LEARNING AND DEVELOPMENT ANGELA BINGHAM
Making a start Angela Bingham, Executive Director People and Capability at the Open Polytechnic, shares her predictions for learning and training in the future, and looks at practical steps organisations can take to embrace online learning.
I
have built a career, as have others, on e-learning. We’ve watched the evolution of 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 and 4.0 and now we’re on the cusp of 5.0 (I Googled it, and no-one has claimed it yet!).
Brief history
1.0 was about e-learning from a website with compliance and completion protocols, communicating messages to get a broad and consistent reach. 2.0 brought to the world Flash and interactives, and the realisation that there was a learner at the other end. Podcasts and videos created a learner experience. 3.0 blended the social construct with the behavioural models. 4.0 focused on the technology (responsive design, third-wall narration and quirky edu-tainment), and the authoring tools replaced code. 4.0 went on to challenge the learning management system demanding a learning 22
HUMAN RESOURCES
SPRING 2020
platform, meaning learning record stores became more critical than a completion score. 5.0 is now up for grabs. My prediction is that there will be a demand for quick sound bites of learning that don’t take large amounts of time and money to build. This will require bringing together the designer and subject matter expert to enable asynchronous and synchronous learning. They’ll be in constant discussions and releasing learning in a similar way software is consumed, as a service (SaaS).
Wide-open spaces
If you haven’t produced online content before, it’s a big scary place. As a face-to-face facilitator or trainer, you are in control of the message, and you are probably adding the human element to your delivery. In our new worlds, this just isn’t possible. There are no more international experts flying in, and the days of trainers travelling town to town delivering training are over. So, come on over to the world of virtual learning. I promise you that you can add human elements, you can have control over your message, and you can develop learning that is palatable for learners. Here are four suggested actions to virtual learning, with questions to help guide your thinking.
Case study 1
Consider a small medical centre in a small city. Each month, the office manager delivers a health and safety briefing on information that is relevant and topical. The team looks forward to the briefings because it’s a break from the public; they can laugh, share and relax together. The team itself is a reflection of the community; most of the nurses are female and a good cross-section are Māori and Pasifika. Like many across the globe, the medical centre must continue throughout lockdown, including delivering training. Many of the support staff are working from home because the office space has reduced to share with the physio and dentist next door who had to find new premises. My recommendations to the office manager are as follows. 1. Start hosting coffee catch-ups using Google Hangouts, and ask the team to join virtually. Book in the next one, a week later, to try an online fun quiz. These two simple tasks will give you a good sense of who can use the technology and link to an external site from the Hangout. 2. Take the briefings that you received from external stakeholders and break them
