2015 07-16--state of-the_training_industry
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This presentation, prepared and delivered for PCI Webinars, begins with a brief summary of the ATD (Association for Talent Development) 2014 State of the Industry report, surveys a couple of related ATD documents, then focuses on 12 aspects of the state of the training-teaching-learning industry in summer 2015. Topics covered include Clark Quinn's "Revolutionize Learning & Development"; science of learning; learning to learn; adaptive learning technologies; the continuing evolution of MOOCs; flexible learning spaces; and others. Speaker notes accessible by clicking on the NOTES option below the slides.
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2015 07-16--state of-the_training_industry
- 1. Facilitated by Paul Signorelli, Writer/Trainer/Consultant Paul Signorelli & Associates paul@paulsignorelli.com Twitter: @paulsignorelli July 16, 2015 Teaching-Training-Learning: State of the Industry (Summer2015)
- 2. What This Means to Us
- 4. The Need forLearning Isn’t Going Away “More than 50 percent of the new jobs created in the economy did not exist just 25 years ago.” --ATD State of the Industry, 2014, p. 3
- 5. The Need forLearning Isn’t Going Away “More than 50 percent of the new jobs created in the economy did not exist just 25 years ago.” --ATD State of the Industry, 2014, p. 3
- 6. The Need forLearning Isn’t Going Away “More than 50 percent of the new jobs created in the economy did not exist just 25 years ago.” --ATD State of the Industry, 2014, p. 3 https://youtu.be/dGCJ46vyR9o
- 7. Discussion #1: What workplace changes in yourlibrary have led you to pursue a learning opportunity within the past 12 months?
- 8. Discussion #1: What workplace changes in yourlibrary have led you to pursue a learning opportunity within the past 12 months? Was the learning opportunity a formal onsite class/workshop, a formal online session/webinar, a self-directed search forinformation, an informal learning opportunity with a colleague, orsomething else?
- 10. ATDon Formal Content-delivery Methods
- 11. ATDon Cost of Training “During the past eight years the distribution of direct learning expenditures has remained steady.” --ATD State of the Industry, 2014, p. 17
- 12. ATDon Reuse of Learning Materials
- 13. ATDLearning Executive Confidence Index
- 15. Discussion #2: How does the data fromthe ATDreports compare to what you’re seeing in yourown workplaces?
- 16. Discussion #2: How does the data fromthe ATDreports compare to what you’re seeing in yourown workplaces? What preferences are yourlearners expressing in terms of onsite and online learning opportunities?
- 24. Evolution of Massive Open Online Courses
- 29. Conferences: Onsite & Online
- 30. Mentoring
- 31. Podcasts
- 32. Discussion #3: What aspect of ouroverview and discussion offers the most potential foryou to create a more responsive learning environment within yourorganization ?
- 33. Discussion #3: What aspect of ouroverview and discussion offers the most potential foryou to create a more responsive learning environment within yourorganization ? What is one step you will take within the next two weeks to improve yourworkplace learning environment?
- 34. A Visual Summary
- 35. A Visual Summary
- 36. A Visual Summary
- 37. A Visual Summary
- 38. A Visual Summary
- 40. Additional Resources FromBuilding Creative Bridges Blog: Articles about training-teaching-learning https://buildingcreativebridges.wordpress.com/ http://ccrc.tc.columbia.edu/media/k2/attachments/adaptability-to-online-learning.pdf
- 42. ForMore Information Paul Signorelli & Associates 1032 Irving St., #514 San Francisco, CA 94122 415.681.5224 paul@paulsignorelli.com http://paulsignorelli.com Twitter: @paulsignorelli, @TrainersLeaders http://buildingcreativebridges.wordpress.com
- 43. Credits & Acknowledgments Interactive Learner-centric Learning Session at the New Media Consortium 2015 Summer Conference: Photo by Paul Signorelli Jobs That Don’t Exist Today: From Michael Wesch, “A Vision of Students Today,” on YouTube at https://youtu.be/dGCJ46vyR9o Media Lab in Perry-Castañeda Library, University of Texas, Austin: Photo by Paul Signorelli Guerilla Storytime: Photo by Paul Signorelli Dollars on Clothesline: From TaxRebate/org.uk’s Flickr photostream at http://tinyurl.com/qzz8yyp Recycling: From Colleen Lane’s Flickr photostream at http://tinyurl.com/otykhlh Brain: From Allan Ajifo’s Flickr photostream at http://tinyurl.com/ncjewsy Question Marks: From BeatnikPhoto’s Flickr photostream at http://tinyurl.com/pcuqmjr Observing the Painter at Work (National Gallery, Washington, D.C.: Photo by Paul Signorelli Connected Learning Infographic: From the Connected Learning Research Network and Digital Media & Learning Research Hub at http://connectedlearning.tv/infographic LITA Members at 2014 ALA Midwinter Meeting: Photo by Paul Signorelli The cMOOC That Couldn’t Die: From Alan Levine’s CogDog Blog at http://cogdogblog.com/2015/05/28/the-cmooc-that-would-not-die/ Flexible Learning Spaces/University of North Texas Library: Photos by Paul Signorelli Barbara Ford Trying Google Glass at ALA Midwinter Conference, January 2014: Photo by Paul Signorelli Peeking Through Open Door: From the Intel Free Press Flickr photostream at http://tinyurl.com/neh36gz Question Marks: From Valerie Everett’s photostream at http://www.flickr.com/photos/valeriebb/3006348550/sizes/m/in/photostream/
