What must digital, distance training learn from the classroom?

There is an academic and business movement that views the growth of elearning and mlearning as sounding the death-knell for the industrial-age classroom and its teaching model. This view is held both for education in schools and colleges as well as business training. I don’t know if we will see everyone transition to distance learning during this century, but I can see that distance learning is becoming increasingly popular right now. This wind of change that is gathering strength across business training is driven by the opportunities offered by technological development. Computer-based training in the workplace gave way to elearning across the Internet and elearning has now morphed to mlearning, as unprecedented telecommunications access from smartphones has engulfed and enabled the world. The single apprentice became the class of students which became the virtual learning environment (VLE).

The classroom is dead; long live…hmm?

We are in need of a term for what the (brave) new world of education and training has to offer. Massively Open Online Courses, or MOOCs, have appeared over the past couple of years, with private companies and traditional educational establishments offering courses to a mind-boggling number of students at the same time; MITx had a reported 120,000 students register and 10,000 work on an electronics course. Personal Learning Environments (PLE) are defined by their ability to let the student take charge of their curriculum. I would suggest that it won’t be long before someone coins the iMOOC (Independent Massively Open Online Courses) which will mix the two…the acronym even has a catchy ring to it. Students will be able to pick and choose the components of a number of MOOCs to create their own, personalised learning experience.

The problem is that we seem to be assuming that the classroom is just a place where you learn a subject. From my school days I recall learning (some) subject matter in a classroom, but I also think that I learnt rather more about social interaction, formulating opinions in a dynamic, interactive, real-time environment…a discussion with my mates, in old speak. In adult training sessions I have taken and delivered, the discussions and exercises were always the most interesting part of any course; though in the latter students often cited the lunches as the best thing about the course.

So what do we need to learn from the classroom as we move into uncharted educational waters?

• Learning works best in a social environment. There is a big push to emphasise the value of collaborative learning. Hardly new thinking. In 5^th century BC Greece, Plato, Aristotle and their students worked in the Academy where they could discuss their ideas in order to challenge and refine their thinking and arguments. When working through an exercise team working engenders problem-solving skills and the social interaction that is the bedrock of any society, community or team.
• Students learn best from expert mentors. While I can read and learn from a text or by watching a video, the most effective learning is mentored by an expert. This is particularly the case for the student who is starting to feel lost. A good teacher can see who is struggling and intervenes before the student loses motivation, providing alternative thinking or examples.
• Students learn by asking questions. Student questioning, both of the teacher and the peer group, is critical to the formulation of new ideas and clarifying understanding.
• Students develop stronger memories by doing. Classroom exercises, be that in a school chemistry class, a university research lab, or a business training session on fire safety, cement a student’s understanding of a topic covered.

What do these classroom benefits mean for your distance learning training design? The classroom is expensive, so just as books and newspapers will inevitably move to electronic formats (in a hundred years people will shake their heads when they talk about us killing trees to make books) training, and possibly (to a lesser extent, because of a number of other societal needs) statutory education, will move to distance learning based on technology. If you want your distance learning to be more effective you should:

• Include social communications in all distance learning. I do not believe that MOOCs have fully come to terms with this yet. 10,000 interacting on Twitter? This would become a storm of one-liners where there is lots of talking and no communication. For those who are looking at a more manageable number (say 100 staff in an organisation) split the class into groups. Ten people can, just about, hold a conversation or maintain a thread. And Twitter is not the only option. If you are staying open or free, you may try Google Hangouts or something like that. If you have your own training environment you need to see how it can encourage social interaction through discussion forums, synchronous chat, microblogs or video discussions.
• Include mentor interaction. Where possible—and if it isn’t possible you had better set both student and organisational expectations accordingly—you should have an expert mentor available. This may just be for time periods, but that subject and training expertise can prove the difference between you training being an educational resource and an effective training course. Both have educational validity, but only one is a course. As a mentor one needs to engage with individual students. If you treat the group as an entity, rather than a group of individuals with individual needs, then you will lose some students along the way.
• Provide as many options to question as possible. Good training is a two-way process. There is instruction that provides base-level information but there is also investigation and discussion. Discussion may be synchronous, in a VLE format, or it may be asynchronous, through a Twitteresque platform or a discussion forum, but there has to be student-teacher, teacher-student, and student-student interaction, just as there is in a classroom. As a trainer, you must respond to questions quickly. Set a time where you answer questions that come up. If they require more than a text response then organise a Skype or Hangout chat or tutorial. Where possible encourage a community of practice, where students can answer each other’s questions and gain status or recognition for contributing to the community. This approach was adopted by MITx.
• Provide practical experiences (if practical). The somewhat maligned (by me) Learning Pyramid puts doing as one of the best ways of learning, and it is right. You have to insert practical sessions in your course. This may be a computer simulation or a directed task or a Hands-on-Lab, but you need them. Clearly there are limitations. If your training is on first aid I would not recommend that you direct your students to inflict and then dress a wound. But you can create a simulation where they have to identify the steps in the process. This is a realistic scenario, it is easy to see whether the student take the correct options and it can even be turned into a game, by setting a timer on the actions they need to select or complete. Just like classroom activities, you must provide feedback. This may be computer-generated or assessed by a trainer. Unless they get worthwhile responses they will be less likely to engage with subsequent exercises.

