Big Question: Workplace Learning in 10 Years?

This month's Big Question question is Workplace Learning in 10 years?

A very pertinent question to ask in such times, as we hear of more and more failure rates in formal and push learning. Most of our generation have learned this way, and some like me have always found such learning boring from the very beginning. My parents, would force me to learn the way the other 'good' kids learned, and I would resist and prefer to stay in my own dreamworld, that I found more fascinating than my study books. Fortunately for me, every year before the final exam my mom would hound me into preparing for the exams and I would come out scoring reasonably well. Now I can owe my 'decent' job to all the 'push' I got from my parents. But given a chance, I would not like to go back to studying the way I did in school, though I owe my 'formal' degrees to the 'formal' learning I received. But I did have some pretty good teachers. My Geography teacher had a unique style compared to the other teachers in my school. She would ask us to close our text books, and teach us sitting on the desk like she was telling us a story. She would bring us pictures of the Aurora Borialis, and various phenomena, pictures of the different kind of jungles, videos of the equatorial forests, etc. and make her lessons much more interesting. I still remember a lot of Geography owing to her style. I even remember the Agents of Denudation project in my 10th grade, on which I worked very hard to get information from various sources. The whole process was simply made more interesting for me as I had to find and discover the information myself, and this process helped me retain the information in the long term.

This is pretty much the reality for me. When I started work, I joined an elearning company. This is where I was exposed to elearning, and also where I learned about instructional design, but this was purely on the job and with no formal training. Again, the process of discovery got me more interested in the subject. Overtime, I learned more and more about instructional design from the Internet, on my job, connecting with my peers and learning from their experiences, forums, etc. So even though I have a degree in Science and have studied programming in college, I learned instructional designing out of sheer interest and am here writing my views on the big question of the month. Since we do not have formal degrees and PhD courses in the field of instructional designing in India yet, I'm sure all of my peers in India would have learned pretty much the same way. All this is enough proof of how 'informal' and 'pull' learning work well and you have a 'motivated' learner out there who learns better because of his interest. Such a trend is already prevalent in these times, and is obviously driving towards a form of learning that is slowly but certainly, moving away from traditional learning consisting of learning blocks of course, module, lesson structures.

The Road Ahead...
My predictions for the road ahead would be in the lines of what we all are talking about in the form of Ask and thou shall receive, seek and thou shall find. That's precisely what futuristic learning is going to be like irrespective of the time frame. In my view, the discriminating features of workplace learning for the times to come would be:

1. Learner-centric—All forms of learning will keep in mind the needs of the learner as the greatest priority.
2. Relevant—The focus will be to provide to the point and no-nonsense information. Long texty content will be passe.
3. Unlearn-relearn—It will be vital to unlearn several things of what worked in the past, and relearn them to understand their significance as of today. Thus, learners will have to be open-minded.
4. Reference hybrids—Lots of task-oriented reference material will be created and available to learners in the form of demos, quick-reference materials, advanced tool tips, task-focused documentation, wikis, blogs, etc. These materials will be the reusable entities available for creating presentation/training material on the fly.
5. Knowledge bases—Due to the extensive amount of learning materials that will be created the knowledge bases will grow in size. This will call for efficient knowledge management systems to organize and index the information, and also provide very efficient search capabilities. For example, I can imagine search spanning across wikis, forums, blogs all at once and giving the learner, the seeker of the information, exactly what he wants, irrespective of the source.
   
6. Idea management tools—The top management of organizations will reach out to employees via Idea Management tools, throw open questions about business problems that they need solutions to, and give employees at all levels an opportunity to share ideas that will help do business better, create new standards, coin best practices, design innovative solutions for using the products better and coming up with better ideas for creating innovative products. As a result employees will feel motivated and appreciated for their contribution and eventually be valuable to the organization.
   
7. Social/Professional networking—Learning will be greatly augmented depending on an individuals ability to reach out and network with people of the same community, trigger interesting discussions, and come to a consensus at the end.
8. Collaborative learning—The willingness to share what you have learned with the community, and being open to getting their suggestions, feedback and ideas will be critical. Wikis, forums, blogs will be the different medium, and they will be well integrated to drive collaborative learning. This will promote learning across hierarchies and learning will not be limited only to certain roles.
9. Brainstorming—Brainstorming on topics with peers and colleagues will supplement learning and aid the mental process of learning. Eventually, learners will achieve higher levels of cognition in their field of expertise and be able to graduate to levels of professional consultants .
10. Gadget independent—Learning will move towards achieving gadget/medium independence and formats will come about that will be compatible in all kinds of systems. Windows versus Mac users will not have the same compatibility issues.
11. Simple, usable and intuitive interfaces—All the new gadgets and networking tools will be designed for greater usability, simplicity and be intuitive to use. For example, we never had to learn how to use Google or Orkut. Just because the interfaces are intuitive people just 'learned' to use them and love them.
12. Scenario-based—Learning will be more focused on real life scenarios replicating the tasks that the learner will perform in their jobs. Simulations, decision-tree learning modules, learning games, etc. will be some examples of such learning.
    
13. Multi-faceted—It will become imperative to learn about the job you do from different perspectives. If you're a coder you will not only need learn the internal functionality of the product but also get a perspective of the customers point of view and the problems a customer faces while using the product. The requirement for knowledge will be more holistic and the learner will be in a position to add value to their job.
14. Learning outcomes—Organizations will get 'real' by encouraging their training initiatives based on the observed learning outcomes. They will measure the performance of learners and evaluate the training initiatives. There will certainly be a reality check to ensure that their money is getting invested in the right directions.
    

Having said all the above, one needs to realize that this will be a global trend but at all times there will be variations based on specifics:

• You may not be able to share top secret, confidential, proprietary information this way.
  
• We have to see how 'open' the times become with 'open' source, cloud computing etc.
• Your organization may have their own quirks about doing things the way the world is doing them.
• You may still have the typical digital immigrant species driving your organization, and it maybe difficult to bring about change all of a sudden as after all your audience does matter.
  

Knowing how these factors will influence learning trends maybe another discussion altogether.