I gave a session at this year’s Online Educa Berlin conference entitled “Adapting e-learning for global learners: what have we learned so far?”, although the title is a little misleading. What the session was really about is the importance of understanding the difference between superficial learning and deep learning, and between the superficial features of a culture, and deeper values.
I won’t run through the whole thing here, as you can get the presentation here (500k) if you want. But basically my argument is this...
A large proportion of activity that currently goes by the title of “elearning”, particularly in the corporate world, deals with a type of learning that can only be called “superficial”. That’s not to say it doesn’t deliver value; it probably does. But it generally doesn’t change people much. It’s often to do with new product information, new procedures, induction, a new software package or customer service skills.
And that’s fine for now. But delivering new product information isn’t where the greatest long-term value is going to be delivered by new learning technologies. New technology is going to help people learn to learn, adapt more flexibly to their environment, innovate...This is deeper learning.
The problem is that deeper learning is highly sensitive to cultural difference, as I show in the presentation. There’s plenty of evidence for this, from well-known authorities such as Hofstede, Adler, Trompenaars and many others. I’d go so far as to say that culturally insensitive learning is pretty unlikely to work.
So if large, global organisations are really going to get value from their investments in learning technologies, they have to understand how to accommodate cultural difference. This demands learning strategies that consider cultural difference as a key influence on decisions at every stage, from business case, through analysis, design, all the way to implementation.
But we don’t currently have methodologies that do this. Our learning design methodologies, even as they are undergoing huge transformation, still largely assume that we all learn in roughly the same way. OK – so some of us might be “reflectors” as opposed to “theorists”, or more “kinaesthetic” rather than “visual”, (choose your favourite learning styles model) – but basic assumptions about such issues as the role of authority, sequence, risk avoidance, communication style, truth and identity are largely ignored by current methodologies.
What’s needed is a clear and widespread understanding amongst the learning design community of exactly how culture impacts learning, and a revised, or new development methodology that helps those responsible to tackle this growing challenge.
The main headings in the presentation are:
- We ignore the deep at our peril
- Where is the greatest value?
- How we learn differently
- Why we learn differently
- Localisation at what level?
- The 5 foundations of instructional systems
- A culture-sensitive methodology?
- How culture influences the key decision point
- Not all elearning needs the same adaptation
Incidentally, there are my rough notes with each slide, so if you save the presentation and look at it in notes view, you get all the details. There’s also quite an extensive list of references at the back, and a couple of extra slides I knew I wouldn’t have time to get to during the session in Berlin.
Finally, I've written about the challenges of surface -v- depth elsewhere on this blog. Have a look if you're interested.
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