Editor's Notes
- Let’s start today’s session with what I believe is a fairly accurate snapshot of the state of our training-teaching-learning industry. We’re looking at an interactive workshop a colleague and I facilitated at the New Media Consortium 2015 Summer Conference in the Washington, D.C. area, and I think it captures much of what we see in the best training-teaching-learning offerings these days. A few things worth noting: Some learners are engaged in obvious face-to-face discussion (upper right-hand corner) and others (in the foreground) are incorporating online tools into their onsite discussions—which built upon a bring-your-own-device approach to the session. If you take a look at the faces of the learners, you probably immediately notice that they are engaged in their learning process. If you glance around the room, you see that there is not a static shoulder-to-shoulder, everyone-facing-the-front-of-the-room set-up. That’s because learners, during the first couple of minutes, were encouraged to reset the room in ways that they believed would support their learning during this hour-long session. You might also notice that there is no obvious front-of-the-room; the two of us facilitating the session moved around the room to interact with learners and to encourage them to interact with each other to create a learner-centric learning space. And while the photograph doesn’t reveal this, there was a great deal of flexibility and improvisation built into the session: the learners in the foreground are capturing and sharing their thoughts on a shared document (within Google Docs) that we created on the spur of the moment so no one participant was stuck taking notes for everyone else; this left us with a document that could be used to continue the conversations and the learning far beyond the time we had for that one-time session.
- A few other things to consider: Most of us can easily be engaged in similar endeavors if we are not working within spaces with furniture that is locked in place. Most of us can incorporate a bring-your-own-device into our training-teaching-learning endeavors if we have adequate bandwidth/wifi support and are willing to let learners help each other with devices that are unfamiliar to us. Most of us can foster this level of engagement if we’re willing to let go a bit and not feel as if we have to control every moment of the time we have with our learners. With that as our background, we’ll look at a few wonderful resources that can help each of us develop our own up-to-date snapshots of our current learning environments and then circle back to brief discussions of various trends and developments that seem well worth noting—and incorporating into our training-teaching-learning efforts.
- The annual State of the Industry report prepared for the Association of Talent Development at the end of each year offers us a great starting point—and you can see the highlights from the most recent report in this graphic distributed by ATD. Let’s set the context for what the report offers us: It draws from data collected during 2013 and published at the end of 2014. As the title implies, it’s an annual publication, so offers us chances to make some comparisons over a period of several years. The companies providing the information included in the report are not always the same, so there are some variations from year to year in terms of responses, and the number of respondents changes from year to year. (You can see from the graphic that there were 340 participating organizations—in 2013—for the 2014 report. The report itself—on p. 6—shows participation rates as low as 221 in 2006 and as high as 475 in 2012.) The size of the companies providing the information is broken into three groups: those with less than 500 employees, those with between 500 and just under 10,000 employees, and those with 10,000 employees or more. The first two groups were almost identical in size—130 and 128.
- There’s a wonderful context-setting quote at the beginning of the report, as you can see here…
- It actually confirms a point that Michael Wesch and his students at Kansas State University made in a video they posted on YouTube in October 2007…
- Our workplace learning and performance—staff training—programs are as important as they have ever been, and the need for lifelong learning is only growing stronger because of the rapid rate of change in our workplaces and the technology we use. Images from “A Vision of Students Today,” available at https://youtu.be/dGCJ46vyR9o
- Let’s take a few minutes to see how much this parallels what you are currently experiencing: Please use the chat window to respond to this question. As always, I’ll read what is entered into the chat window so colleagues listening to the archived version of this program can draw upon the resources you identify.
