Learning Ecosystems

Six reasons why disruption is coming to learning departments — from feathercap.net, with thanks to Mr. Tim Seager for this resource

Excerpts:

1. Training materials and interactions will not just be pre-built courses but any structured or unstructured content available to the organization.
2. Curation of all learning, employee or any useful organizational content will become a whole lot easier.
3. The learning department won’t have to build it all themselves.
4. Learning bots and voice enabled learning.
5. Current workplace learning systems and LMSs will go through a big transition or they will lose relevancy.
6. Learning departments will go beyond onboarding, compliance training and leadership training and move to training everyone in the company on all job skills.

A successful example of this is Amazon.com. As a shopper on their site we have access to millions of  book and product SKUs. Amazon uses a combination of all three techniques to position the right book or product based on our behavior, peer experiences as well as having a semantic understanding of the product page we’re viewing. There’s no reason we can’t have the same experience on workplace learning systems where all viable learning content/ company content could be organized and disseminated to each learner for the right time and circumstance.

From DSC:
Several items of what Feathercap is saying in their solid posting remind me of a vision of a next generation learning platform:

• Contributing to — and tapping into — streams of content
• Lifelong learning and reinventing oneself
• Artificial intelligence, including Natural Language Processing (NLP) and the use of voice to drive systems/functionality
• Learning agents/bots
• 24×7 access
• Structured and unstructured learning
• Socially-based means of learning
• …and more