Corporate Digital Learning

Successes
There’s two types of digital learning I’ve been experiencing lately:
1. Corporate learning. It’s a passive, consumption oriented learning.

• Personal learning. MOOCs like coursera and iversity

Challenges
Corporate learning challenges include:

• Diversity - One size fits all challenge. I have hard time finding
  things that can help my day-to-day, or even relevant to me at all.

• Didactics and media. Long, boring and badly designed slide decks and
  quizzes. You are expected to read through a lot of information, that
  has questionable relevance.

• No effective social learning. There have been attempts but they
  
  failed.

MOOCs are definitely more effective. In my opinion the main challenge is self-motivation and self-discipline. Funnily enough, there’s almost too much choice of topics you’d want to study, so here’s another challenge - prioritisation.

Learnings
I think these 3 things are extremely important for a great learning initiative:

• Didactics and relevance. WHAT you teach needs to be relevant to the learner’s needs. HOW you teach needs to take into account specifics of the learner’s context (location, time available etc)
• Educational media. It needs to be relevant (suitable for a given context), effective (explain concepts in the most approachable and memorable way) and engaging (fun, enjoyable, something you’d want to share with others).
• Applicability to the workplace. Being able to transfer your knowledge into the work process, start applying it right away.

Recommendations
Embrace new technology - for example recently we tried a combination of a group chat in a messenger + mobile website to distribute the workshop summary and encourage communication between participants.

I think it’s a good example of reaching out to people using the most relevant (to them) channels and platforms. Everyone has a phone with a text messenger these days, so instead of sending official email with a ppt deck to multiple recipients, we invited people into a group chat, gave them learning summary in the form of a short, attractive mobile web-page and facilitated/encouraged discussion.