CustomerCentrix

Winning Approaches to Corporate Learning on Internet Time
by Jay Cross, www.internettime.com
(only a portion of this article may be read here)

Who needs it?
Business people are so consumed with the day-to-day that they have little time to think about the future. They are "too busy chopping down trees to sharpen their ax." But in a scant three years, what we're calling eLearning will be a survival skill for corporations and individuals alike.

eLearning (circa 2002)
As Charles Handy points out, "Real learning is not what most of us grew up thinking it was." Information is not instruction, telling is not teaching, schools are dysfunctional. Learning isn't pouring knowledge into heads; it's igniting a fire. A true learning organization is foremost a doing organization. eLearning rests upon solid evidence, old and new, about how people learn. Hearts, heads, and hands learn differently - using different parts of the brain, so they require different sorts of schooling. The "soft stuff" is the hard stuff but it is also generates the greatest return.

By 2002, people will be breaking free of the obsolete, inefficient model of learning imprinted on them by the school system. Real learning starts with the learner, not the teacher. People learn by solving problems, by making mistakes and correcting them, by hearing stories, by engaging multiple senses, and by following the call of their innate curiosity. Learning need not take place in classrooms, classes need not last an hour, and the strongest motivation comes from within. Pages, documents, classes, and files are anachronisms, vestiges of a bygone era of factories and smokestacks. All learning is social. People learn what works by conversing with one another informally. eLearning gives them freedom, unstructured time, and encouragement to learn this way (rather than stuffing their calendars with repetitive exercises and tests.) Learning styles and multiple intelligences are a given. Howard Gardner says that differences in learning style "challenge an educational system that assumes that everyone can learn the same materials in the same way." While eLearning can't determine the right method to present this particular lesson to this individual, it does increase the odds of success by providing multiple paths for learning. Amazon's model is · customer focus· customer-centric· customer obsession eLearning treats learners as customers. eLearning's credo is learner-focus, learner-centric, and learner obsession (as long as the learners are hunting the elephant.)

Putting it together
Investment analysts appear to think that reaping the rewards of computer-assisted distance learning is a no-brainer. Convert your content to digital form, throw it up on the corporate intranet, and immediately save millions in travel, bricks and mortar, and instructor salaries while training all those IT workers everyone's needs. Alas, real life is not so simple. eLearning won't work well unless we maximize learner choice, encourage participation, link learning goals to personal values, set positive expectations, prepare learners, employ genuine and empathic coaches, put learners in charge of their own learning, explain what the competence is and how to acquire it, break goals into manageable steps, provide opportunities to practice, give frequent feedback on performance, rely on experiential methods, support with groups and mentors, model best practices, encourage the application of skills on the job, and develop an organizational culture that supports learning.[2] Put a CBT program on autopilot and it rapidly morphs into shelfware.

Next
Predicting the future is like teaching a pig to sing. You'll never do it, it's a frustrating experience, and it's not much fun for the pig either. Nonetheless, it's valuable to speculate on the possibilities. "To create the future, a company must first be capable of imagining it," Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad tell us in Competing for the Future. "Scenarios aim to stretch thinking about the future and widen the range of alternatives considered," writes Harvard's Michael Porter.