Match Learning Solution with the Learners’ Life-Style
I am really fascinated by this new MOOC concept. Extremely rich content and that too free of cost. When I found them for the first time, I felt that somebody must have been completely insane to offer such a thing free. I immediately went and enrolled myself for 4 courses which had quite exotic names. One I started immediately and rest 3 were to start in near future. It was an afternoon in the office and I had little time between 2 meetings and I started consuming content and was mesmerized with the excellent quality of the content. After 15 mins, I had a meeting scheduled and I stopped and went to meeting.
Next day, I accessed it again and did for 10 mins but could not go back the content after that. After about 2-3 weeks I saw reminder in my mail box and I remembered that I had started a course and had lined up 3 courses for near future, but still could not continue.
I was thoroughly impressed with the content and concept and hence I went around and told about it to everybody in my team and circle and advised them to start a course out there.
After 2-3 months, again I had some time, and I started again a course and being a greedy person, lined up 2 courses for future but sequence of events were no different from the previous ones. I was really annoyed and guilt ridden by then. I spoke to few of my colleagues and to my surprise, we all shared similar experience. That made me think as to what is wrong here. Every thing that is required to learn – Intent to learn and free course were available but could not learn.
Thats where I got my answer that probably, the learning is not offered in a way that suits my life style. I am no more a student who has learning / reading as the only and the most important thing to do. With a working professional like me, reading / learning such content falls under “good to know” category and comes at the bottom of the pyramid of priority.
As a learning professional / or learning solution provider, its high time for us to think of offering a learning solution to our learners which matches their life style and learning style. Now think of this. What if, after enrolling in the course, I would have received my daily dose of content that I could have finished in 5-6 mins, some thing like micro learning or the same could have been made available on my smartphone without creating a whole in my phone memory and data (I mean light enough content created for mobile learning)? Probably, this would have led to higher probability of me learning / completing the course, isn’t it?
