In recent years, education has evolved to the point where learning can take place anywhere and at any time, usually beyond the walls of the traditional learning space. There are all sorts of possibilities thanks to new technologies. Although distance education has been in existence for more than a century, the various technological means by which it can now be conducted have advanced quickly. The last two decades alone have seen a rapid rise in popularity of the World Wide Web, smartphones, social media, social networks, augmented reality, wearable technologies and user generated content sites. New trends have emerged including blended learning, personalised learning environments (PLEs) Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), mobile learning and the flipped classroom. Although it could be argued that some of these are not new concepts, in combination they have become a phenomenon that has occupied and exercised the minds of educators worldwide.
What are the challenges of these new learning environments? What do new learning environments promise in terms of new learning, new pedagogy and new opportunities? What are the issues we need to address to make new learning environments a success? And what new skills and knowledge do educators need? These and other questions will be addressed at the final Twitter #EDENchat session of the year on Wednesday 16th December, when we will discuss issues, challenges and benefits of the new learning environments mentioned above. As ever, the session will be one hour in duration, and will start at 20.00 GMT (21.00 CET). Please join us, and come prepared to share your expertise, ask questions, challenge others and be challenged, and generally learn together as we head towards 2016. I hope to see you there!
NB: The next series of #EDENchat will start on 13 January, 2016. Further details will be posted about the schedule on this blog and also on the EDEN NAP website later.
Learning in many organisations is going through radical change. Some are ditching their training rooms in favour of digital delivery of content, and bosses that are forward thinking are investing in social learning, social media and mobile devices to support the learning of their employees. When I was invited to speak at a Human Resources and Corporate Learning conference in Cologne, Germany I did an interview about how organisations are remodelling their learning strategies around new and emerging technology. The interview, by Bettina Wallbrecht and Stefanie Hornung for Zukunft Personal is also available in a more extended version in German at this link. We started by discussing the rapid development of new technologies such as social media and mobile phones, and their implementation in work place learning.
What do these new developments mean for trainers and how do they adapt to these changes?
Some trainers find it hard to keep up because they think it is too fast and too complicated for them to understand. But any teacher or trainer can exploit the power and potential of these new technologies. Many of them are free and easy to use, and there is a definite pedagogy underpinning the use of these technologies. They just have to be aware that there are privacy and identity issues, issues of safety and content management. I urge every teacher and trainer to try these technologies out in a safe environment to see how they work and what they can do for their learners.
Can we apply this also to corporate learning? Do companies use these technologies, and how?
Oh yes. I can give you at least one example: Just recently I was speaking at a conference in London (Learning Technologies). 450 people attended representing many major companies, from for example, banks, manufacturing companies, the police, the military and government departments. Many of these 450 people were already doing something new with technology and wanted to hear all about the latest digital media and technologies. I think that it is a growing trend that corporate trainers are tapping into the power of these new media and technologies.
Do companies support the use of these technologies by their employees?
Well, corporate barriers are a problem - for instance when the management says you are not allowed to use Facebook because it's against company policy. I say to them, if you ban Facebook, you are losing one of the greatest opportunities to gain social credibility and social traction that you are going to have: the power of social media to connect people professionally as well as personally. The ability to tap into a professional network is one of the most valuable that an employee can have. So don't turn your backs on social media in the workplace. Rather than block it, facilitate it in a way that it becomes a benefit to both your employees and your company.
You once said that learning transcends the boundaries of the classroom. Do you see problems when professionals, for example specialists in a certain field, connect with others from different companies?
Companies obviously want to protect their secrets, they have to - to a certain extent - because if they don't, their rivals will come in and steal their ideas and capitalise on them. But there are ways of sharing information, there are also ways of marketing where messages become viral, enabling you to exploit the power and potential of social media, to sell your ideas to people. You see, all of my content is licensed under Creative Commons, which means that it can be shared and repurposed under the same licence with which I have licensed it. Sometimes people translate my blog posts into other languages, and this way I get a huge audience which I would otherwise not have had. This is what companies have to see: They may wish to protect some things, but they may also wish to open up their ideas to sharing, to gain more credibility, more effective marketing and more efficient promotion of their ideas and products.
In Germany, HR professionals have to face the demographic change. Are the new learning technologies just a new way to learn for digital natives or also for older people?
