by Alan Nelson
I read with interest Charles Jennings’ recent article, Less is more: A different approach to L&D in a world awash with information. I had been alerted to this author a while back when Jacqui returned from an e-Learning Network Event enthusing about his presentation.
Jennings central theme then as now is that the way professionals operate is changing. He highlights the remarkable rate of expansion of stuff you might expect a professional to know, citing as evidence the work of Andreas Weigend, former chief scientist at Amazon.com, who in May 2009 wrote in the Harvard Business Review,
“In 2009, more data will be generated by individuals than in the entire history of mankind through 2008.”
Getting professionally trained and then staying up to date is an increasingly Sisyphean challenge. Our expectations are changing though. Whereas it used to be the case that a professional could be expected to know most of what was needed to work in their chosen field, we now realise that in many areas that has become nigh on impossible and so a greater emphasis is being placed on having the information available: knowing where to find the answer, rather than just knowing it.
How much of this is driven by the expansion of knowledge and how much is due to the role technology has played in putting the answers within easy reach, I don’t know, but I am sure that Jennings is right to argue that it has significant implications for professional education, and of course for online learning providers.
This idea appeals to me instinctively – I’ve never much liked the anorak approach to professionalism. Most of the time we don’t need the world’s expert in any case, but we do expect a basic level of competence. And that requires more than just knowledge and information. If you put me in a doctor’s surgery and gave me access to the most extensive and user friendly reference resource imaginable, I’d still be a rubbish doctor. I’d be no better in a local authority benefits office. I agree that I wouldn’t need to know every detail of the benefits system, but I don’t know how it works at all, so I’d be no good at all.
I agree with Jennings that there must surely be a need to move the focus away from teaching facts and towards enabling people to assemble the core skills they need for their professional life. It chimes with our philosophy of putting the learner in charge. Put another way, perhaps we should see our purpose as educating people to understand how something works – the principles - and how to use them to make good judgements.
Jennings suggests some core skills that people will need – search and find skills, critical thinking etc – and these are useful. However his focus is primarily on the role of the L&D function within organisations, whereas ours is more on individual professionals – both their initial professional development and qualification, and their continuing professional development. So how does the change potentially affect the different types of learning resource that we create at Nelson Croom.
We claim four capabilities:
Let’s look at them in turn.
Distance Learning
Our distance learning projects are focused on preparing students to take their professional exams. The students do not get to decide what they would like to learn; they just want to ensure that they have reached the point where they have the requisite knowledge and skills to pass the exam.
This places an emphasis on the Examiner who sets the syllabus. They are in an invidious position. If they keep the syllabus as it is they will be accused of teaching and testing an increasingly small subset of the relevant information. On the other hand, senior professionals had to study hard to qualify and are likely to resist any initiatives to change the nature of the qualification to focus more on skills and judgement, on the grounds that it is lowering the hurdle and downgrading entry to the profession. If this conjures up stereotypical images of the oldest, most traditional professions, ask yourself why new taxi drivers still have to pass The Knowledge. I’d frankly rather they used a Sat. Nav.
So for these reasons I suspect that our distance learning resources may be slowest to change, but we will continue to push from our end.
General professional development
Our work in this area is more and more focused on professional conduct and ethics. In this area we have already taken huge steps forwards. Whereas five years ago we might have created a course to explain the ethical code in place in a particular profession and thought we had done our job, we are now focusing more on the application of the principles in practice.
Our course for Resolution, designed to encourage family lawyers to take a less combative approach to their work, encourages learners to reflect throughout on a real case they are working on. A range of case studies for STEP (Society of Trust and Estate Practitioners) present complex scenarios and ask the users to make judgements based on the ethical code. The concepts are simple but in practice it isn’t as easy as you’d think. And our own Ethical Issues for Accountants is a vast array of case studies that the user can comment on and read the views of other professionals.
CPD
Our approach to CPD has always been pretty flexible and so it is easier for us to change than it may be for others. From our origins in 2000 we have always argued that we should look to facilitate learning rather than attempting to teach remotely. Professionals all come to a course with different perspectives. They operate in different specialist areas and have different levels of experience. So any course that tries to make them all learn a set bunch of facts is going to alienate most of them. The idea of taking someone through the basic principles, getting them to engage and think and offering them access to more information for reference where they are interested, has always been central to our approach, and so we have been well placed to embrace these new ideas.
Over the last eighteen months, we have taken a further step forwards with the launch of our peer enriched learning courses. These tend to deal with an issue or debate. The learning takes place in a series of three-step activities. Firstly the learner is asked a question which they consider and construct a reply to. Next, they read an expert summary of the key issues. Finally they read their peers’ contributions. While this may be an inefficient way to teach lots of facts, it is a excellent way to change attitudes and broaden horizons.
Compliance
This is the area of our work where we have the most challenging conversations with our partners. Whether we are talking to an organisation that is concerned to make sure their employees understand the ins and outs of competition law, or to an individual professional signing up for a course to make sure they understand how to avoid a malpractice case, their instinct is to focus on what they need to know.
Although this makes intuitive sense, I think it is often misleading. I’m pretty convinced that you could write down what most people need to know about competition law on two sides of A4. When we teach them more, I wonder whether they remember it for much longer than it takes to pass the assessment. What matters is not whether they become expert, but whether we really succeed in changing their behaviour. So recently we have started to work on more and more case study based approaches to compliance. This seems to me to be a massive step forward. If we can focus more on whether people understand the limits of acceptable behaviour and less on their ability to commit a series of facts to their short term memory, we will be doing a great job.
So how does this all fit together? It seems to me that it continues to be the case that professionals in any particular sector need to learn some principles and how to interpret them and put them into practice. Add to that some more generic information management and retrieval skills and we will start to turn out some real 21st Century professionals and not just an army of Sisyphean disciples.
An excellent summary of the key challenges, and then some, Alan.
The old adage 'knowledge is power' has certainly seen it's day. Although we obviously still need knowledge in order to make decisions and act (the ultimate output of any learning), trying to retain vast repositories of knowledge in our heads is no longer a winning formula. 'Access to knowledge is power' has replaced it.
Your GPS illustration is perfect. 'The Knowledge' for London Cabbies was established in 1865 and is proudly touted as having changed little since. The idea that, in 2010, you would spend time trying to memorise an entire route from a roadmap before setting out - or memorise the entire map, because you're not sure when you'll need to take a specific journey - is crazy to everyone other than the taxi authorities, and probably crazy for them as well unless it's being used as a mechanism to control entry to the taxi driving profession - which is probably the case.
Equally the idea that learning professionals spend their time trying to embed an ocean of ever-changing 'knowledge' into people's heads in case they may need it in future is also crazy - and a futile exercise. Provide them with fishing rods, not fish.
Charles
Posted by: Charles Jennings | 12 May 2010 at 12:56 PM