For this week’s blog post, I am going to tell you a little about the chat I had with my learning partner last week via the magic that is Skype.
My learning partner works in retail management, and I am an instructional designer in eLearning. Night and day? Turns out not! Teaching people to learn new technologies and disrupting their comfortable workflow is challenging no matter what area you work in.
The Omnichannel trend new to me. According to my learning partner, omnichannel involves using technology (for example websites) to improve the overall experience for a client. After a little reading, I understand that “when a store has implemented an omnichannel approach, the customer service representative in the store will be able to immediately reference the customer’s previous purchases and preferences just as easily as the customer service representative on the phone can or the customer service webchat representative can.” (TechTarget)
According to my partner, integrating technology into a company’s workshop is often challenging as people will have to be trained to use the technology. Her example was a yoga company which traditionally focused on the “one on one” and on community. Moving to an omnichannel approach means that now this focus will have to be balanced with technology and a new workflow.
We, in our eLearning unit at our college, have similar challenges when working with faculty who are not ready to move from standing up in front of a classroom lecturing, into learning technology to support their teaching. It does, however, become easier for them to accept disrupting their workflow (and adapting a new workflow) when they begin to see the benefits for their learners (and in all honesty, for them).
Creating company culture in retail environments was the second trend in my partner’s area that we discussed. This involves companies adopting core values and a purpose beyond the bottom-line sales. This can be very disruptive for companies who do not already operate under this model, as it can be viewed as getting in the way of making money. According to Forbes, however, “[p]eople now believe that culture has a direct impact on financial performance.” (Bersin) and “[c]ompanies that focus on culture are becoming icons for job seekers”, and also have higher employee retention rates. (Bersin) It makes sense: if your company’s values match your own, and if that company actually lives and breathes those values, you are much more likely to enjoy your job and put your all into it.
Once again, I saw similarities with my discipline, specifically as it results to changing the culture of the classroom, from one where the instructor is the “sage on the stage” to more learner-directed. This, I find, is a difficult shift for some faculty, although we do have more and more new faculty who just teach this way from the beginning. I think we, as post-secondary institutions, have to look at learner retention trends from the perspective of, are we creating and supporting educational culture at our institution, what does that look like, and does it have an impact on the retention and satisfaction of our learners and faculty.
Finally, we discussed some trends in Adult Education.
My partner talked about how there is a constant introduction of new technologies into adult education these days, and we also discussed on-demand learning as a new model for education, often in the form of informal learning resources such as Ted Talks videos, blogs, vimeo, etc. Certainly, these trends are right up my alley! There are days I can’t keep up with the new technologies people are integrating into their teaching (which is ironic, given that I also work with faculty who struggle with the concept of simply setting up a gradebook in our LMS). One faculty member I work with started integrating VR into his political science classes, and this year is getting students to create and critique their own VR experiences. All ends of the spectrum, and no end in sight. Guess I will be employed for awhile!
References
Bersin, J. (2015, March 13). Culture: Why It’s The Hottest Topic In Business Today. Forbes. Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshbersin/2015/03/13/culture-why-its-the-hottest-topic-in-business-today/#6f6e6e6c627f
TechTarget. (2014, February). Omnichannel. Retrieved from http://searchcio.techtarget.com/definition/omnichannel
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