This post continues my commentary to the Learning Insights 2012 Report produced by Kineo for e.learning age magazine. The ninth of ten 'insights' is that �Learner journeys need to become seamless'. Although you should really read what the report has to say on this topic, the gist is that employees want easy access to information that is relevant to their job responsibilities. I'm not convinced this is anything to do with 'learner journeys', more a continuation of the experiences they have come to expect in their everyday interactions with Google, YouTube, Wikipedia and the like.
'Easy access' means you log in once and once only as you move from site to site. It also means availability in usable formats on all platforms (in other words mobile devices as well as PCs). This is how we're used to accessing web sites (at least the most-commonly used big sites) outside work. I don't see any reason for learning professionals to look for new technologies to achieve all this, because the problems have, by and large, already been solved.
Some learning needs to be dealt with separately, because it needs its own, secure space with the ability to track learner progress and assessment scores. But, of courser, we already have those platforms and they continue to play a role. But I don't see why it shouldn't be possible for everything else (the web articles, videos, software demos, PDFs, decision aids, wikis, forums and the like) to be handled through whatever intranet software an organisation has - SharePoint or something similar. This means learning professionals working closely with IT, internal comms, knowledge management and other departments to devise an integrated solution.
To be honest, when you're working outside the domain of formal courses, I wouldn't use terms like 'learning' at all, and certainly not 'learner journeys'. Employees don't see online support materials as tools for learning, just business as usual. In many cases their goal is not learning, in the strict sense that new connections will be made in the brain, just access to information for the here and now. If they do learn something for the long term then that's a fortunate secondary result.
The report also makes the point that employees want information that is relevant to them This happens routinely outside work through a number of means:
- search engines
- social media - our friends and followers recommend and share useful stuff with us
- news feeds
- sites aimed specifically at people like us
- content that is tagged with keywords
In other words, all the stuff you would expect to find on a Web 2.0-enabled content management tool. Chances are you already have one, even if you're only using the Web 1.0 features.
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