I don't believe that younger people are more adept in using technology just because they were born after 1980 and I don't want to categorise people this way. In my view, it is all about context rather than about age. What matters is what uses you see for the technology and then there is a willingness to learn how to use it. When you understand that these technologies are for everybody to use, demographics such as age don't really matter that much.
How far are all these changes we talked about international phenomena?
In one sense, there are huge differentials between how people use technology to learn to connect with each other, to communicate, to do commerce and business. If you go to Singapore, a small country where there is a population of people who are very much immersed in technologies, because it is one of the most wired - or wireless - countries in the world. You can't compare that to the Gambia in Western Africa, another very small nation where they don't even have a power (electrical) infrastructure for most of their country. But in other ways everybody is in the same boat, because everybody wants to learn, everyone wants to have a good life. The needs, aspirations and hopes are the same, but our opportunities are not the same. The future is unevenly distributed, which means tat the future is not here yet.
This is a brief video I did in 2012 at Learning Technologies that is related to theme of companies integrating new technologies into their corporate learning strategy (and how to get around some of the perceived barriers in organisations). Look out for my comments on positive deviance and the IPD - Innovation Prevention Department!
Blended. It used to be something you did in the kitchen. With a machine. Saved you having to mix ingredients with your hands or a utensil. Took away a lot of the effort. Hopefully, the end result was edible.
Now blended has come to mean something else, at least in the education domain. But what exactly do we mean when we talk about blended learning?
Once, blended learning was an easy concept to understand. It described the difference between traditional and distance education. You mixed your face to face learning experience with remote learning, usually mediated through some kind of technology. First it was paper based, and then there was a rapid evolution of technology, and now the distance side of blended learning comes in many shades and hues. The most common form of blended learning today is where you spend some time in the classroom, but the majority of your time studying online. Some people call it the flipped classroom. Whatever. It's blended. Local and remote. There you go.
But it's not a simple as that now. Blended learning is taking on a number of other connotations, because thanks to the advent of the digital device, there are now many more modes of learning. Consider for example the blend between mobile and tethered learning experiences. You can be mobile and take your learning beyond the classroom, but you can be away from the classroom and still be tethered to your technology. What are the issues here? There is plenty of debate and much research in this area, not least around student preferences. Some people prefer to learn on the move, while others are more comfortable with larger screens, and with all their resources physically around them.
Then there is the blend between paper based texts and e-readers. Which is best? Who prefers which? It's a blend we are taking an increasing interest in, throughout the education community. Both can support learning on the move, but then, learning has always taken place exactly where the learner goes.
This blog post was inspired by the above illustration by Amy Burvall
What about the blend between social learning and personal learning? Surely this is another important dimension to contemporary education? You can learn different things when you're in close proximity to others, especially if they are intent on reaching similar goals to you. And yet, personalised approaches to learning are also on the increase, and although social and personal learning are not mutually exclusive, they tend to be separated out because they afford different possibilities. My view is that social learning amplifies personal learning, and all can benefit from the knowledge of each individual in the community. Blended again.
There is also learning within the same time frame, and learning outside of the time frame. In education we call these modes synchronous and asynchronous, and each has its own benefits. For example, in asynchronous mode, you don't have to respond immediately to a prompt - you can take your time, reflect, go and do some research, and then come back to contribute to a forum or online discussion. Another kind of blended.
So blended learning is becoming an increasingly complex concept, with multiple possibilities and infinite options. Blended is about choice, and about maximising your learning in the modes you find most convenient. Learning in all its forms is a little like the blender in your kitchen. Put in the right ingredients, and use a little effort, and hopefully the result will turn out to be very useful.
Many of my public presentations have the prefix: Digital Learning Futures, because for me, the future of education and learning will be greatly influenced by digital technologies.
The presentation below was for the ELI 2015 (4th international conference on e-Learning and Distance Education) event in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where education and learning professionals from the entire gulf region and beyond came together to discuss the possibilities of future education scenarios.
The key argument of my presentation was that social learning, the use of mobile devices, and personal learning environments will all be vitally important components of any future learning ecology. I advised that technology is not a silver bullet, and cannot solve all the problems education is currently experiencing. Nor can it replace good pedagogy. However, once those concerns are settled I said - technology, especially the personalised, mobile devices student now own - can and often does make a huge difference in how people learn, and can neither dismissed nor omitted from any future pedagogical discourse.
