LPI Fellow Myles Runham writes:

By an accident of timing, the anniversary of starting my consulting business coincides with the tax year. Early April tends to inspire a little self reflection. Last year, these were the thoughts brought to mind.

This past year has been spent mostly on helping organisations consider how and if to go about digital learning initiatives. This has coloured my reflections.

So, to those observations:

  • Barriers to entry for good learning experiences are very low and seem to be falling
  • Good learning experiences are defined by the audience, not the provider
  • Many good learning experiences are provided for outside the organised provision of Learning
  • Attempts to control how people learn are almost always doomed
  • Technology should be used to help people learn, not manage (control) how they do so
  • Organisations like technology systems, users like tools
  • Resolving this tension is the value of product management for learning
  • Learning teams are so often preoccupied with the challenge of delivery at the expense of the relevance of what is delivered
  • That challenge of delivery is often the problem L&D services are given to solve for an organisation – it’s what learning teams are seen to be for
  • Many organisations are (very much) stuck on an equating performance change with the visible delivery of instruction
  • Organisations still equate ‘digital’, in a learning context, with distribution channels
  • Valuable problems are not solved by distribution alone – solving the ‘hybrid learning’ problem, for example, takes more than channel selection
  • The internet has given us all direct access to expertise – this is now a hygiene factor for any learning experience (those good learning experiences require more)
  • The Course as the unit of learning provision has been disrupted and needs to be unbundled with deliberation (I will return to this one)

About the author – Myles Runham:

Myles is an experienced senior leader in both learning services and digital business, having worked in around the internet for 20 years. He has a track record for strategy development and delivery in a variety of digital services, taking ideas from inception, through business case and into launch and operational management.

A deep understanding of digital business and product management is coupled with extensive practical knowledge of managing and leading learning teams across technology, content, product and design functions. This is evidenced in both strategic and practical advice on how to adopt user experience thinking, agile development and product development techniques for learning and development teams, bringing digital thinking to life for senior stakeholders and teams on the ground.

His experience combines more recent leadership roles in learning and learning technology with managerial roles across a variety of disciplines. This history includes roles as the Head of Digital for the BBC Academy, Managing Director of Ask.com Europe (AKA Ask Jeeves) and Head of Interactive Learning for BBC education services, across television, radio and online content and products.

Myles is an LPI consultant – click here to find out more

Post Views: 11