Elearning! Magazine: Building Smarter Companies via Learning & Workplace Technologies.
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digitallearning that the collective wisdom of the team can inform its decision. Each week, a guide facilitates live virtual discussion to make sure that the team is on track. Te cohort can collectively assess results and adjust course and speed down the road. BENEFITS FOR LEARNERS AND L&D; FUNCTIONS Te result of all this careful choreography is that emerging leaders gain access to expert content from world-class business schools in a digestible form that both reduces disruption to their day jobs and increases the relevance of learning to their work. Tat's something face-to-face learning experiences can't claim. At a manageable price point, L&D; functions can dramatically boost the level of development support they offer By tightly integrating learning with doing, connected learning achieves more developmental stretch from participants while pushing organizations to higher levels of performance. emerging leaders on a learning platform that reduces the commitment to any particular content source. Want to intermingle lectures and case studies from Harvard and Wharton faculty? Fine. Want to change the content terrain altogether? Great. The learning platform ensures that the underlying teaching approach remains the same (and scalable) even as content on the platform evolves over time. Put another way, connected learning allows L&D; to spend its time refining how executives learn best rather than what executives need to learn. Additionally, L&D; gains a treasure trove of information about how people learn, which participants warrant additional development and whether development investments are paying off. TIME TO JUMP IN For decades, L&D; functions have wanted to increase investments in emerging leaders. However, cost and scale issues have kept them from ofering elite residential experiences available to the top of the house. At the same time, quality issues have kept online leadership development experiments from moving beyond the pilot stage. Tey are craving a solution for those emerging leaders in "the middle." It's unrealistic to assume the environmental conditions driving interest in digital learning are going to reverse or even slow. And it's pretty easy to believe that, at some point, digital learning will meet a quality bar worthy of emerging leaders. So the question is when (not whether) to jump in. Te time has come. At last, an experience — connected learning — can overcome those scale and quality hurdles that have constrained us. Digital learning now exceeds the standard of "good enough" to deploy to emerging leaders. The true potential is even more exciting. By tightly integrating learning with doing, connected learning achieves more developmental stretch from participants while pushing organizations to higher levels of performance. That is a formula that face-to-face can't match, and it has the potential to revolutionize talent development. —The author is CEO of CorpU and a pioneer in the field of corporate learning. He served as chairman, CEO and co-founder of KnowledgePlanet, a company that helped launch the online learning 20 December 2013 / January 2014 Elearning!