Elearning! Magazine: Building Smarter Companies via Learning & Workplace Technologies.
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digitallearning At the same time, senior leaders can't help but notice the explosion of social networking. While executives are struggling to fnd time for personal development, they are spending hours per week on social platforms. Might there be a way for us to capitalize on the stickiness of social technologies in a way that also harnesses the power of collective thinking to accelerate development? While only a tiny fraction of the $20 billion executive education market is spent online today, billions of dollars in capital investment are pouring into digital learning experiments, reflecting a belief in their potential to complement or transform traditional corporate learning. As high-profile experiments boost the visibility of the field, it's no wonder that so much executive attention is focused on digital learning. But capturing the digital learning opportunity has not been easy. Past attempts to bring the high-end residential experience in house have been less than 16 December 2013 / January 2014 Elearning! Te world is still waiting for collaboration tools to reach their potential and harness the power of collective thought to help teams learn. successful. As L&D; functions have discovered, pressing "Play" on a video of a Stanford lecture for an internal audience does not make for gripping television. On the other end of the spectrum, professional skill training (think Skillsoft) has not proven effective for developing a generation of emerging leaders. With rare exception, digital platforms have proven better at filling heads with knowledge than teaching judgment or leadership instincts. Efforts to apply collaborative tools like Jive to achieve learning and development objectives haven't been particularly effective, either. While collaboration tools can certainly help teams get things done, the world is still waiting for them to reach their potential and harness the power of collective thought to help teams learn. THE HIGH-EXPECTATIONS CONUNDRUM All of these challenges leave corporate learning functions in a tough spot. The "high expectations/uncertain solutions" box is an uncomfortable place to be. We've all heard the truism, "No one ever got fired for choosing IBM." When it comes to digital learning for emerging leaders, no such safe choice yet exists. Learning and development professionals must assess a slew of unproven options, all of which sound great on paper. Assessing the gap between technological promise and actual value, however, is truly difficult. The challenge is made harder by the fact that we have little room for error. If we disappoint emerging executives or executive sponsors, it will be a long time before they'll be willing to take another bite of the digital learning apple. No one missed the irony earlier this year when the Georgia Institute of Technology's MOOC, "Fundamentals of Online Education," fell apart in its first week due to technological glitches — and the e-learning community is rightly concerned that corporate clients will be even less forgiving of early stumbles than higher education. As a result of these fears, L&D; professionals are either placing small bets to test