- Let’s carry this one step further with a second question… …now, let’s see what the ATD report suggests.
- The ATD “State of the Industry” report examines what the report writers call “12 common content areas” and tells us that approximately one-third of training represented three key areas (quoting here from p. 26 of the 2014 report): Mandatory and compliance (e.g., safety and security) Managerial and supervisory Profession or industry specific Other content areas mentioned in the report include processes, procedures, and business practices; customer service; new employee orientation; executive development; interpersonal skills; and one of particular interest to us in libraries: Information technology and systems training
- The report also confirms what many of us see in our day-to-day work: Instructor-led classroom sessions remain highly popular and common compared to other delivery methods. This form of instruction represents over half (54%) of the formal learning hours available to those represented by the companies responding to ATD researchers. When we combine that with “instructor-led online” offerings (9.33%) and “instructor-led remote (satellite, video, etc.),” we see that instructor-led offerings onsite and online represent approximately two-thirds of what was delivered. Self-paced learning represented nearly 30% of what was offered, with “mobile technology,” “non-computer technology (DVD, audio CD, etc.),” and other means providing the remainder of what was documented. I think it’s well worth noting that, as we see here in a “Guerilla Storytime” learning session at the American Library Association 2015 Midwinter Conference, our ideas of what “instructor-led” means is evolving: Our roles are (thankfully) changing from instructor-at-the-front-of-the-room to “learning facilitator”—which means we not only collaborate with rather than lecture to learners, but often become part of the learning group so that everyone shares the role of trainer-teacher-learner in very engaging and memorable ways. [For more on Guerilla Storytime, please see Angie Manfredi’s story in American Libraries (January 2014): http://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/blogs/the-scoop/guerrilla-storytime/]
- For those of you looking for numbers, here are a few: “Direct Expenditures per Employee (FTE)” for formal-learning efforts on average were $1,207.73 Direct-learning expenditures were broken down to show that approximately two-thirds of those formal-learning costs represented internal costs, a little less than 30% were for external costs, and approximately 10% represented tuition reimbursements. Something to think about—and we’ll return to this later in our session—is that these types of formal-learning efforts (which represent much of what our staff training programs support) actually represent a very small part of the learning that occurs in our workplaces. Numerous reports suggest that informal learning is actually a much larger part of our learning landscape than we usually acknowledge.
- One interesting area of exploration in the ATD report is what is called the “reuse ratio”: “…the number of learning hours used compared to the number of learning hours available.” While we might initially assume that a higher reuse ratio suggests a more efficient training-teaching-learning operation, the writers of the report note that reuse ratios can vary for a variety of reasons, including (p. 23): The size of an organization – “…large organizations typically have higher reuse ratios than small organizations” The types of training needs an organization faces – “organizations with very specific training requirements that require niche offerings for employees typically have a lower reuse ratio than organizations that can offer training options to large cohorts of employees” What this suggests to us is that reuse ratios are well worth paying attention to, but we also need to think about context and learning needs rather than simply arriving at the mistaken conclusion that higher reuse ratios indicate better training-teaching-learning programs.
- If we want to gain the best possible snapshot of the state of the training-teaching-learning industry, we probably want to also know how learning executives feel about the state of the industry—something that ATD documents on a quarterly basis through its “Learning Executive Confidence Index” reports. The latest one available as I was preparing for our discussion draws from a survey of 243 respondents between December 12, 2014 and January 5, 2015. Looking at three of the four categories shown in this cover graphic from the report—meeting learning needs, impact on performance, and value of learning—we’re probably not too surprised to find a sense of optimism at this point—after all, if we don’t believe we are meeting learning needs, having a positive impact on performance, and providing something of value, who will? Overwhelming numbers of respondents anticipated “moderately better” or “substantially better” situations for the first half of 2015 in each of those three categories, and there actually were no respondents who believed the impact on performance would be “substantially worse” for that period. When those learning executives turned to the question of “availability of resources,” they pretty much said what many of us have been saying for years: they are less optimistic about the possibility of gaining increased funding for learning. Our ATD colleagues summarize this as follows: “…learning executives generally have a considerably more negative view of the availability of resources compared to the other key indicators. This suggests that they do not believe that their organizations are aligning the amount of resources they provide to learning functions with the demand for learning” (p. 14 of the Q4 2014 LXCI report)
- A final ATD resource worth examining is The Mobile Landscape 2015” white paper released in May 2015. Highlights are shown here on the cover… Things worth noting: Those preparing the report tell us that there will probably be 2 billion smartphone users and 1.4 billion tablet users worldwide by 2018, so mobile learning is not going to be stalled for any lack of equipment, but connectivity to those devices obviously is something we continue to explore and support. “A third of organizations represented in this survey had mobile learning programs” another third of the respondents “expressed plans” to develop mobile programs (p. 5). “…mobile learning, by nature, has to be short, concise, and very focused” (p. 6) Among the things I would suggest we need to be considering: Does mobile learning have to be formal? Is the current use of mobile devices for formal and informal learning a good sign that there is no longer any question about whether mobile learning is already a part of our learning landscape? (I clearly believe that we need to define mobile learning as any learning that involves the use of mobile devices in our learning process, so think m-learning is much more widespread than most of my colleagues acknowledge.)
