Technology enabled Learning

Yesterday, a colleague asked me to make a short video on my thoughts on notable trends in the learning ecosystem. Knowing that he was more passionate than I on the influx of technology into the work-space, I decided to speak a bit on how technology is/will disrupt learning and development.

Learning is essentially getting a good grasp on one’s environment. Like most things in the environment, technology is the big disruptor. The influx of technology-enabled learning will throw up many new and exciting avenues. For a start, it will make learning:

Personalized – Learning is always different for different people as each individual experiences and grasps his/her environment uniquely. As a consequence, no one-size-fits-all approach will work here. Just as individual preferences of different forms of entertainment threw up the “entertainment on demand” industry, learning too is increasingly becoming “education on demand”, catering to individual choices and preferences. MOOCs and video-based lessons from Khan Academy or TED talks are great examples of how learning has become personalized.

Participative – Each individual wants to participate and shape his/her learning. They want to choose their sources of learning, actively selecting people who they want to learn from. People create their ‘personal learning networks’, which are often technology enabled in the era of the ubiquitous web. These personal networks act as an individual’s greatest source of the latest and most relevant information. The use of Yammer, WhatsApp groups etc, show how people choose and actively participate in groups they want to learn from and contribute to.

Power-packed – As learning has moved on from formal full-day classroom sessions to more informal and ‘just-in-time’ information gathered from trusted sources, people get comfortable consuming power-packed chunks of information rather than massive data downloads. The popularity of Twitter, small videos on Facebook amply demonstrate this. Moving forward, technology such as Google Glass or its adaptations will allow individuals to pull up exactly the piece of information that is most relevant at that moment.

People learn from everywhere. From other people, from networks and from each other. They learn all the time. They observe and process information on the move. They choose their devices and applications. Technology has enabled exciting times ahead. How organizations and leaders shape up to face this future, will be interesting to observe.

Watch my 1-min video here.

These are my personal views and do not represent the views of my employer.