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    Priming Learning For Digital
    Priming Learning For Digital
    Priming Learning For Digital
    Ebook151 pages1 hour

    Priming Learning For Digital

    By Mark Nathan Willetts

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    About this ebook

    Cost savings and increased profitability regularly entice businesses into pursuing digital innovations for both delivering and enhancing student support.

    Unfortunately, digital education is a complex area of business where much can go wrong, and missteps can easily result in wasted investment, difficulties for students, weak performance, unexpected costs, workplace dangers, and an overall poor return on investment.

    This book provides guidance for avoiding costly mistakes when managing the complexity of digital education projects, so that the best return on investment can be sought.

    Within this book you will find:

    • Two new tools and guidance for aiding the assessment of suitability for software, platforms, media and interactive development, so that a sensible balance can be sought between investment and targeted benefit

    • Brand new story lead thought experiments to provide a simple overview for the essence of learning and the associated student support requirements, which must be understood for quality assuring the delivery of a viable product

    • A deep dive into disproving the most common misconceptions & highlighting the most common issues, which could damage the prospects for a viable digital learning solution if they aren't understood

    • Guidance and example investigative questions to set the direction for gathering the pertinent data for a user centric approach

    Within an estimated 4 hour read time, this book will provide insights for allowing business managers, project managers and any other business personnel to move beyond a plethora of buzz words, rhetoric, cognitive biases, marketing pitches, and all manner of misdirects so that they can gain a clear top level understanding for defining the investments that will be required for developing a viable digital learning solution.

    The same simplified analogies and tools within this book can also aid L&D professionals in guiding their own stakeholders towards understanding the risks and requirements.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBright of the Blue Press
    Release dateApr 30, 2022
    ISBN9781838040512
    Priming Learning For Digital
    Author

    Mark Nathan Willetts

    Previously an editor of the Velawoods ESL A1-B1 (level) books, Mark Nathan Willetts has a passion for technology, educational pedagogy, and delivering strong business ROI; with over 20 years experience in digital development, his background includes delivering e-learning such as the banking and telecom suite of courses for Experian’s DA academy, as well as more exotic stuff such as an AI powered invigilation assessment platform, a voice recognition 3D virtual reality driven English language learning app in collaboration with Cambridge University Press, and various other bespoke solutions.

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      Book preview

      Priming Learning For Digital - Mark Nathan Willetts

      Chapter 01

      Introduction

      Whilst digital learning has been successfully leveraged towards achieving profitable ROI in many businesses, there are also many examples of failed digital learning projects and initiatives within the industry. And whilst this could sometimes be attributed to the competency from any of the business professionals involved, L&D professionals from around the world regularly indicate that their expert advice is often being dismissed; whilst grossly unrealistic constraints are placed against the investment needed for correctly refining and balancing the many aspects of a viable digital learning product.

      Constraints against investment are of course completely understandable when we consider that the management of a business as a whole involves balancing time, cost & resources for every business activity within the ever evolving conditions of the marketplace, and through the existing availability provided by the circumstances of the business. And within such a balance there will certainly be a critical need for ensuring a strong return on investment.

      A maximum return on investment is obviously going to be the most favourable proposition for any business. And yet the pursuit of maximum gains can also drive idealistic hopes for achieving success with the most minimally unrealistic levels of investment; with digital learning development being one of those key business areas where a range of misconceptions can quite easily lead to low cost, rushed, gimmicky solutions which ultimately fail to achieve the required results.

      A key source for any failed solution may stem from an ongoing myth that digital learning can ALWAYS be developed more cost effectively and more rapidly than traditional learning solutions, as well as through a variety of further misconceptions about the ways in which digital technology can actually be used to support and benefit the learning experience.

      The misconception that digital education can always be implemented rapidly and to strong effect is a magic beans proposition that was particularly dealt a strong blow during the Covid 19 pandemic; with the term panic-gogy, rather than pedagogy, actually coined in the media during the pandemic in reference to the rapidly implemented digital learning solutions which then proceeded to falter and fail worldwide.

      Worryingly, insights from around the industry indicate that many important pedagogical requirements are often being dismissed within business, and regularly through a misguided belief that learning delivery is purely a delivery of information which can be dressed up with pretty designs and whizzy imagery to excite learners; whilst overlooking the key importance of providing a suitably crafted learning experience that is designed to interact with students' minds in different ways so as to support them towards the successful gain of true learning outcomes.

      Of course, any learning product will involve a delivery of information to an extent; and yet the mere addition of some nice graphics or supposedly exciting animations and media to a body of information, so as to increase engagement without any further scientific rationale, will rarely provide benefits for enabling students to learn. And ironically such an approach may even impair a student’s ability to learn, under certain circumstances, through an inclusion of media that could actually interfere with a student’s eye tracking, the flow of learning, and other critical elements of the learning process.

      To succeed, the design behind any learning must cater to the audience that it is intended for by providing them with the adequate amount of support that they will need. And if the support measures within a learning solution are poorly scoped, weakly addressed, or poorly implemented, there will typically be a knock on impact against a student’s ability to perform.

