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 Here are some of the things that The Company of Thought has been thinking about recently – notably issues involved in meeting today’s education and training market needs, along with micro-learning.
Five key things about Education, Training – and Market Needs:
- Government and industry - on a global scale – continue to seriously question the relevance of current education and training offerings. Horror stories abound of high graduate unemployment and debt, along with these graduates’ lack of employability skills.
- Fifty years or so ago, a degree or an acquired vocational skill guaranteed its holder a job for life. This is no longer the case.
- There’s a distinct and pervasive disconnect between what the market wants and what’s being provided for it. Reasons for this disconnect include:
- Education and corporate training sectors adhere to an entrenched 600-year-old business and funding model that lacks the dynamism to change rapidly with the needs of industry.
- New technologies driving rapid and constant changes in new products and services, along with the lack of skillsets to support such changes.
- A lack of sufficient and timely data and metrics on the education and training needs of industry.
- The lack of an end-to-end infrastructure (education and training content provision to consumption with timely and responsive needs feedback loops) to facilitate the timely delivery and consumption of new skillsets.
- The high cost of education and training globally.
- What’s important to industry is a workforce that has the skills to help them be competitive in a global market. What’s important to the employees of such companies is that they have the skillsets required to acquire and keep a job.
- The message to the established education and training sector must be “adapt or die” or, more specifically, “provide timely, relevant and modular courses at a low cost”. The clock is ticking.
Five key things about Micro-Learning:
- The Bersin and Associates research bulletin, “Meet the Modern Learner: Engaging the Overwhelmed, Distracted, and Impatient Employee,” reports that today’s modern learners only have one percent of their time available each week to devote to professional development and learning. This translates to 4.8 minutes per day – assuming a 40-hour working week.
- According to TCoT’s research, corporate clients are moving to micro-learning for specific job-related tasks that can be completed just-in-time or as needed.
- When providing micro-learning materials, remember that –
- If micro-learning modules are part of a larger training program, they should be branded so that learners know that there are other modules available in the program.
- If you load micro-learning modules into an LMS, you should organize the content so that learners can find the information quickly and easily. Information should be tagged. Having the modules in the LMS also allows you to track which modules are relevant and popular among learners.
- Subject matter experts (SMEs) are key players in creating micro-learning materials. SMEs have expert knowledge to share. For rapid development situations or just-in-time training, SMEs can contribute “solid” content videos that can be shared with learners. Moreover, these SMEs can create the videos when they have the time or when a situation arises that would make a great video example - such as demonstrating a process or recalling a dangerous situation.
- There are many tools available for video creation. Instructional designers can provide – for these SMEs - a checklist of things to include and a “how to” guide. These days, we’re noticing more tools centered around enabling SMEs to create learning – see http://expertknowledge.com/ for an example of a “learning design system” which walks SMEs through this process.
Three TCoT predictions:
- Traditionalists – in the education and corporate learning sectors – won’t change. These providers will always do what they’ve always done – but, as a result, their market share of the “learning market” will fall substantially, especially as new cohorts of learners (many from the Asia-Pacific region) emerge. Traditionalists’ offerings will still appeal to the wealthy, would-be social climbers but most employers (and learners) will find alternative learning models that are more relevant to the needs of modern economic life.
- The results that these learning models deliver will be accessed/ delivered online. Furthermore, they will be delivered, increasingly, via micro-learning – probably by video/ interactive video via social media sources - and “certificated” by new, emerging learning providers who will address the issues of online proctoring, also known as remote invigilation (live, online identification and monitoring of a candidate taking a test).
- Our researches lead us to believe that the market in online proctoring will be worth some $10bn by 2026.
The Company of Thought publishes quarterly Reports that provide more detailed, up-to-the-minute market news and insights. These are published in March, June, September and December.
TCoT is a (high level) international think tank, comprising thought leaders from the e-learning and related industries. It:
- Has many years’ collective experience of the online learning technologies and related industries around the world
- Does continual worldwide research, including data mining and business intelligence
- Produces generic reports, guides and newsletters
- Produces reports that are specific to the needs of particular customers
- Uses its ‘special relevance algorithm’ to match LearnTech buyers with sellers
Contact
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or via http://companyofthought.com/
November 2016
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