- [after discussion:] Let’s look at several elements I’ve noticed in talking with colleagues, designing and facilitating learning opportunities, and absorbing as much of the current literature on training-teaching-learning that I can…
- …and let’s start with Clark Quinn, a colleague I very much admire. As I wrote in a piece posted on my blog earlier this year, Clark takes a playful yet devastating approach to describing the state of our industry. The subheadings to Chapter 3 (“Our Industry”) seem to be the result of an effective game of free-association—one that helps make the case for joining the revolution: “inadequate”; “event-ful” (in the negative sense that learning opportunities are treated as isolated events rather than part of a larger learning process that produces positive results for learners, their organizations, and the customers/clients/patrons they ultimately serve); “disengaging”; “antisocial” (in the sense that they underutilize the social media tools that are so important a part of our workplace efforts); “rigid”; “mismeasured” (in the sense that evaluations don’t measure meaningful results from training-teaching-learning efforts); and “no credibility,” among others. If that isn’t enough to make us grab our pitchforks and burning brooms so we can storm and burn the antiquated castles of training/L&D/P&D, perhaps we need to check to see if any of us still has a pulse. The book (and Quinn), of course, offer us far more than a pessimistic document that would leave us wanting to slit our training-teaching-learning wrists. He urges us to focus more on simple rather than all-inclusive approaches so we can produce concrete learning results that benefit learners, the organizations they represent, and the clients they ultimately serve. He reminds us that informal learning opportunities, the use of communities of learning, the use of existing resources rather than always seeking to design new workshops and courses, and recognition of the benefits of mobile learning as part of our learning landscape stand to produce far better results than we currently produce. And he ultimately leaves us with a short set of appendices to help us reflect on core competencies and practices that better position us to be part of a process of change within our workplace training-teaching-learning (and doing) efforts.
- It wasn’t all that long ago that the average trainer-teacher-learner was studying everything imaginable except the most obvious tool we have: the brain. Numerous mainstream books on “the brain in learning” have been published in the last decade; colleagues in a variety of learning organizations (including ATD) are putting more effort into learning how this magnificent tool works; and there’s no sign that our increasing interest in what research is revealing will decrease anytime soon. A quick search of your own library’s catalog should give you plenty of resources to explore on this magnificent topic.
