The evolution of learning

The need to provide public and private sector employees with skills development and business education has become increasingly important in the globalising economy, says Richard Lilford, MD of LeadTrain.

Employees require opportunities to advance, to earn qualifications, and to engage in continuous learning on the job.

Classroom-based education, although proven and offering a certain amount of success, tends to be inflexible in its content, design and delivery, as well as in its experience by students, Lilford says.

Although classroom learning allows the students to interact in a face-to-face environment with teachers, lecturers and fellow students, there are often further requirements as well. Students often need to collaborate in the learning process to provide them with support and facilities to make the most of the learning experience, he states. These facilities include libraries, access to best practice and updated content, storage facilities for articles and reference material, managed syndicates and discussion forums as well as tracking of their ongoing progress.

Many companies and individuals who have found that the classroom model does not meet their needs have embraced distance education as a solution.

The main strengths of distance education are that it is convenient, flexible and inexpensive. In addition, distance education is usually self-paced, which grants the student the power to monitor and control his or her own educational process, Lilford says.

Distance learners are free to learn when and where they choose. However, because they're on their own, they're also less likely to feel motivated to make progress or to succeed, he adds.

Distance education lacked one of the key elements that made classroom-based education successful - opportunities for interaction and communication with the teacher and other students.

What was needed was a way to deliver education that combined the strengths of the classroom (personal, interactive, compulsory, collaborative) with those of distance education (self-paced, flexible, cost-effective). It needed a new way of delivering instruction that was interactive, instructionally engaging and flexible.

Web-based learning (WBL) or online learning is an innovative approach to education in which teaching and learning are transformed by Web-enabled technologies and means of communication, Lilford says.

It differentiates itself from other approaches to education delivery by its reliance on technologies to distribute course materials, access reference documents as well facilitate communication between teachers and students. It also enables students to engage in exercises and activities, engage in collaborative and group work and interact with sources on the Web. Other advantages are the ability to carry out surveys, assessments and evaluations, he adds.

The use of e-mail, discussion groups and chat rooms allow individuals engaged in WBL to communicate synchronously (at the same time) or asynchronously (independently of time constraints). Offering virtual classrooms as a means to communicate, interact and deploy learning is also made possible with the use of technology.

The advent of e-learning and its associated restraints has necessitated the offering of a "blended solution" where all the current learning modalities are used, including classroom-based learning, Lilford says.

Companies need to integrate education into their business strategy, and make education outcomes a key performance indicator of business success. Organisations need to set up a learning strategy driving the roll-out of e-learning, and have it integrated into the existing learning culture in order for it to work. The learners need to see this option as part of their work deliverables and aligned with their business goals, performance objectives and outcomes and therefore becomes the ultimate motivator in any training experience, he says. Learners are much more prone to attend and complete training that specifically relates to what they do on the job.

A crucial aspect of this process involves assessment. To guide a student through making the best decisions possible, the assessment needs to cover competencies (knowledge and skills) as well as behavioural competencies. The system needs to capture and manage work profile or job roles and align the required competencies to that role. From this, the organisation will be able to do skills audits and competency assessments to uncover potential learning gaps and link the learner to potential training initiatives or learning material to fill these gaps. The learners also need to see their results and be recognised for their achievements in an ongoing fashion, he says.

Traditional universities are not customised around a company's objectives and actual learning requirements. This has led to companies setting up internal universities that are usually associated to accredited universities, but ensure their curricula is more relevant to the immediate needs of the business. There is also a necessity for corporate employees to take ownership of their education programme to develop their career path.

A corporate university has one very distinct advantage over traditional universities when it comes to knowledge - its teaching environment is its working environment, Lilford says. One characteristic of the information age is how quickly knowledge becomes obsolete and needs to be replaced with updated more relevant information.

The most important step to offering an effective blended learning solution is implementing a learning management system (LMS) that supports the entire roll-out and learning experience. The LMS needs to be all-encompassing and include all types of mediums, as discussed above.

LeadTrain Exchange, a competency-based learning, performance, assessment and profile management system, offers public and private sector institutions the strategic functionality to develop employees in synchronisation with corporate, productivity, service and profit objectives, Lilford says. Dependable technology, scalability and implementation flexibility are all elements of the opportunity presented by the Learning Exchange, including the ability to exploit the upside of risk and to realise the potential of employees, he adds.

Organisations can customise and assemble different components of the platform to suit their unique needs. Similarly, reports and management functions can be put together in ways that are aligned with the strategic needs and operational processes of customers.

The Learning Exchange is a locally designed and produced solution, aligned with the NQF and optimised for the specific conditions encountered in South Africa and other developing nations. The LeadTrain Exchange currently has over 200 000 active individual profiles that are being managed on the hosted solution, Lilford says.

The system is offered as a hosted, Web-based or ASP system, but also allows clients to have the ability to host and manage the system on their own servers. LeadTrain constantly develops and supports their systems to embrace the evolutionary cycle of learning as described above, thereby ensuring their clients are always ahead of the game, Lilford concludes.