Re-Visioning E-Learning: Breaking With Knowledge Silos in Training and Education

Changing Times and Emerging Paradigms Impacting Global Business

In this age of a pandemic called Covid19 and all of the mutating hybrids that are appearing, unprecedented changes have impacted all parts of our existence. As noted above, Charles Dickens in his introduction to his work: "A Tale of Two Cities" really sums it up well. But unlike the focus of Dickens on two cities, in business we are facing a tale of two approaches to training and development of employees as we strive to meet each challenge that this new reality is forcing upon the unprepared global business economy.

Which side of the revolution will we and our organization be on?

In the first approach we have a dated training approach that basically says that we will keep doing what we have always done which means the following:

• Classroom training sessions led by an industry expert where people sit in rows and quietly receive the wisdom imparted.
• HR departments continue to be expected to do and be all things when it comes to employees, yet without the necessary budgets to take on these new challenges when it comes to the learning and training of employees.
• Continued and growing detachment between how learning takes place within the business organization and the reality of learning that employees are pursuing and adapting in their everyday highly connected lives.
• The pursuit of the accumulation of content as a main goal despite what 21st century learning theory says which is supported by valid and authenticated evidence.
• An approach that is not proactive to advances in technology and learning but is reactive, using stop gap measures to weather the storm.

The second approach basically says that the industrial model of education from the 19th century has left us as course designers and instructors, constructs that are no longer viable in the 21st century. One of the hold overs from this model that is still with us today is the idea that the knowledge of disciplines need to be taught from separate, specific compartments complete with their own vocabularies and guiding principles and pedagogy for instruction.

With respect to training and development in business organizations, we have enshrined this idea in the way that we depend upon SME's and their relationship to instructional designers.

Whether we are CLO's, C.I.O's ID's, or SME's, one common truth that binds us together is that we are all products of our education and it is our education that in fact dictates how we proceed in performing our function within the organization. When we consider our backgrounds in education, we arrive at a disturbing fact. That is, we maintain this silo approach to the acquirement and application and training for our work for others and with others. It is for this very reason that schools were designed the way they were with students going along a hallway from class to class. Replace the hallway with a conveyor belt and each classroom with stations along that conveyor belt, you have the model of a factory floor where each product in the process that is moving along must be conformed to a set pattern. The products, being students, must conform and be adapted to that pattern. Notice that this is not an action that they are performing but it is an action being performed on them. Does this sound like your typical training room session? The questions we need to ask in regards to our business organization are:

" Is this the model that will sync with the demands of a globally connected economy that moves at the speed of light? Are we training our employees for a business world that no longer exists or even makes us competitive? "

Coming back to the upcoming students who will become our business leaders, will their education make our business organizations ineffective in the global economy? What about the idea of the need for effective agents of change and innovators? Think back to the way that "bright" students were educated.

So, what happens when you have a creative student who is either "gifted" or what is euphemistically referred to as "challenged"? Putting this back in terms of the factory environment, these disparities would be seen as "defects" because they do not fit the set pattern. In this case, a defective product is either off-ramped to "quality control" where the product is collected with other products for further experimentation or correction. In terms of the school, this off-ramping would be to what has been called "classes for the gifted" and "classes for the challenged". These students represent exceptions to the defined norm.

This all brings up some very important questions which will impact the future of our business organizations:

1. Is this model in sync with the needs of the 21st century, given the advances in technology and its application to conducting research and business in online global networks?
2. In the continuing use of this model, are we preparing students for the past or the future? 
3. What skillsets do we need to meet the challenges of finding solutions to very real world problems that pertain to the survival of our business organization?

When you consider that the goals of this model of education were two fold:

• to create a work force that that would conform to all required by areas devoted to mass production of goods and services. To discourage anything that did not fit the prescribed pattern, and
• to create life-long consumers of products and services so that the workers who produced the products also became the consumers of them,

You realize very quickly that in the 21st century, we are still living out these goals especially with the over the top consumerism. Consider what happens, as a case in point, when a new I-Phone comes out:

Sir Kenneth Robinson, a well known author and speaker on the state of education systems in the 21st century makes a strong case for the need to dispense with this model that supports a continuance of a knowledge silos as useful constructs for learning in the following presentation:

As Robinson suggests, a change in paradigm is needed.

" So, if we need a change in the paradigm of education, what are we changing to?"

