In your opinion, why isn’t learning in vocational training changing?
 

Bob Little: The basics of learning and imparting learning haven’t changed – and never will change. People will always need to learn things, and they’ll always need other people to teach them, "engage" them, and motivate them to learn.

Moreover, some may argue that teaching strategies and learning design haven’t altered much since the days of Socrates – the philosopher, not the Brazilian footballer of the 1970s and ‘80s. Others can make a good case that there hasn’t been much advance in instructional design over the last thirty to fifty years - since the work of Gagné (in the 1960s) and Reigeluth (1970s/1990s).

What can new learning methods, new technical tools, and various individual learning styles achieve?

Bob Little: What is changing within the learning world is delivery technologies and the relative importance of the growing range of learning-delivery technologies in the learning- delivery mix. In addition, as more "millennials" (people born into the current technological age) enter the workplace, a greater proportion of learning and performance-support materials are likely to be delivered online, especially via mobile devices.

So, new learning-delivery methods and new technical tools can combine to meet the needs of a wide range of individuals. This includes their various learning styles and preferences, along with their increasing need for just-in-time, just-enough, and just-right-first-time learning, wherever they are and whenever they need this learning in today’s increasingly fast-paced commercial world.

In the private sector, as worldwide and local competition increases, greater demands will be placed on learning-delivery technologies to help workers and their employers maintain their competitive advantages.

In the public sector, these learning-delivery technologies will be called upon to help workers provide ever greater value for money to all stakeholders, including taxpayers as well as customers.

The academic world has the greatest potential problem with the introduction of new learning-delivery technologies – especially MOOCs at the moment – because it cannot (yet) see how to reconcile the greater availability of, and access to, learning materials with the needs to protect both its intellectual property and its income from this.

What influences do you think actually "inspire" and facilitate learning?

Bob Little: In the corporate sector, the key influence on learning should be business need, but this has always been a difficult thing to relate directly to "learning activities". Typically, this has kept learning-and-development (L&D) professionals out of key board-level posts and has tended to make them second-class citizens in their organisations.

There are ways in which L&D professionals can overcome this – for example, by understanding and manipulating corporate culture, as well as harnessing the power of uncertainty within the organisation – and become key influencers in their organisations.

If, however, the L&D professionals, the people who facilitate learning and “inspire” learners for a living, aren’t influencers in their organisation, they will never be able to inspire and facilitate the learners for whom they’re responsible.

Consequently, learners will (have to) look elsewhere for their inspiration and learning facilitation. In today’s "online age", this opens up the options of self-directed learning using online sources. While this can often (ultimately) be beneficial, there is as yet no objective way for learners to know whether the material they are accessing is bona fide, worthwhile, and of high quality. The only attraction and advantage this method of acquiring knowledge has is that it is easily accessible – and if this is going to be the only criterion for learning materials in today’s, and tomorrow’s, brave new learning world, there will soon be some major problems to be overcome.

So, this argues for a return, in some technologically enabled and facilitated form, to learners having access to "expert" tutors, coaches, or mentors. It also implies that these experts will have to observe the accepted rules of high-quality instructional design in order to impart the high-quality learning that learners may not crave but certainly need.

Do you have an idea or vision as to what "modern learning" will look like in twenty years?

Bob Little: Twenty years ago, eLearning was still known as "computer-based training". The genre was still in its infancy, but its exponents were fanatical about the need for it to meet high-quality instructional design criteria. Indeed, they were all the more fanatical about this because the learning was being delivered remotely and impersonally, with minimal opportunities for feedback between "instructor" and "learner".

These days, largely thanks to the advent of rapid authoring tools, instructional design has taken a back seat to the demands of subject-matter experts. Advances in delivery technology and greater access to the internet via mobile devices, allied to the availability of real-time online messaging, have made "information-based" learning, especially for regulatory and compliance purposes, available almost on demand. This sort of learning is blurring any boundaries there might have been with “performance-support” materials, but in any case it’s now firmly "online learning 2.0", offering many opportunities for interaction between "tutor" and learner.

In twenty years’ time, little is likely to have changed except in terms of the available technologies and devices via which to deliver learning. It would be nice for the learners if the technology made accepted subject-matter experts more accessible to any learner, anywhere in the world. This way, learners could get access to top-quality learning, which would  be reversal of the way that, today, only privileged learners can study with the world’s best, for example, at the world’s top universities. However, human beings being human, I suspect that, as technology makes these experts more accessible, other factors – such as money or time availability – will come into play to maintain some form of established intellectual elite.

And if you believe that the future is already with us, but it’s just that we can’t see it yet, then the way to foresee twenty years ahead is to begin by looking ahead only a year or so and progressing from there. In that case, you could do worse than taking a look at a report produced a few months ago by the UK-based market analysts, Learning Light. The report, called ‘A Review of the e-learning markets of the UK, EU and China 2014’, sets out the size and state of the online-learning-technologies markets in twenty European countries, including the UK, and examines the Chinese market for online-learning technologies. The trends that it identifies include that becoming “mainstream” within L&D are

• gamification – including serious games
• multi-device learning: m-learning, responsive web design and learning apps, and HTML5
• "bring your own device" (BYOD)
• virtual classrooms
• cloud-based learning
• learning-content-management systems (LCMS)
• social learning and curation.

The Learning Light report suggests watching out for the growth of

• adaptive learning platforms
• learning-as-a-service (LaaS)
• increasingly smart assessment
• reconfigurable learning via reusable and interchangeable "gadgets"
• “build your own content” (BYOC)
• MOOCs and VOOCs
• analytics and learning-record stores (LRS), along with the increasing influence of "big data"
• the Tin Can API, officially called the Experience API (xAPI).