George Siemens of elearnspace makes the healthy and obligatory nothing-new-under-the-sun critique of this year’s crop of online learning buzzphrases:
Rapid elearning and workflow learning are two concepts that have been getting enough attention over the last year to be classified as “trends”. I’m not entirely sure what to think about either. We have a unique problem in the learning/technology field of giving every small nuance in a concept a new name. Then we declare the old name/concept “dead” (almost as if we are constantly struggling to stay with the “in crowd”). Rapid elearning simply means “we have limited resources and time, how can we get this stuff done faster”…and workflow learning simply means “learning integrated (an abused word that can cause a rash to break out in some tech workers) as a vital business process…while still focusing on the needs of each individual worker”.
Of course, he’s right. In particular, “rapid e-learning” is certainly nothing new and, to the degree that it’s a trend, it’s not entirely a good thing. I’m less sure about workflow learning; there is a very real change in what’s possible that’s developing owing to new technologies that are enabling more real-time and meaningful support interactions, both with work peers and with information systems. I suppose I would call workflow learning “EPSS: The Next Generation.”
But there are sometimes good reasons to give things new names whether or not they are actually new. In the case of rapid e-learning, I think it’s important to clearly label what it is and what it’s for lest all e-learning be reduced to rapid e-learning (which, conveniently for many organizations, is also cheap e-learning). We need a name for it so we can talk about when it’s appropriate, and I don’t think we currently have a label that works.
Now, in the case of workflow e-learning, the opposite is true. EPSS never really evolved past lame software help cue cards in most organizations. It never really found a home in a meaningful way, in part because it wasn’t training, it often eliminated the need for traditional training, and yet it was expected to be owned by the training department. I don’t know whether workflow learning will have any better luck as a trend, but there is something to be said for putting a different spin on an old (but good) idea in order to revive its chances for getting the attention that it deserves. That said, we do have to be careful when we engage in what is essentially a spin job lest we risk sabotaging ourselves with excessive hype (as I believe Jay Cross comes dangerously close to doing sometimes).
