Bus or bike? Informal learning is gaining pace, but will it replace?

Formal learning is a bit like a bus - the learner gets on and the driver takes
them on a journey from A to B.

Informal learning is like a bike, the learner gets on and chooses where, when and how fast they make their journey.

Here’s the issue...

Some people are suggesting that formal learning is dead and informal learning will take over, but that’s just daft!  Informal learning is not superior to formal they are equally valid, we simply need to plan solutions that are like buses and like bikes.

I think this is an example of where people with good ideas take them too far?  Like Pareto who observed the whole 80:20 principle thing, going too far and suggesting that you lose 80% of your friends because they only bring 20% of the value!  Bikes are good, but so are buses and we don’t need a fight to sort out which is best, we just need to find a way of using them both through our life of learning.

I learn daily, I love to learn, I often learn subconsciously like when I hear two colleagues disagreeing on something and somehow I store up understanding of ‘what to’ or perhaps ‘what not to’ say when I’m talking with those people in the future.  We do an enormous amount of informal learning, all of the time.  Yet when I think about some of the biggest lessons I’ve learned recently and when I think about some of the biggest changes I’ve made recently, they have come about through the formal learning cycle.

A significant example of this big change for me is caught up with a personal confession that may be incriminating so please don’t tell!  I have been throughout my life a daily law breaker!!  You see from my teenage years (having motorbikes on the local wasteland) I have loved speed.  This resulted in a driving style that broke the speed limit almost every time I got in a car.  Sometimes deliberately sometimes through absent mindedness.   Anyway, I kidded myself that I was a great driver especially when I took up Motorsport and started to bring home occasional 3rd, 2nd and 1st place trophies.

Today I am pleased to tell you, I do not ever break the speed limit on the roads - no really, I have totally and majorly reformed my awareness and practice.  I know automatically the correct speed limit for any piece of road I am traveling on, I have strategies in place for maintaining legal speeds whether in town or on the open road, and most remarkably this life change took-place overnight about 18 months ago and am still maintaining my new behaviours every day.

So what was the catalyst for this change?  Was it my informal Learning?  Where driving is concerned there has certainly been lots of it over my lifetime.  I love to drive and I like the skill of driving, I have paid attention to great driving and learnt many lessons especially on the track.  I have sat next to ex touring car professionals and learned first hand how they loaded the springs a fraction of a second before a turn to ensure that the car is balanced and settled as they take a corner on the slippery limit of adhesion.  I suspect their has been countless occasions on the highways where I have learnt how to drive better almost subconsciously through what I have witnessed and experienced.  All of this is great informal learning, but my biggest learning and biggest change took place through an afternoons face to face speeding ticket training course - formal learning.

If someone tells you formal learning is dead (like in the currently very popular book I’ve been reading) give them a reality check.  Yes informal learning works and us L&D people can help facilitate it much more, but don’t let the buses tyres down yet because we all need the big crisis / wake up / game changing formal learning interventions too.  

The truth is, we need proper blended learning solutions that maximise learning, 
buses and bikes all the way.  

Bob

The value of learning, a new perspective.

Kirkpatrick has served us all well for many years in providing his 5 ways of evaluating learning.  Effectively evaluating learning is indeed a subject that has taken up much time and attention yet seemed to have developed very little. 

I have a different take on this subject and in a series of blogs I hope to explore my ideas, encourage your comments and if you are willing engage you in some research that may provide some helpful insight.   

Here's my hypothesis, that all education always delivers a valuable return. 

I think L&D people have stopped trusting in this phenomena and are actually trying too hard to measure the wrong things as indicators of learning success.    

Take for example this simple observation from data collected over the past 200 years. 

It shows primary and secondary school enrollment rates alongside birth and death rates.  Given that the population has grown massively over the same period, this is a very compelling set of figures.  It might be easy to challenge the correlation between these sets of figures, surely there are many contributing factors for these improvements in society?  Science and medicine has made huge advances, society has progressed, laws have stabilised communities, our understanding of so many things has advanced, technology has transformed our lives.  Yet every one of these factors are reliant upon people who are able to access these complex worlds and use their ability to progress their own sphere of expertise.  Where does this capability begin?  It must begin with increasing numbers of educated people.  This is two hundred years of evidence that education delivers a valuable return. 

Here's another insight from a very recent study looking at the impact of education in 2012.  

This one looks at the level of unemployment and the average monthly salary of people groups with differing levels of education. 

The story is compelling and not unsurprising. When people drop out of learning early they reduce their potential to be employed and their ability to bring home income.  It is telling to see that that these indicators improve so clearly as the individual sticks with education and so develop their potential.  This is current evidence that education delivers a valuable return. 

Wherever you look it's not hard to find confirmation that education delivers benefits.  

I'm a big fan of real blended learning, the 70:20:10 concept makes sense to me and as L&D people we need to set up all kinds of learning opportunities within our organisations.  What we don't need to do is support the belief which suggests we measure learning outcomes by evaluating the change in the learner.  Focusing on the nitty gritty behavioural level misses the point that all learning delivers a valuable return.  The way to measure this needs to be aligned with the performance indicators of the organisation, not trying to capture the intricacies of the small individual changes. 

Having some data to support this view would be very helpful for all of us L&D folk.  So here’s what we are doing...

If we are able to collect a sample of c.500 L&D budgets alongside the indicators of organisational success we may be able to observe whether an increase in L&D spending correlates with improved performance results.  Perhaps not too many organisations have seen improved results over recent years, so we need to look at organisations within sector to understand how the relative success compares.  

Measures of success are easy to identify within the private and charitable sectors, but we need your help to determine what to measure in public sector organisations.  

If you are at all interested in the question of L&D return on investment, please complete our survey and if possible pass a link to this blog page onto other L&D professionals that you know.  Current results will be displayed on completion of the survey, and our full report on findings will be sent to everyone who takes part.  If you are working in the public sector, then please use our survey to suggest the right indicators of performance.  

Your thoughts on any of the above would be very welcome.  

Regards

Bob