As I suggested almost ten years
ago in the book "The Future of Learning: Insights and Innovations from
Executive Development”, education has experienced its biggest shift in
millennia over the past few years, moving away from the paradigm of a teacher
at the front of a classroom imparting their knowledge and being the ‘sage on
the stage’. Facilitation of learning, or the ‘guide on the side’ is how
executive education tends to aim at try and make the learning stick, and with
the advent of social technologies, there has, of course, been a big shift
towards the ‘crowd in the cloud’ where the barriers to imparting knowledge have
crumbled and individuals learn from each other, where anyone can set themselves
up as an expert and help others on subjects ranging from strategy and corporate
responsibility to maths and mentoring.
An important feature of all
these learning delivery methodologies (or ‘teaching’) is that they revolve
around ‘knowledge’. Knowledge, of course, is essential, but one doesn’t
need a teacher to acquire the knowledge - one can sit quietly with a textbook
or one’s favourite websites and read the knowledge. The way people used
to.
What none of these methods are
really good at doing is teaching ‘skills’ - both soft skills and hard skills.
They can teach you the theories about teamwork, or influencing skills. You
can learn everything about leadership that has ever been written and expose you
to great political and business leaders who can explain their own theories on
what made them great. But it is still
knowledge. Knowing the knowledge does
not mean you will know how to use it.
They can teach you the principles
of creating a Net Present Value for an investment or developing a strategy for
expanding markets, but things would still simply remain theory, with the only
practical side being case studies of successful, or unsuccessful situations
that other firms have experienced in the past.
With the world of business changing at the pace it is, where some
estimates suggest that up to 85% of the jobs in 2030 do not yet exist, reading
about the past is not always going to be relevant for the future and the
knowledge of a dozen PhD theses will not help a manager actually manage better
until they have seen what works when, how and why.
Hult International Business
School’s mission is to be the most relevant business school in the world, and
there have been many discussions on what ‘relevance’ means. On the undergraduate program this means
preparing students for their future careers, by not just teaching theories and
business frameworks (which they do need to know) but, more importantly, giving
them a practical experience of applying the knowledge they learn in real-life
business challenges with clients ranging from start-ups to Fortune 500 brands
such as Unilever, Amazon, Ferrari, McLaren, Virgin, UBS and Micron. What this does is convert the knowledge into
skills, the skill of analysing a client’s problem, researching the
organisation, the environment and the competition, recommending solutions,
delivering those recommendations and thinking about stakeholder management
throughout.
Online learning, as we all know,
can be an excellent way of transmitting knowledge. The textbooks of the past can be read online,
of course, but the larger publishers have, for a long time, provided an online
environment accessible to purchasers of the textbook, where students can go
through quizzes and simple games to test their understanding of the materials.
Transmitting lectures online is
not new – the Open University in the UK made high-level knowledge on a wide range
of subjects available to the entire population by filming academics, predominantly
with bushy beards and woolly jumpers (starting, as they did, in 1971), and
broadcasting the lectures on the BBC.
Move on almost fifty years and everyone is able to record anything on
their phone and post it on YouTube, from lectures on quantum physics from the
world’s top universities, to individuals explaining how to calculate a Net
Present Value, or use the business model canvas, or change the inner tube on a
bicycle. Once again, however, whilst
very useful, this is all about transmitting and imparting knowledge. But how do we teach skills through online
learning?
The acquisition of skills, of
course, can only come through practical experience. It is one thing to know how a piano works,
but it takes practice to play it well, converting the knowledge into a skill.
And so it is with all relevant
and practical learning – creating opportunities for the student to practice the
knowledge they have learned and, in so doing, acquire the skill.
The worldwide web has
revolutionised our lives by giving everyone instant access to the world’s
knowledge from their mobile phone.
Delivery of that knowledge is through text, pictures, audio and
video. The knowledge can be tested through
online quizzes or online submissions (such as reports or videos) can be assessed
by peers around the world, showing how the ‘crowd in the cloud’ can be both
teacher and student at the same time.
The challenge for online
learning, however, is how to provide the practice needed to turn the knowledge
into skills. How to ensure students are
engaging online with a project the way you can be sure they do in the
classroom, when they are face-to-face with the client and the mentor. How to ensure everyone is listening to the
brief – in short – how can you be sure that the student through online learning
is paying attention and not, for example, on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat,
WeChat or Twitter? At least in the
classroom you can walk around and see what everyone is up to. And environments like MOOCs are great in
theory but have a very low completion rate.
A challenge for educators everywhere is far more urgent for online
educators: how to engage the disengaged?
The most common way to engage
students in an online practical challenge is through a business simulation,
where individuals or teams work on a ‘fake’ challenge and the ‘sim’ regularly
gives feedback on their performance via the virtual stakeholders. Simulations are great for practicing with
new-found knowledge in a safe environment where the worst that happens is that
you lose the ‘game’. There are no real clients to disappoint and no real cash
to lose. The best sims provide
opportunities for blended learning, where the participants have an offline
element, such as talking to investors to request funding, or presenting to a board. This approach can work very well in small,
local environments (such as at business school where all the students are in
the same building) and whilst the meetings and presentations can take place
through a virtual meeting tool such as Skype, GotoMeeting, Citrix or Zoom, it
is again too easy for the underperformers to hide, quite literally, off camera.
All of the online media
described above are very two-dimensional.
The ultimate goal of online learning is not to recreate the offline
experience (mainstream education has also always struggled with the question of
how to engage the disengaged and deliver practical learning experiences to
scale) but find a consistent way to deliver both knowledge and skills to a
large virtual audience and know that
it has been received, acquired and absorbed by the students or participants.
Virtual worlds have been a
promising opportunity for over 15 years but they have been the preserve of
technology evangelists, geeks and early-adopters. A very large percentage of millennial and
Generation Z (such as one would find in an undergraduate student body) are
surprisingly, shockingly, ill prepared for online interactions. There is a
false but widely held belief that young adults are digital natives and
therefore completely comfortable with all technology, when the reality is that
many confine themselves to a small selection of apps on their mobile. They
don’t necessarily know, for example, how to use Microsoft Office efficiently,
or use the shortcuts that will help them use their laptops. They do not always
know how to add an email address to their mobile phone and they have not all
experienced virtual reality.
In summary, while online
learning is a godsend to all of us to quickly clarify confusions and enable
self-paced learning for the busy executives, empowers those far from a major
seat of learning to experience the wisdom of the world’s greatest thinkers and
allows the crowd in the cloud to share their expertise (we are all experts in
something in our own little way), it faces the same problems the traditional
educational systems have always faced.
Even when we get to the stage that we can implant a chip in our brains
which instantly accesses all the knowledge in the world, we still need to learn
how to use that knowledge and convert it into a skill. On a personal level, I
cannot wait for the chip, and am fascinated to see how the educators of the
future will focus on the practical.