TRAINING & EDUCATION
Nowadays, learning must
address Generation Y, who have apps for everything
we’ve all seen what YouTube has done to a generation of grandstanders and that trend is here to stay. It all helps create a truly learner-
centric, customised environment where learners’ individual skills are accentuated and experience, not content, is king. Sir Ken Robinson articulates this with his inspiring view: “The future for education is not in standardising but in customising; not in promoting groupthink and
‘deindividualisation’ but in cultivating the real depth and dynamism of human abilities of every sort.”
Opportunity or threat? But with mobile learning providing the perfect environment for peer-to-peer interaction – a learning feature that’s vital to gaining perspective, learning support and compliance – the idea that you need a teacher present for everything is under challenge. That begs a paradigm-changing
question: How much does the learner need the training provider now? The internet means all the content in the world is out there – for free – and the digital generation is used to getting an answer through Google, to any question, in under a second. They also have their peers online at any given time to pass comment. It truly is the world classroom. So is the paradigm of education
changing to become more learner- centric than ever before? Will providers have to surrender some control of learning and accept that, provided the learning goal is made clear, learners can find their own way to the answer with the help of their learning community? Sugata Mitra, a leading pioneer in the
field of peer-driven learning, carried out trials in which children were provided with no teacher, but simply a computer and a clear learning goal. His experiments showed that children in unsupervised groups are capable of answering questions many years ahead of the material they’re learning in school. In fact, they seem to enjoy the absence of adult supervision, and they are very confident of finding the right answer. Food for thought indeed. Generation Y is upon us, and these
people communicate and socialise via a multitude of apps. With few exceptions, content is not the problem companies need to solve for learners: learners
The internet means all the content in the world is out there for free... It truly is the world classroom
can find content anywhere they want at the click of a button. Providers will have to let go of the content paradigm and think more about creating the right environment for learning to take place.
Proceed with caution With these perspectives in mind, it’s pretty straightforward isn’t it? As time progresses, more and more online learning will be used by the fitness industry to effect a transition into the digitally-driven age. Staff will regularly be seen learning via their mobile phones on the train, and students will catch up on their studies via iPad when they are sat in the park. Well, yes and no. Yes, putting the mobile learning
platform in place for training providers is relatively inexpensive. But making the shift in learning culture is much harder, and simply putting content online doesn’t make a good course: fundamental principles of learning must be applied to harness the technology to its greatest effect. Lucy Birch, head of training at The
Training Room, sees online and mobile learning as economical, convenient options for people with busy lives, but also sees the stumbling blocks and cautions against going with electronic trends if it doesn’t suit the target audience: “It’s not for everyone. There’s a cultural shift, and arguably we’re pushing people into mobile learning as it’s the hip and trendy way to learn – but I’m not sure we’re always getting the quality out of it that we need.”
52 Read Health Club Management online at
healthclubmanagement.co.uk/digital
The right recipe So what does all this mean for the health and wellness sector? The same as it does for every other sector. Many providers create eLearning that looks like yesteryear: lots of text interspersed with lots of headshot videos. What this doesn’t address, which Birch has rightly eluded to, is learning at distance and compliance: keeping eLearners on- course, engaged and journeying to completion takes much more than this. The experience needs to be much more engaging, leaning on social media to encourage peer-to-peer interaction. If we do it right, we will bring
individuals on-board who don’t require spoon-feeding in their education, but who thrive on being able to update and adapt, sharing continuously evolving information on the internet. This will steer us away from homogenisation and allow individuals to nurture individual strengths and creativity – be that as a sales, pool lifeguard or PT. The future of learning will be a thrilling place to be. ●
Pete Banbury is an experienced education professional with 18 years in the fitness and professional sport industries, spanning careers at Premier Training International, Leicester Tigers RFC, MyCognition and mLearning Community. His ambition lies in bringing the key features of face-to-face learning into a mobile environment to change the face of world learning. Email:
pete.banbury@
mlearningcommunity.com
September 2014 © Cybertrek 2014
PHOTO:
WWW.SHUTTERSTOCK.COM
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