The Rise of the Personal Learning Environment

One of the interesting developments of web technology has been the increasing focus on individual, personal choices. Don’t like what’s on TV? Choose something for yourself to watch on YouTube. Nothing of interest in the newspaper? Use Google to find a blog that covers the issues you’re into. And so on.

Now this issue of personal choice isn’t limited to our personal tastes in media consumption. It applies to everything. Increasingly, it’s applying to learning and development – and that could have significant implications for workforce learning.

Much e-learning activity has been focused on the organisation side of things, perhaps at the expense of the actual learner. Courses are chosen for their applicability to corporate aims and objectives, rather than what staff actually want to learn, or feel is important to their jobs.

Of course, there are plenty of times when both corporate and personal learning needs align, and so everyone is happy.

However, the development of easy to use online tools for the recording and sharing of learning make the possibility of a genuinely personal learning environment a reality. This takes two forms.

Firstly, one of the implications of the rapid innovations online is that consumer technology is now way in advance of that available within organisations. Think of the ease of use and functionality of tools like Amazon, or Facebook.

Now consider the intranet at work. Depressing, isn’t it? But a lot of these tools can be – and almost certainly are being – used by people to record their own personal learning activity. Whether they are storing useful links in Delicious, or typing up information on a blog, or even marking interesting videos to view later in YouTube, people are taking charge of their own learning activity, and are identifying and using the right tools for them to do so effectively.

This also leads us onto the second point, away from technology and onto learning content. The sheer quantity of material now available on the internet is bewildering. What’s more remarkable is the sheer quality of it.

YouTube isn’t just full of videos of funny cats, or cute babies. It’s also home to an outstanding array of professional educational content, including videos from top universities and large corporations.

So it isn’t hard to see how learners, when motivated and enthused to take charge of their learning needs, could use this amazing resource of content in combination with easy to use and freely available technology to build their own ‘courses’ and then share them with the world. All they need is internet access, a decent search engine and the ability to use some of the tools metioned above to record it all.

When one considers the current financial position most public sector bodies find themselves in, it isn’t hard to see the attraction for organisations if staff are to take more active control of their learning and development needs.

Where does this leave Learning and Development professionals? What about companies providing learning services such as Learning Pool? Both have to be agile and flexible in their approach to meeting learners’ needs whilst also ensuring the aims of the organisation are met.

The role of those working in Learning and Development will change into more of a facilitation role. Their purpose will be to help provide the tools and platforms learners require within the organisation to be able to record and share their personal learning journeys. A key part of this facilitation will be helping to point learners in the right direction, perhaps through a training needs analysis to help them identify where the gaps in their knowledge lie.

Why not just let people use whatever free tools already exist? Well, there is a danger that by doing so, an organisation will find itself with an enormous knowledge leak. Part of the benefit of social learning technology for an organisation is that it ensure all staff with access will be able to tap into the knowledge and learning of everyone else. If staff are using tools chosen on an ad-hoc basis, there is no way for the organisation to know what learning is being recorded and no way of allowing others to have access.

This is where companies like Learning Pool will fit in. We need to ensure that our Dynamic Learning Environment will be able to adapt to the changing learning needs of learners and of our customer organisations. Right now, the DLE features a range of tools that could be used by learners as a personal learning environment. Blogs can be used to record learning activity, or to share useful links and resources. Wikis are great for people coming together to collaborate on a learning project. Tools like forums and web chats provide a superb environment for sharing information and finding quick answers to questions.

To make this work, though, organisations need to help out by making it explicit that staff can use these tools as part of their learning and development. This will involve a certain amount of trust – but those people working in Learning and Development can play a key role in setting policy and ensuring staff can be confident in using technology in this way.

We’ll also have to make our platform as open as possible to allow for the sharing of learning and content, much like the way the current Learning Pool catalogue and community work now. We will also help with the curation of content, finding the good stuff so that you don’t have to.

It would be interesting to hear if anyone in the Learning Pool community and beyond have started to go down this line, of providing access to the tools needed for a personal learning environment. Do share your thoughts in the comments!