Create, Innovate & Evaluate in Higher Education

By Jane Hart - Learning in the Social Workplace

For many people the word “learning” is synonymous with studying, lessons, classes, etc – because that is how we have been conditioned to believe how “learning” happens. We think back to how we learned at school with a teacher, who took us through a topic step by step, in a logical way. It was the teacher who “joined the dots” for us, linking together all the aspects of the topic in a structured way to help us understand it. And that of course, is now what many think “online learning” is all about; although the teacher is (usually) not physically present any longer, the instructional designer has created the content in the same structured way, by joining the dots for us so that we can work through it in a logical way. Currently this is where corporate e-learning focuses its efforts - delivering online learning experiences for its people to acquire existing bodies of knowledge or skill – it’s all about learning the old. Of course this has an important part to play in what we need to learn to do our jobs, but nowadays it is not the only way we need to learn. We also need to learn the new.