LCB April Question - Leave a clean corpse

The big question for April on the Learning Circuits Blog is: ILT and Off-the-Shelf Vendors – What Should They Do? My answer: Leave a clean corpse.

Now that we realize that most learning occurs from conversations and coaching, there appears to be no more use for outsiders: delivering content or helping us to talk among ourselves.

Now that we've gotten far better results from giving us more feedback and less instruction to build skills, it makes no sense to pay instructors to give us no feedback -- and then give them feedback on how they performed.

Now that we know that intended learning outcomes depend on long term evaluation, it's far cheaper to shortchange the classroom segment and spend more money on follow through with the team, supervisor or internal customers affected by the outcomes or lack of results.

Now that we've had so much success teaching ourselves how to use lots of new toys, technology and software, it seems quizzical to act like we need to be taught methods by someone else or another click2death module.

Now that so many of us have built up meta skills (for problem solving, changing strategies, collaborating etc) in online and computer games, it seems silly to teach a concept, skill or policy change as if it's not something everyone can figure out for themselves or team-up to knock out in a jiffy.

Now that we've had years of experience getting better at most everything we do, it's astonishing that someone we've never met could identify our shortcomings, break our habits and overcome our inhibitions -- better than our colleagues, friends, mentors and ourselves.

Now that we are on a roll of learning from internal blogging or subscribing to RSS feeds, tags and searches -- it seems antiquated to pretend that identified skill gaps from a training needs analyses could have a clue about what can be cooked up today, between us, to get better results than yesterday.

Now that "communities of practice" has taken on new meaning (as we find so many others with parallel passions in the horizontal city called the blogosphere), the struggle to make formal instruction more informal, immersive and interactive seems futile.

Now that I have pictured ILT and Off-the-Shelf Vendors as obsolete, the question remains how long their customers will pretend the world has not already changed this dramatically.

Technorati tags: informal learning, blogging, elearning, communities of practice