One of the things discussed at the Google hangout last night was the idea of learner autonomy in relation to Sian’s critique of TEL.
This is a short post to capture my notes on the hangout:
– Learnification tends to reduce learning as a market transaction, a commodity.
– Learnification talks about the role of learners but ignores the role of teachers and tutors. These two cannot be separated, nor can the power dynamics inherent in this relationship be ignored.
As I mentioned in the session, corporate training seems to value learner independence over collaboration. This can be seen in the prevalence of corporate self-paced e-learning courses. The idea of lifelong learning is sometimes misconstrued to mean that learning is the sole responsibility of the employee. The corresponding role of the organization and of managers in particular is often not discussed.
This came up as we talked about nanopills, how one day, all we’ll need is a pill, an implant or a plug to transfer learning from one container to another. While all this sounds futuristic, similar ideas already happen in different forms. Returning to corporate training, I often see (and have also been involved) in projects related to training the trainers, the goal of which is to reach a large number of trainees. Training other trainers is supposed to solve this problem through a multiplier effect.
As I write this, I realize I used to think about how introducing elearning courses helps solves this problem by providing consistent learning experiences, directly from a single source. In this sense, technology helps improve efficiency and reduces cost. The tricky part is how to make it not just efficient, but also effective: how to make corporate elearning courses sensitive to learners’ contexts and needs.
Great notes, Ed!
Coming from a similar background as you (corporate leadership trainings) I agree that lifelong learning seems to often be put into the responsibility of the employee. We tend to forget that especially in today’s tough workin environment employees often simply do not have the time nor energy to focus on learning. It’s not so much that they wouldn’t want to, they just lack the resources. Employers need to be made aware and provide the resources (especially time). After all, such an investment is likely to pay off for them as well.
Also, with regards to training the trainers I have witnessed that many organisations simply teach the trainers just the materials but not HOW to engage learning. They expect the trainers to be good enough at teaching the materials, and evaluate them after the seminars by asking the students how they felt about that particular trainer. Oftentimes, that is where the evaluation ends, however. Whether transfer actually occured or the trainer was just particularly good at making the participants feel good for a while is often never really evaluated. As you say this is the really tricky part.