There is a burgeoning industry based on taking the next step into technology-based distance learning. Bring it on; I can’t wait. But don’t forget the experiences of 10,000 years of learning or paint the industrial-age classroom as an anachronism whose features we must abandon on principle. It was just the deployment of our learning model based on the technologies available at the time. We are just looking on how to deploy the next instantiation.

How will the Internet of Things affect your training design?

The term Internet of Things (IoT) was coined by Kevin Ashton in 1999, according to Wikipedia. Some see it as a framework for a futuristic world where everything (including us) is connected across and through the Internet. I would argue that that futuristic world is here, with objects controlled and surfacing data over intercontinental distances. This is no longer science fiction, it is the stuff of situation comedies. While the IoT already affects many aspects of our lives, the world of business training has been slow to embrace its potential, unlike it siblings; the worlds of K-x level and higher education. Schools and universities are already utilising data that is fed onto the Internet from a  variety of non-human sources, as seen in the Technology Strategy Board project in schools and Kingston University medical research. Of course the business world has been leading the way on gathering information and using it to drive growth for some time, with approaches from the very basic loyalty card to more sophisticated in-store analytics. (My favourite application is the must have Wireless Key Locator).

But business training still lags behind. 

It is widely held that, the best training benefits from being scenario-based. I would imagine that a good number of instructional designers (me included) have spent many hours trying to develop believable and applicable training scenarios and the datasets that support exercises, to enhance our training materials. However, no matter how hard one tries there is always a feeling that…well…it’s not quite the real thing.

In our increasingly connected world we seem to have overlooked the potential of training materials that incorporate real-time information from the Internet. The IoT offers us information that has:

• Spatial existence (place)
• Temporal existence (time)
• Persistence (history)

These three features mean that the data that the IoT makes available can be anchored to a place and a time and that you can compare the current output to historical data. These are the three key elements of any data that we want to turn into information for a training course. (Clearly we need the data to be correct, but I will assume that…though I guess you could learn a lot from corrupt or inaccurate data).

This type of information package is usable across any training scenario, from the school children who study the requirements of plants to mining engineers who need to track and interpret geological activity. The logs from an IoT object—an under-watered plant or a mine-shaft—can transmit data across the Internet as a real-life, even real-time, training scenario or as a Performance Support source.

While this is clearly immensely useful in classroom and virtual or elearning environments, I would 

argue that it becomes even more intriguing when you look at mlearning. The student can become part of the online network that includes data, training content and learner…maybe even the instructor. We get a 360°, real-world, real-time environment where the student can benefit from actual business information, rather than a prepared dataset. I am not saying that prepared exercise materials don’t need to exist; without samples a student cannot gain the experience that will help them to interpret the real thing. The addition of IoT object input lets you take the next, natural step in training, especially where time-critical interpretation is a feature of expertise. You can take your students beyond the safety-netted world of a made up scenario to the more urgent one of real-time information.

Of course, the majority of real-time information is incredibly dull. Take your pulse, for example. You hope that it maintains a very boring rate of around 60 beats per minute. For medical students it would be unlikely that they would get real-time experience of all of the multitude of ECG outputs that may be the symptoms of an even wider range of health issues. However, if you have the ECG machine connected to your network as an IoT object you can alert students to an interesting cardiac output event when it happens. Clearly the students will not always be able to engage with the ongoing events, but the beauty of mlearning and IoT object logs is that you can maintain a history, so students who are not available in real-time can replay the event and experience it at a time that works for them. They can see what is happening; see the protocols for diagnosis and management unfold and even question or comment on what they are seeing, through social media.

Less dramatically, you may be working in finance or retail, where you could watch and interpret actual business activity, from the movement of stocks, through online exchange feeds, to the movement of stock, through RFID product tags. Have a think about how your students or staff could benefit from the simple introduction of real-time data from IoT objects in your training. 

One of the facets of business training that has, to some extent, hampered the development of IoT-driven scenarios is the structured nature of our tracking of Personal Development. The learning management system (LMS) is on our network rather than the Internet and we manage all training events through it. If your training is going to embrace the immediacy of IoT object data, you need greater flexibility in tracking training events. It may be that the Experience API and next generation LMSs may enable real IoT integration and propel business training to the next level.