"Smashing up" e-learning methods with Twitter and multi-device learning

If a model’s broken, well, sometimes it’s best to break it up some more.

Nigel Paine, a thought leader in the fields of leadership, learning and technology and former head of people development at the BBC, reflects on "smashing up" old e-learning models to pull together chat rooms, Twitter, and uniquely interactive desktops for learners.

L&D professionals—whose responsibilities as facilitators and consulters are only increasing—must further act as experts and curators of the vast amount of MOOCs and open resources available to learners.

Additionally, globalization has transferred learning trends once unique to the U.S. to other countries, but there are still hot trends in America that have yet to really spark overseas.

Paine explains that social leadership development is white hot in the U.S. now, whereas multi-device learning is picking up in South America and Eastern Europe.

Finally, organizational development appears to be bouncing back—although the phrase itself is on its way out. Customer sensitivity, innovation, and operational excellence are the clay organizations will now use to build their foundations—ones hopefully robust enough to withstand a beating.

Check out the video interview with Nigel above or the text version of the Q&A below.

Let's start by talking about the international focus. A lot of the things we report on at CLN focus on corporate learning in a domestic, U.S.-based sense. So are there different trends you're seeing in corporate learning emerging on the international stage?

It's a very good question, and once upon a time I could have waxed lyrical about the massive differences between the U.S. and the rest of the world. Now, it's not so sharp. The differences are much closer together than they used to be.

There's one big U.S. trend that hasn't manifested itself around the world yet, and that's a real renewal of interest in leadership development, but not conventional leadership development as it used to be—face-to-face meetings or sending people off to some kind of business school.

There's much more emphasis on online, social networking, blogging kind of leadership development. That hasn't manifested itself in Europe, where the emphasis is still really on multi-device learning.

That's the biggest push at the moment in the rest of the world, and when I say the rest of the world, I mean Europe and South America, there's this huge emphasis because people want to take their learning with them.

They don't want to sit at their desk; they don't want to sit in their room. They just want to be able to take their learning from their desk onto the train, or wherever they want to. And that is a massive driver for most organizations, trying to meet that incredible pressure of demand.

Going off that, you're talking about of these different devices that people can use to access training and professional development. In many of your past positions, you were at the forefront of e-learning. Now, many more companies are implementing e-learning modules. So what are the steps they should take from there?

It's sort of taking up from e-learning, but there's something else going on, which is kind of more important, and that's basically smashing up the old e-learning model.

There's an old song by a group called Orange Juice where the chorus was "Smash it up and start again." And in some ways, that's what we're doing with e-learning.

The concept of the isolated learner, sitting in front of a machine, often just pressing the return key, absorbing great chunks of learning—that old model of learning—no one wants anymore.

That model is creating massive resistance now with people saying, 'I'm just not going to do it, unless you make me do it.' And that's not a great way to create learning.

What's much more interesting now is merging social with information, creating a desktop that's full of multiple access points—Dropbox, stuff based on web technologies, browser-based technologies, chat rooms, Twitter.

The change involves incorporating all of these different elements that most of us use in our day-to-day lives and trying to pour those together into the same environment. Some of the MOOCs are pointing the way forward.

I'm not one to say MOOCs have changed the world. In many ways, they haven't. They're going slightly back into old times where someone is sitting in front of a camera for 20-minute chunks, staring wildly and talking to you.

I was at the University of Pennsylvania last week and they've got a MOOC called Modern Poetry. If you look at it, it's based upon one of the propriety software systems. But it’s also an explosion of learning opportunities.

The actual live sessions are done in a room, so people can actually turn up physically if they happen to be in Philadelphia, and they can walk in the room and they can participate. They have teaching assistants who interview some of the people online. They have synchronous chat, asynchronous chat, documents, videos, huge amounts of different resources.

If you look at each week block, the resource list is almost a page. They're basically saying: What suits you? You choose. You want to weigh into this, you work out your own way.

This is one MOOC where there isn't a 96 percent drop out rate. Vast numbers—I think the majority of people—go right through the tenth module, which is an incredible tribute to that simple message: Give people multiple ways to learn and that's the way they want to learn.

And that's the true in that MOOC and it's true right across the corporate world, whether that's in the U.S. or whether it's in any other country.

There's a whole bunch of learning technologists and learning professionals trying to all work out how they can break out that conventional model of e-learning and make it more dynamic, more exciting, more attractive and, above all, more social. That’s a critical underlying principle that's going on all over the place in corporate learning.

It sounds like there's some really dramatic changes in the role of a learning and development professional. How has this shift in having all of these learning modules changed the role of the learning and development professional?

The answer is: completely. The learning and development professionals who are getting that, I think have got a really exciting career ahead of them because of all of these changes.

Those who don't get it and are still putting out catalogues of courses every six months, they're in trouble because they're getting a kind of push back, not only from the senior executives who are saying: Why are we wasting our money on this stuff, but from the users themselves, who are saying: Hey, there must be a better way.

I suppose there are three major changes in the role. The first is: It's a role that's based around facilitation rather than direction.

It's also a role that's based on consulting rather than directly doing. So you're enabling different parts of the organization to get their acts together. You're supporting different groups to get things organized.

You're encouraging the whole organization to contribute content and your'e acting more as a curator of content, rather than a developer of content. You're maybe acting as the smart guide to help people through the network of MOOCs, of open resources that are out there.

If you're a company, why create something that is freely available somewhere else. The key is to know that's the one to go for, rather than all of these others.

So that curatorial, expert, intermediate role is starting to emerge and it's really interesting and successful. You're kind of serving your group, you're helping them help themselves to learning, rather than doing it for them.

And that sense of responsibility is more and more important. You've got to get, in some ways, a whole organization behind learning, not just the learning team.

And when you've got that, you get something quite exciting, quite dynamic and really investing in change. If you just expect a small team to do it all for you, it's going to be very disappointing and it's always going to be slow.

Another one of your areas of focus is organizational development, which is often housed under corporate learning or at least HR. I know in the worldwide recession that spun out of control in '08, we saw companies that were lessening their focus on organizational development, especially from a monetary standpoint. Now as the world economy is starting to improve, are companies bouncing back with a renewed focus on organizational development?

OD is starting to morph into is stuff like innovation. We need to be more innovative. To change, we have to change the organization and individual’s behavior.

It's almost more acceptable to see something coming in as part of a way of making the organization better, rather than something that is about developing the organization.

I've noticed that the emphasis on those two words—organizational development—seem to be pushed down and a much bigger emphasis on innovation, customer sensitivity, better logistics, operational excellence, encouraging faster, more agile leaders to take a bigger role in helping leaders change the organization.

In no way are we moving away front the need to change. I just think we're slightly changing our vocabulary and changing our focus where we can get to a real dominant coalition of staff, rather than something isolated called OD.

As a theoretical model, it's now about getting skin in the game, getting human beings warm, active, passionate about making the organization more effective. So it is definitely a change in organization, but not perhaps used in that manner, in the same way we're used to.