In this age of the 21st century, we need students who will become effective agents of change who will be able to work together on a global scale in a totally online environment to address the rising global issues that need innovative and effective solutions. They need to have the following skillsets:

• Able to collaborate with others who may be resident in different cultures and world situations anywhere on Earth to solve global issues that impact multiple groups of nations. In business, we have been hit with the perfect storm which involves the great disruption to supply lines and our clients due to Covid 19 coupled with the growing confrontations between two of the largest economies, the United States and the People's Republic of China in what may be termed as a new "global trade cold war". This means that new trade re-alignments will be necessary in order for economies to survive and therefore, through the use of the web, the noted skillset is really a survival skill for business.
• Able to recognize that the new global issues require the pooling of the talents from various sources in a cross disciplinary approach.

Problems in the 21st century are not one dimensional in nature and therefore can not be adequately resolved by one specialist addressing the problem These new problems require a multi-disciplinary approach. For business this means re-defining the roles of people like SME's . This means that the type of leadership needed at the top is best described as "transformational".

We spend a great deal of time speaking about how to increase the performance of our employees in their area of expertise. One of the first steps is to recognize that adult learning has changed because the nature of life in the 21st century has changed compared to the time of the industrial revolution.

The interconnected relationship of such approach can be illustrated as in the diagram below.

Higher education institutions are starting to realize the importance of this needed paradigm change in that areas of study and collaboration are being created to advance students in ways that are in sync with the realities of the 21st century world. As you read this, you can't help ask these questions:

"Why is all this talk about education important to the outlook of the future health of my business organization? We have investors and stockholders to answer to when it comes to our ROI, why not just continue our training programs, making sure that we also fulfill compliance training, as we have always done?"

The answer to these questions is quite simple. The training approaches of the past decades are no longer adequate to meet the challenges required in upskilling employees within a world that uses advancing technology more and more to to refine their product and services, to compete against economies that have adapted these technologies and are on the leading edge in innovating in order to capitalize on new and rising markets. At the very eye of the storm is the idea that learning within the business organization is no longer a one and done thing. Learning must be life long in the life of the business organization and its employees. Learning must reflect the new reality which is that a majority of us look to the web to do a majority of our learning and so organizational learning must make use of the assets found in the world wide web which is more and more being employed for business purposes.

E-Learning and the New Paradigm

E-Learning is evolving to become a useful asset for meeting the demands that this new paradigm requires. However, it does not just mean a change to a whole new environment, it means a radical re-evaluation of our pedagogical methods that we have grown and entrenched in an education system built on the industrial model. The question that begs an answer is:

"Do our "best practices" still apply when looked at in the context of a completely new environment as represented in the online world?" 

If you talk to some business leaders about e-Learning and their organization, they will recount horror stories about how e-Learning was a disaster when they tried it and their employees hated it. At business meetings when the issue comes up, this when discussion leaders trot out a collection of anecdotes of how e-Learning should not be used in training or upskilling of employees.

The real question to ask is why is this the experience with e-Learning and part of the answer can be seen in the experiences of higher education institutions.

There are still higher education institutions who allow their instructors to simply copy their courses over to an e-Learning environment in an uncritical fashion and call it e-Learning. The obvious down side to this is that students who attend courses have never known a time when they were not connected to the web so they can recognize that which is true e-Learning that makes use of all the assets of the web and that which is a phony, lazy, attempt to be an e-learning experience.

Could this also be the problem when business tries to adapt e-Learning? I would say there are few business trainers who wouldn't confess that it is difficult and uncomfortable giving up training practices that they are so familiar with and in which they have invested so much time in refining. Simply using these same practices in an e-Learning environment is not really e-Learning as in doing so, you ignore the very assets that have been created on the web to make your e-Learning experiences and upskilling, effective.

Attendance statistics for courses tell an interesting story and support the student's awareness of course offerings which are not true e-Learning courses. It seems that in these courses, the only time that attendance is up is when tests need to be done. The same may said of in-house training and upskilling. How often have you heard your employees clap their hands and cheer when it is announced that they would all have to undergo compliance training sessions in the training room this week?

E-Learning, Knowledge Silos and Business Organizations

If there was ever an area in our society in need of a revolution in thinking it is in business organizations and the training regimens that they inflict on their employees. There is a very serious disconnect in learning done within business organizations compared to learning that employees engage in outside the hours of business. The idea of using silos of knowledge as a viable construct is alive and well within the learning culture of business organizations. Largely, this is driven by fear that any type of innovation or change will disrupt the flow of business.

So, the question that should be addressed by business is:

"Which is more important, the organizational needs or the learning needs of our employees which directly impact on innovation and performance?"

"It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. It was the age of wisdom; it was the age of foolishness"

Where does your business organization fit in these times and even more importantly, where do see the future holding for it?

Think about it.....