- Engaging in numerous learning opportunities over the past several years, I’m struck by a basic issue that never seems to receive enough attention: learning how to learn in our dynamically changing learning landscape. The skills needed to absorb information in a lecture setting are obviously much different than the skills needed in a well-facilitated online learning settings—and as we increasingly pay attention to the challenges of defining and fostering digital literacy, we can easily see this is a challenge that is only going to continue to grow. We do have a variety of resources available to us, not the least of which is Di Xu and Shanna Smith Jaggars’ fabulous online report, Adaptability to Online Learning: Differences Across Types of Students and Academic Subject Areas, Community College Research Center, Teachers College, Columbia University, February 2013: http://ccrc.tc.columbia.edu/media/k2/attachments/adaptability-to-online-learning.pdf Xu and Jaggars, as I noted in a blog posting in March 2013, lead us to an interesting set of conclusions and recommendations that include “screening, scaffolding, early warning, and wholesale [course] improvement” (p. 25). Acknowledging the difficulties inherent within each of their four suggestions, they leave us with proposals to define online learning “as a privilege rather than a right” and delay learners’ entry into online learning “until they demonstrate that they are likely to adapt well to the online context”; to incorporate “the teaching of online learning skills into online courses…”; to build “early warning systems into online courses in order to identify and intervene with students who are having difficulty adapting”; and “focus on improving the quality of all online courses…to ensure that their learning outcomes are equal to those of face-to face courses” (pp. 25-26). The entire blog posting remains available at https://buildingcreativebridges.wordpress.com/2013/03/08/adaptability-to-online-education-replacing-failure-with-success/
- Walking through the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. recently, I was struck once again by the numerous ways we engage in and benefit from informal learning. As we can see in this photograph, there’s the painter herself learning by copying the work of a master, and there is the even more informal learning occurring as others watch her at work and learn through observation and a bit of conversation with the artist. Numerous reports document the fact that much of the learning that takes place in our workplaces involves informal learning at a variety of levels; in fact, colleagues maintain, it’s so pervasive that we even have trouble clearly defining what informal learning is and where (and how) it takes place. Patti Shank, reviewing an eLearning Guild report (Informal Learning Takes Off) in September 2014, listed several extremely common “informal learning activities [that occur] WITHOUT L&D intervention” cited in the report, including: Water cooler encounters (97%), conversations with colleagues/co-workers (94.7%), collaboration with colleagues (92.9%), trial and error (92.9%), and using the web (92%) As we absorb the implications of what the report offers and what Clark Quinn suggests in Revolutionizing Learning & Development, we’re left with an extremely important question: Why are we spending so much on formal learning efforts when informal learning plays such a large role in our workplace learning landscape? [Shank’s article is accessible at http://www.learningsolutionsmag.com/articles/1501/elearning-guild-research-informal-learning-with-and-without-ld]
- The concept of “adaptive learning technologies” received a big boost earlier this year when it was included on the long-term (four- to five-year) horizon for key ed-tech developments in the Horizon Report > 2015 Higher Education edition. As I noted in a blog posting published in February 2015, the report writers tell us that adaptive learning technologies (learning opportunities programmed to respond and adapt in an apparently personal way to an individual learner’s progress, performance, and unmet learning needs) reflect “a movement in academia [and in other learning environments] towards customizing learning experiences for each individual” in meaningful ways (p. 44): if a learner is clearly mastering a topic, the adaptive programming advances the learner to an appropriately more-challenging set of problems or to the next topic to be studied, while a struggling learner is moved to different content that offers additional supportive learning opportunities to plug that person’s learning gaps. The winning element in the best of these examples is that learning facilitators are encouraged to remain integrally involved in the design and use of this technology to the benefit of the learners they serve; those trainer-teacher-learners understand that adaptive learning “is best suited to take place in hybrid and online learning environments” (p. 44), Report co-authors Samantha Adams Becker, Alex Freeman, and Victoria Estrada note. [Link to Knewton’s Adaptive Learning video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o27SZXTCOHE&feature=youtu.be]
- Connected learning is a wonderful development that continues to receive plenty of attention in our expanding learning landscape—particularly for those of us who have participated in those highly interactive, learner-centric massive open online courses that are referred to as “connectivist MOOCs” or “cMOOCs.” The Connected Learning site we are seeing here defines connected learning as “a learning approach designed for the demands and opportunities of the digital age: powerful, relevant, and engaging.” Key elements [quoting from the Connected Learning website at http://connectedlearning.tv/what-is-connected-learning] include that learners are the focus, we build on the basics, we connect three critical spheres of learning (academics, a learner’s interests, and inspiring mentors and peers), we harness the advances and innovations of our connected age to serve learning, and making, creating, and producing are powerful paths to deeper learning and understanding. [Infographic, from the Connected Learning Research Network and Digital Media & Learning Research Hub, available at http://connectedlearning.tv/infographic]
- With the concept of communities of learning, we’re back to one of my favorite photographs, which shows members of the American Library Association LITA (Library and Information Technology Association) group in action at an ALA Midwinter Meeting. This combination of informal learning—LITA members exploring Google Glass and how it interacts with other mobile devices via a Google Hangout—and a community of learning engaged in an engaging impromptu extended moment of learning shows us how important a part of our learning landscape communities of learning have become.
