Serendipity and Learning

Everyone wants learning to go digital, but it just isn't sticky. What gives? Here is a graded summary of what works and what doesnt work as per my learning... Purely self motivated - I want to learn - works best. But it may or may not be relevant to organisations. While I might want to learn decoupage and might be supremely motivated, it may be irrelevant and even distracting to the organisation. If we could channel this and align the motivation of the employee to the organization needs - this is the place digital learning would work best. Thus, if your sales training is motivating enough for your sales team or if your analytics training is cool enough for your analytics team - it will work. You may want to add a social layer (sales cohort, analytics cohort), get the leader to lead or a gamification layer, but if you havent cracked the 'motivation' - the need - the social and gamification layer is a wasted effort. The leaders effort and inspiration wont help beyond a...

The connection between learning activities and actual learning is an interesting one especially in elearnings. In a lot of elearnings, you will find such embedded activities in the guise of engaging the learner. What you get is for learning by doing is mostly flash gimmickry, which may range from dragging a box to the right position to clicking the correct answer (usually a quiz) or even (my favorite-sarcasm alert) jeopardy. How much does this animation help? Today, in powerpoint presentations, animations are largely discredited - and to be used only sparingly - and that too when powerpoint presentations itself are being used. So, while building an elearning, how to make the learning faster, better, stickier? There are no easy answers (and we haven't found one yet). The conflicting demands are as follows, some of them: On the hand there is an impatient audience that wants everything quick and on the other hand there is a learning team that demands time to teach material ...

So, what about e-learnings? The trouble with e-learnings is that they are too linear. One dimensional. Given what we saw about live trainings, e-learnings rarely offer any of them. So, how to make e-learning more interesting. The answer lies partially in the name. The level of interaction e-learning offers is quite low - as compared to an online learning or a live virtual session where the interaction is much higher. So, e-learnings can be used to up a point - which is the 10% - substitute a part of the classroom  training with an e-learning. It does not provide the interaction that a classroom does - so try and see if that can be done. The other thing an e-learning can do is to become like games - and I am not saying gamify - the question is how to make it challenging. Can an e-learning become more non-linear - give a different outcome depending on how one interacts with it? So that each time you interact with it (like a game), your outcome is slightly different and y...