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On Digital 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 point. Sure, people will click and complete, but actual stickiness will be poor without this motivation layer.

Sure making it mandatory will give you the numbers, but little beyond that.

Any other mode of digital learning will fail. Why? Because you may buy content but people will do what they want to do, if at all they want.

Blended learning will work well as part of a motivated cohort, without that, it will come a cropper.

Therefore, the key to digital learning is not great content, nor the 'Netflix' of learning, not great names, but the answer to the question - 'Does the team/person think it is useful to them from a career/getting better at work lens'. The team has to think so, not others...

[This is a gist of my learning from digital learning. Hopefully, will write more about this.]

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