Digital Learning: Future of Learning

?It has been approximately two years that COVID-19 has hit the world. Due to this pandemic, business and education continuity have come under several restrictions. Several challenges have surfaced all of a sudden. We have seen organisation's adapting to these restrictions and doing their best for business continuity and employee welfare. In the case of education, be it learning at school, colleges, or corporates, organisation's have quickly moved from classroom-based training to video-sharing platforms to conduct virtual classes. However, only video-session-based classes give unidirectional training to learners. To realize a subject thoroughly, we must explore it from different perspectives. Healthy discussions among peers help in bringing forward various concepts. Along with content delivery, a virtual classroom should enable continuous interaction through questions, debates, group assignments for problem-solving, polls, surveys, assessments, hands-on, experiential activities, etc.

A large percentage of the capacity building follows a traditional approach. Traditional training, however, is limited to physical classrooms. Organizations offer lengthy classroom-based training programs. During such training, learners come together for a few days and then, they return to their regular job routine. The ability to interact with each other and learn through sharing and exchanging ideas is within the duration of such physical classroom sessions. In such a brick-and-mortar learning setup, learners cannot engage sufficiently. To overcome these challenges, organisation's need to adopt a digital learning platform that can be accessed anytime, anywhere and enable the learners to become lifelong learners. The learning patterns of the learners have also changed. Learners expect personalized training. They also expect it to be experiential, multimodal, aspirational, and continuous. New rhythms indicate that learners embrace micro and nano blended techniques that facilitate a do-it-yourself approach. Millennials live in a multi-screen world and expect a highly responsive learning management system. They expect gamified learning and simulations to make learning fun and engaging.

To achieve all the objectives, organisation's require a learning platform for imparting knowledge anytime, anywhere, and through any device. It will replace lengthy training programs with personalized learning journeys containing nano learning modules. Employees will be able to learn at their own pace without hindering their actual job. Organizations will also be able to significantly reduce the need and duration for Physical training. The learning platform should provide capabilities on the below aspects:

·?????Structured Learning - The platform should provide the ability to create various types of courses that can be self-paced or regular. There should be an intuitive interface to define course structure, upload learning content, and schedule content. The platform should support various types of content – Presentations, Documents, PDFs, eLearning content (SCORM files), audio/ video files, embedded YouTube links, etc. The platform should support game-based activities to custom create game-based bite-sized granular learning nuggets, practice sessions, and assessment capsules. The platform should provide the capability to host live classes through third-party, to conduct assignments (including group assignments) and assessments (including proctored ones). Technology-related courses should support hands-on environments to familiarize students. To summarise, the learning platform should have multiple features to support various pedagogies.?

·?????Collaborative Learning – Peer learning and contextual learnings are necessary for learners to develop a holistic understanding of the topic. Such learnings require a community setting. The platform should include various enablers to facilitate collaboration among community members. Enablers like blogs, media, debates, surveys, polls, quizzes, etc., are a few of the variants that help in collaborative skill-building. The platform should enable timeline view along with collaboration for each enabler posted. Thus, they would have exponential learning opportunities and create an atmosphere of mutual respect and learning.

·?????Reports and Analytics – The platform should generate various course-related reports - learners enrolled, learning progress in the course, scores, grades, and feedback from the learners. There should be the capability to schedule reports as required.

·?????Mobility - Through the mobile app, the learners can access courses anytime, anywhere through any device, learning at their comfort.

Learning platform should provide the following benefits if implemented well:

·?????Contextual and multimodal learning (anytime, anywhere)

·?????Structured learning with learning standardisation

·?????Scale in training

·?????Reduction of training duration

·?????Enable collaboration with peers and experts

·?????No capex investment on infrastructure

·?????Reports (track learning progress of every learner etc.)

It is time to reimagine learning, from classroom to “phygital”, from theoretical to experiential, from activity-based to outcome-based. Organizations need to build an effective ecosystem around learning by bringing the right set of technology and tools, experts, content providers, etc. Hence, organisation's can ensure that learners have all possible channels to up-skill and apply the knowledge to achieve business outcomes.