The MASIE Center has added a brand-new LAB to its 2019 schedule of Learning Experiences: the Learning PRODUCER LAB, taking place 26-28 March at their state-of-the-art Learning Center in Saratoga Springs, NY.

According to host and curator Elliott Masie, "Learners of today and tomorrow require new and evolving skills from learning professionals. It is time to 'retool' into learning producers. Let's re-tool our design, creation, and management roles in learning!"

Masie will be joined by learning colleagues from around the world as they explore the roles of the learning producer in his unique 10,000 square foot Learning LAB. Participants will be highly engaged, challenged, and asked to help explore the evolving roles of learning producers in a dynamic and interactive LAB experience.

The skills of instructional design, program creation, content delivery, performance consulting, curation, and learning management will continue to be important, but the learning producer has a wider set of competencies and capacities including

• user experience
• design thinking applied to learning
• curation of content and context
• from social "learning" to collaboration
• learning ecosystems
• performance, workflow, and on the job learning support tools
• adding engagement, competition, and entertainment to learning
• personalization
• learner-centered content
• learning data analytics
• really blending tech and human learning resources
• emerging opportunities of chatbots and smart speakers
• brain science applied to learning
• AI and machine learning - getting ready
• learning systems, xAPI, lrs, and knowledge clouds
• beyond courses and classes - new brands and formats
• Lego designs - preparing for content reuse and blockchains
• building learning producers - skills, approaches, and careers
• global and diverse workers as learners
• assessing learning innovations - yes, maybe, or hype?
• and more...

Learning producers will add many of these skills to their instructional design toolkit. As a producer, much of the content they'll be assembling and distributing will be from open or external resources. As a producer, they will facilitate a wider range of choices of the format, setting, intensity, and framework of learning activities. And, as learning producers, their use of data and analytics will become a major force in design and personalization.

Finally, the learning producer title provides better positioning for future career opportunities, with a wider set of transferable skills and readiness to play other roles in other parts of the organization.

Elliott Masie will bring his 48 years of experience as a learning researcher, advocate, and community builder, along with a decade as a producer of Broadway theater (e.g. Kinky Boots, The Prom, The Cher Show, American Son, and SpongeBob) to this brand-new, interactive LAB. Over the two-and-a-half days in the MASIE Center LAB, a small group of participants will experiment with learning producer roles, skills, and projects. Learning innovators, chief learning officers, and user experience experts will join via live video throughout the program. Participants will be working on a set of projects that can be applied to challenges and opportunities back home. There will be two hour long follow-up online sessions five and six weeks after the LAB to extend the learning.