The Magnificent Seven

The viewable web

Our Internet experience has evolved dramatically in the past 10 years. The web has evolved from a read-only medium through to our current state, which is a rich video environment. In fact, most of the popular sites have a great deal of regularly accessed video content. This is changing the way in which our workers expect to receive content from their organizations. The YouTube experience is coming to work!

Content creation becomes democratized

Learning content will be created by users as fast as it can today by instructional designers. The content will be less controllable than today because there will be significantly more places where learning content will be published. As a result, content development will get closer to front line workers who know what is happening. The best strategy for corporate trainers will be to create templates and get out of the way: instructional design will be done by the community.

Instead of waiting for the instructional designers to take 13-18 weeks to build the average course, users will do it in hours or a few days. Plus, there will be a lot of social networks for learning. Learning content will be different than the current Wikipedia format in that, in the future, you will know who created the content.

Thin slices of content will be consumed

Instead of “complete courses”, content will get sliced into smaller, bite sized chunks that will be created rapidly. Popularity of reading-based courses will drop radically because today’s youth don’t want to read textbooks. New content will be in the form of stories!

Content will also be contextualized through social networking: the community will say what is relevant and critical to know. What if content gets out of sequence? Corporate learning needs to add stronger assessment to make up for the lack of content structure.

Content authoring tools will change

Learning content tools will help users create stories. Tools will be available that will help users to create thin-sliced content that will become peer and value rated. Today we have a scarcity of content, but that will change dramatically when the community creates the content. See what is happening right now with YouTube to preview this future.

Gaming and simulation emerges

Gaming and simulation are somewhat new in learning, but they are very powerful and will continue to gain momentum. The problem with gaming at work is that there are not enough opportunities to practice; however, simulations will give people experience often not available in real life. For example, where do you learn how to fire someone as a manager? What if there was a simulation course on how to fire someone, much like a game? Now, if you do it wrong, you might get sued, but with a simulation you can practice until you get it right.

Simulation helps you to “Fail Forward,” to make progress through mistakes without any real negative consequences: only learning opportunities. More tools will emerge that will make gaming and simulation widely available.

Self-service learning becomes the norm

Today, most learning comes by assignment from management. In the future, you will see much more learning coming from driven individuals who want to learn.

Finding content will be more important than creating courses

Since there will be an explosion of community developed courseware, the “corporate” training group will be charged with organizing a taxonomy to help users find learning content (category creation, adding metadata). Librarians may become more important than the instructional designers. A new job title will emerge: Social Network Manager, the coach of how to create courseware.

Elliott Masie is Chair of The Learning CONSORTIUM. He is the CEO of The MASIE Center and hosts Learning 2008 (Oct 26 to 29, Orlando, Florida).

www.masie.com