      So how do you go about ensuring that a digital learning solution is capable of yielding the required business results, and doesn’t become another industry failure?

      If you’re a stakeholder for a learning project, or a business leader considering the implementation of digital solutions within your business, you may already find yourself on the edge of an ambiguous conundrum as you read up on the many different technologies, ideologies and pitches for approaches that claim to be the key behind implementing effective digital learning.

      In reality there is no simple approach or overall magic formula for developing a learning solution in a cookie cutter manner, as the particular circumstances that each type of learning experience must relate to will require a certain amount of investigation, analysis, and careful design & development to ensure a configuration of suitable learning interventions that will achieve the necessary results from the target audience.

      To help you in avoiding missteps when directing the crucial investment for digital learning, this book will explore the process of learning, the structure of digital learning design, the common misconceptions to be wary of, as well as common issues for digital learning that must be acknowledged, with advice for avoiding them; and an exploration of the balance required when judging a necessary amount of investment for achieving a realistic return on investment.

      And within a 2-4 hour read time, the simplified analogies, new tools, and consultancy questions will offer a logical oversight for allowing business managers, project managers, and any other business personnel to move beyond any buzz words, rhetoric, cognitive biases, marketing pitches, and all manner of misdirects which they may encounter, so that they can clearly see what is at stake and how to define the investments that will be required for developing a viable digital learning solution.

      The same simplified analogies and tools within this book can also be used by L&D professionals for enabling their stakeholders to more easily understand the factors at play. Because stakeholders may have already adopted certain misconceptions, which would typically be very difficult to overcome due to the complex range of pedagogical, technological and scientific information that may very well be too dense for stakeholders to digest and make sense of during the limited free time of their busy schedule.

      Chapter 02

      The issues within the digital transformation revolution

      Digital learning technologies have progressed a long way in the past 100 years, and as time moves forward, the many ongoing improvements for technology are continuing to increase the opportunities for enabling students to learn in new ways; with the potential for not only providing a more effective learning experience for the students, but also the opportunities for businesses to gain a wide range of cost effective benefits. And yet despite the great amount of potential that digital learning solutions can offer, there is also a growing opportunity for accomplishing nothing at all.

      The newfangled technologies and the potential benefits that they can provide may prove tantalising. Because, in business, who wouldn’t want to reach more students for greater profits, or deliver learning at lower cost; and perhaps even allow people to learn quicker than ever before.

      And yet digital technology is merely a catalyst that must be included within a supportive guided learning experience, rather than as a replacement for it. Because a tool alone does not the learning make, for example, a person’s cognitive ability for mathematics will not improve purely by placing a calculator in their hand; however the inclusion of that tool in some carefully planned exercises could hold a lot of power.

      Sadly despite the benefits that digital can truly provide its usage is typically driven by a mistaken view that digital learning content will require far less investment than the development of traditional classroom education; which is fuelled by misconceptions regarding the proper usage of software, platforms, hardware, and the accompanying digital learning methodologies.

      But as mentioned earlier in the book, the flawed intentions regarding the ease in leveraging digital learning were highlighted quite profoundly during the Covid 19 pandemic, a time where the available cost effective digital technologies and simplified approaches for digitally supporting student learning should have demonstrated to the world once and for all just how powerful and effective digital learning solutions can be; but instead there were a range of undesirable outcomes that were documented the world over by businesses and students alike.

      What happened should in fact be a wakeup call for a broader industry level change regarding the perceptions of digital learning development. Because the introduction of some fantastic technology, animation, video and graphical treatments, could indeed have strategic necessity beyond aesthetical perfectionism, entertainment value and any wow factor; and yet such digital treatments may also be a waste of investment altogether, depending on the audience needs.

      Of course a panic-gogy, or a rush to get something out there in response to the Covid crisis can be whole heartedly understood on many levels, because students still needed to learn during the pandemic, and businesses still required employees to learn; and so something had to be done, and it had to be done quickly. And yet when something is rushed without the necessary due diligence it can often provide only the appearance of a viable solution, when it is in fact doomed to fall short of fulfilling the crucial ROI.

      And even before the Covid pandemic occurred there were many accounts of digital learning solutions being rushed into service, with business wide learning initiatives merely going through the motions by providing audio visual focused content to entertain people into learning; with superficial memorisation tests that can easily provide only an illusion of achieved capability.

      It should be considered that whist digital media and interactivity can certainly add wow factor when presented to senior stakeholders, those stakeholders are generally not the direct audience for a learning solution. And whilst a stakeholder may initially be satisfied to see a nice looking product that has been developed cheaply in a short space of time, any enthusiasm and appreciation would not be indicative of an actual solution, or of any long term satisfaction.

      In essence, it's true that information can be cost effectively sourced and dressed up with digital treatments as a professional looking product, something that might even look great in a portfolio of marketing collateral; but it should

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