Feature
Even the most heavily regulated firms, such as those in the financial sector, recognise that to get the best learning outcomes for their business they have to loosen the training reins and facilitate more informal learning opportunities
opportunities, given their ubiquity elsewhere in our everyday lives. So, if reinforcement is such an important part of the learning experience to embed knowledge and affect behavioural or cultural change, how can we marry that with the more traditional and formal demands still placed on learners?
Balancing act A year ago, Unicorn started looking more closely at this dichotomy of ‘traditional’ versus ‘new’ e-learning. Out of these conversations the Unicorn Learning Ecosphere model was born to illustrate the challenges L&D professionals face in terms of identifying what is relevant, affordable and good value, in the context of the practical day-to-day demands on their time, budgets and resources. This model features the enterprise-focused ‘you must learn’ demands of an organisation or industry opposite the learner-focused ‘I want to learn’ needs.
The community is rightly excited by the potential of the collaborative learning, point-of- need performance support, serious games and even augmented reality opportunities offered on the learner-focused side. Yet the reality is the fundamental underlying needs for an enterprise to maintain and manage a degree of central control, tracking, reporting, data security and an audit trail (as per the enterprise-focused side) remain genuine and important, and are not going away soon. By helping organisations recognise what pieces of their learning jigsaw might be missing and how it is possible to make the many different elements on both sides work harmoniously together to enhance the learning outcomes without blowing the budget, the ecosphere can bring a sense of perspective to
a fuzzy landscape.
Peter continues: “Organisations will not sit wholly on one side of the ecosphere or the other. Even the most heavily regulated firms, such as those in the financial sector, recognise that to get the best learning outcomes for their business they have to loosen the training reins and facilitate more informal learning opportunities. “So, the question is: where do you draw the line? How much do you slacken the reins? Can you risk making informal learning too formal and turn people off? How much spaced reinforcement is required to overcome the learning curve? “The learner-focused world holds great potential to augment and enhance personalised learning experiences to the benefit of the enterprise, with the new mobile, informal, collaborative world of microlearning complementary to, not a substitute for, traditional proven, embedded learning approaches and processes.”
Shifting sands
Of course, convincing L&D practitioners of the potential of the sexy stuff on the learner- focused side is one thing, selling that to senior managers and those holding the purse strings higher up the decision-making chain can often be decidedly more tricky.
Start by asking if all content hosted on your
learning management system (LMS) really needs to be secure, locked down and require people to login? Isn’t a lower level of confidentiality sufficient for many of your learning materials? If you are already or considering using apps as reinforcement tools, do you really need to record personal details back to your LMS, or to monitor social media activity?
Author
Unicorn Training Award-winning LMS & e-learning solutions
unicorntraining.com
‘Evolution not revolution’ is probably the best term to describe your organisation’s toe dipping into the swirling waters of personalised learning. This is why early adopters are tending to focus on using apps for onboarding and pre-onboarding.
Meanwhile, if you do need more central management and control, safe and secure APIs can enable single sign-on user authentication, allowing mobile apps to communicate with your chosen LMS, with on and offline syncing. The xAPI standard enables learning experiences outside an LMS to be recorded, with data passed back in a standard format to an LMS.
However, with a bit of vision, the potential for the learner-focused side of the ecosphere is much greater than fulfilling a few basic HR tasks.
Peter concludes: “Because of the impact of mobile technology in all of our lives, informal learning is happening constantly, but with an entirely different mindset from formal traditional e-learning and assessment. “How do we, as L&D professionals, harness this to make corporate learning and career development a natural, automatic part of the everyday lives of our learners? The future is exciting, but it remains rooted in the realities of today.” n
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