- Massive open online courses (MOOCs) continue to offer a variety of models for us in training-teaching-learning. Those who have taken courses that are little more than onsite classroom lectures transferred into an online environment react with various levels of interest and boredom; those who have become engaged by well-facilitated connectivist MOOCs, where learners and learning facilitators are partners in flexible learning endeavors and environments, recognize that these offerings are a wonderful addition to our learning options. The Educational Technology & Media MOOC—#etmooc—that I so often praise and write about continues to be a great example of what these wonderful offerings provide. Alan Levine, who helped set up the original blog hub connecting so many of us in the #etmooc community, recently returned to #etmooc and documented how the learning community it fostered continues to thrive more than two years after the formal learning sessions designed and delivered by the course instructors ended. And our colleague Jeff Merrell, from Northwestern University, is among those continuing to push the boundaries of connectivist MOOCs by having MOOCs that serve his Northwestern University learners while also being open to participation from those of us not formally enrolled in the University. An interesting sidelight here: a very positive study published jointly by MIT and Harvard University in spring 2015 documents how MOOCs are engaging learners and notes that a large percentage (nearly 40%) of successful learners in MOOCs are themselves teachers—something well worth noting as those of us involved in training-teaching-learning seek additional ways to augment our lifelong learning efforts. [A summary of the report is available at http://newsoffice.mit.edu/2015/mit-harvard-study-moocs-0401; the full report is accessible at http://tinyurl.com/pgkgo2q]
- Flexible learning spaces—those spaces that we can easily rearrange to meet our learners’ needs—are justifiably attracting plenty of attention. The next few images show some of the furniture and use of space in the main library on the University of Texas campus in Denton. We should note that these photographs were taken during a renovation of the library earlier this year and may not represent the final arrangement of the furniture and overall spaces.
- Notice here the table in the foreground. It functions as a circular meeting space for library users and, as we’ll see in the next photograph, can be pulled apart to accommodate a different set-up for the learners.
- When we think expansively of our learning environment, we think about the formal and informal learning opportunities that are available at local, regional, and national onsite conferences—an idea that is clearly demonstrated in this photograph of former ALA President Barbara Ford learning about Google Glass by trying it at the ALA 2014 Midwinter Meeting. Online conferences are increasingly providing opportunities for those who might otherwise be left behind, and many of us are attempting to serve as conduits to connect the “left behind” crowd with colleagues who are onsite through a variety of means: live-tweeting highlights from conference keynote speeches and smaller breakout sessions; recording podcasts that can be used for learning purposes long after conferences conclude; calling attention to online access to presenters’ PowerPoint slides and other learning resources; and even connecting online and onsite colleagues through Google Hangouts and live streaming.
- Mentoring is both one of those long-term needs/approaches that is integral to what we do in workplace learning and performance and something that seems to be receiving renewed attention in a variety of contexts. I’ve seen (and been involved in supporting and promoting) dynamic mentoring programs that support learners and organizational needs, and have been pleasantly surprised this year to repeatedly hear about mentoring in an entirely different context: mentoring new members in a professional organization—the American Library Association—to help them more quickly become aware and take advantage of the professional opportunities association membership offers. A colleague at the ALA Annual Conference here in San Francisco late last month made an interesting observation: the sort of mentoring that Association members are increasingly requesting is a bit different from what we’ve seen in the past—it involves expediting involvement in an organization rather than focusing on long-term career goals or specific career challenges—opening doors to our protégés while also increasing the skills mentors themselves have and continue to develop. But, on the other hand, it does take us back to one of the basics of mentoring: providing access to opportunities that newcomers to any organization might otherwise struggle to identify and pursue. This, I suspect, is something we should be watching and pursuing within the context of the learning opportunities we foster formally and informally within our organizations.
- The final element to note here is the one I most recently came across: a perceived renaissance in podcasts. This one came up as one of the “Top Tech Trends” cited by a panelist at LITA’s “Top Tech Trends” panel during the ALA 2015 Annual Conference here in San Francisco, and the reaction in the room and through the Twitter feed indicates it resonated with quite a few people. Maurice Coleman’s biweekly T is for Training podcasts and Steve Thomas’s Circulating Ideas podcasts are just two of the many that are available to us as learning resources.
- We started with brief critical reviews of a few ATD—Association for Talent Development—reports on the state of our industry.
- We then took a quick look at what Clark Quinn sees as the good, the bad, and the ugly of our current learning landscape.
- We explored a variety of elements that are contributing to the dynamic nature of the state of our industry.
- And we return to the beginning with a reminder that engaging, flexible, learner-centric efforts are providing us with an encouraging number of options as we design and facilitate formal and informal learning opportunities that serve our organizations and those who rely on us for assistance.
- A few resources to explore… https://www.td.org/Publications/Research-Reports/2014/LXCI2014Q4