, and this is a good thing. While we still hear the drum beating to put courses on a phone, we’re also seeing that call being ignored. We’re instead seeing real needs being met, and new opportunities being explored. There’s still a ways to go, but here’s to a continuing awareness of good mobile design.
Gamification is still being confounded: people aren’t really making clear conceptual differences around games. We’re still seeing linear scenarios confounded with branching, we’re seeing gamification confounded with serious games, and more. Some of these are because the concepts are complex, and some because of vested interests.
Games seem to be reemerging: while the interest in games became mainstream circa 2010 or so, there hasn’t been a real sea change in their use. However, it’s quietly feeling like folks are beginning to get their minds around Immersive Learning Simulations, aka Serious Games. There’s still ways to go in really understanding the critical design elements, but the tools are getting better and making them more accessible in at least some formats.
Design is becoming a ‘thing’: all the hype around Design Thinking is leading to a greater concern about design, and this is a good thing. Unfortunately there will probably be some hype and clarity to be discerned, but at least the overall awareness raising is a good step.
Learning to learn seems to have emerged: years ago the late great Jay Cross and I and some colleagues put together the Meta-Learning Lab, and it was way too early (like so much I touch :p). However, his passing has raised the term again, and there’s much more resonance. I don’t think it’s necessarily a thing yet, but it’s far greater resonance than we had at the time.
Systems are coming: I’ve been arguing for the underpinnings, e.g. content systems. And I’m (finally) beginning to see more interest in that, and other components are advancing as well: data (e.g. the great work Ellen Wagner and team have been doing on Predictive Analytics), algorithms (all the new adaptive learning systems), etc. I’m keen to think what tags are necessary to support the ability to leverage open educational resources as part of such systems.
Greater inputs into learning: we’ve seen learning folks get interested in behavior change, habits, and more. I’m thinking we’re going to go further. Areas I’m interested in include myth and ritual, powerful shapers of culture and behavior. And we’re drawing on greater inputs into the processes as well (see 7, above). I hope this continues, as part of learning to learn is to look to related areas and models.

Obviously, these are things I care about. I’m fortunate to be able to work in a field that I enjoy and believe has real potential to contribute. And just fair warning, I’m working on a few areas in several ways. You’ll see more about learning design and the future of work sometime in the near future. And rather than generally agitate, I’m putting together two specific programs – one on (e)learning quality and one on L&D strategy – that are intended to be comprehensive approaches. Stay tuned.

That’s my short list, I’m sure more will emerge. In the meantime, I hope you had a great 2015, and that your 2016 is your best year yet.

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