The Question of the month at Learning Circuits is “How do we need to change in what we do in order to address learning/performance needs that are on-demand?”

Learning has always been on-demand. Except that the turnaround time for developing a learning solution is shrinking by the second. In the on-demand scenario, in the time it takes for us as learning practitioners to plan and design our learning solutions, learners have already charted their own learning paths by explorations through company intranets, tapping communities of practice, online searches, going through the company’s Wiki or engaging with SMEs. So how do we meet learner’s needs for on-demand learning more swiftly and provide opportunities for immediate access and self-directed learning?

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This month’s Big Question in Learning Circuits is, “What questions are you no longer asking? What are your new questions?”

I have been in the field of Human Performance Improvement for the last 25 years and in e-learning for the last 10. I have restricted my write-up only to e-learning custom courseware development, which is our core business at CommLab India.

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This month’s big question in Learning Circuits “Effective voice-over in eLearning?” Let’s see how we can utilize voice-over to make eLearning courses more effective.

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Imagine your life without email, mobile phone, laptop, cable TV… difficult, isn’t it? OK, we are quite adept at using these. What about Face Book? Do you twitter? What about an iPad?

Let’s look back, for a change. Do you remember predecessor versions of these gadgets and tools today? Hardly. Why? Because to paraphrase Alvin Toffler in Future Shock, technology feeds on itself. Technology makes more technology possible.

That means the new technology spawns new tools that make the old tools obsolete. The good news is that at any given point of time, there are only a handful of tech tools to adopt and master. Some are so good that they remain impervious to new predatory technology and they become a part of our daily life, always present like a faithful friend.

In any case, humans have enormous capacity to learn. It is only our own apprehensions that limit how much we learn.

The answer to the question is both “yes” and “no”. Yes, there is an ever-expanding repertoire of tech goodies. Yes, we have to learn them to stay current, if not competitive. No, it is not as difficult as it looks because with the advent of one new tech tools, some of the old ones disappear.

So, let’s work on our minds to break down apprehensions that we cannot keep pace. All these years we have done quite well and I am confident we will overcome and persevere in the days to come.

Thank you for reading my blog and for sharing your comments.

RK Prasad

CEO

My response is a bit off tangent. Please bear with me and read on…

A snack in Western culture (and in most other cultures) is a type of food not meant to be eaten as a main meal of the day, but to assuage a person’s hunger between meals, providing a brief supply of energy to the body. The term may also refer to a food item consumed between meals purely for the enjoyment of its taste. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snack_food)

Quoting from Dr. Patrick Nemechek’s blog, “For every 100 calories difference in your diet, your weight will go up or down approximately 10 pounds in the course of 1 year. If you think about it, that’s the rate at which many of us put on the weight in the course of a year. Eating 100-200 calories per day is equal in calories to about 1 snack per day!” it is clear that snacks have a very detrimental effect on one’s health by insidiously increasing body weight, resulting in many health maladies like hypertension, diabetics, cardiac disease.

If we start substituting snacks for proper meals, we don’t need the good doctor’s diagnosis of what will happen to our health and well-being. We can predict it ourselves. At best, a snack may be consumed for the enjoyment of its taste, that too infrequently and in the smallest of portions, definitely not the Dagwood-typeJ. We need well-balanced meals, a major portion comprising unappetizing things like raw vegetables to maintain good health. We should not lose sight of the fact that we eat to live and not to enjoy the taste of what we eat.

Continuing in the same line of thinking, if we think that we can substitute serious, focused study that involves hours of hard work to gain deep insights into a subject with “knowledge” gained from twittering or similar kinds of exchanges in social networking, we are fooling ourselves. It applies to e-learning too, a domain in which our company operates. In my last month’s blog, Learning Predictions – 2010, I mentioned the increasing demand for quick-fix learning solutions. Organizations are asking for more learning “pills” rather than instructionally sound comprehensive e-learning courses that have been subjected to adhere to robust learning design principles and processes. Well, Alvin Toffler predicted this craving for impermanence and shortcuts decades ago. It is now every much here, whether we like it or not.

So, what do we do, as learning professionals? Our professional values and ethics will guide us. We will have to advise our customers what is best for them in the long run, what is important but not urgent.

In the language of arithmetical ratios, a snack is to nutrition is as twittering is to learning.

Thank you for reading my blog and for sharing your comments.

RK Prasad
CEO