What do I like to learn online?
With the emergence of new technologies, e-learning has inundated in the workplace around the world and become an integral component of corporate training in the digital age. Indeed, in the survey by Dixon and Overton (2012), nine out of ten organizations had been providing some form of e-learning content that was either developed internally or acquired from external vendors. As a pioneering tech company, Intel had fully visioned and employed various forms of e-learning pervasively for its human resources development and operations. I had my first exposure to online learning when I was an intern at Intel about seven years.
On the first orientation week, all newly hired employees had to take various self-paced e-learning modules to get familiar with company policies, legal and security issues, health and environmental issues, work ethics, etc. Since it was the first time I experienced this novel learning modality, I was so fascinated to engage with the interactive e-learning modules, do the quizzes, and earn completion certificates. However, my excitement and motivation gradually faded away after I took four or five modules as the learning interactions and engagement opportunities in those e-learning modules were very basic and limited. In fact, you basically clicked through slides to read the content, answered multiple-choice question related to a case scenario, and completed a final quiz to check your knowledge comprehension and retention. Even though e-learning technology was still in its infancy and there were not many exciting and meaningful learning activities back then, until now when I have had considerable experience with e-learning, looking back I still think my e-learning experience at Intel was very engaging and innovative. Maybe I am little biased because of my first impression.
Later in my career, I often took online courses for professional development and my experience with e-learning was not very positive as I often found it constantly boring and unhelpful when it comes to retention and transfer of knowledge. For an adult learner like me who had been so used to the dynamic interaction in face-to-face classroom, the greatest issue with online learning was to maintain motivation when I had to study alone. It was not uncommon that I dropped a course just one or two weeks after it had started. In some rare cases when I was able to finish a course, I could not hold the new knowledge that I had acquired in the course for more than a week as there was no efficient ways for me to review and recall what I had learned. With that being said, I had always preferred face-to-face to online delivery for my professional training.
Online learning started to pique my attention and really became attractive to me about four years ago when I got to know Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). Personally, I think MOOC was really a worldwide educational phenomena since it gave students in developing countries like Vietnam a priceless unprecedented opportunity to get access to “high quality” education from the world’s most prestigious educational institutions. In fact, what attracted to me the most was not only the complementary learning opportunity from the almost impossibly accessible elite schools like Harvard or MIT, but also the chance to get some sort of “credentials” to get myself a bit more distinguished than others in the competitive labor market. When it comes to the desire of getting the U.S. educational credentials, I think Vietnam is not the only country in Asia where these credentials are highly recognized and appreciated and that attributed to the dramatically growing popularity of MOOCs in Asia.
Surprisingly, regardless of this powerful extrinsic motivation, I have never been able to complete any MOOC. This time, instead of feeling lonely, I was so overwhelmed by such a massive number of participants and their interactions. The weekly discussion forum was usually flooded with thousands of posts, yet the ideas discussed were often repeated and had limited or even no values contributed to the conversation. On the bright side, most of lecture videos were professionally produced and thoroughly informative and they presented lectures, discussions, and opinions of many distinguished industry experts, renowned scholars, and educators. Though the learning activities were still very limited due to the large participant population, the level of interactivity and engagement seemed to be improved substantially compared to what I experienced at Intel before. By and large, I think MOOC is still far from the perfect model of future learning, yet to me this model has established and developed my mentality of informal and lifelong learning. It has allowed me to learn almost anything I would like to and a trial learning opportunity to see if the course or the field is really what I imagine and would like to pursue. Whenever I would like to learn something new, I would Google if there is a MOOC for that, quickly glance through the course, and specifically watch the video or read the material of my interest.
With the rise of mobile devices in the last decade, online learning has been elevated to another level and mobile learning (or m-learning) has been discussed and researched pervasively in the literature. Mobile technology further enables and fosters informal and lifelong learning. Indeed, thanks to its portability, learners can learn literally anywhere and anytime. It is not uncommon that we use our mobile devices to search for a recipe while cooking in the kitchen or a how-to video on Youtube to learn how to fix something. In addition, mobile technology also provides an intuitive user interface and human-computer interaction that lower the technological barriers and allow anyone even toddlers and elders to access this technology. That has been empowering and encouraging us to pursue lifelong learning.
Reference
Dixon, G., & Overton, L. (2012). Bridging the gap - Integrating Learning and Work: Executive Summary. Towards Maturity. Retrieved from https://towardsmaturity.org/2012/05/14/2012-13-towards-maturity-benchmark/
