New Skills and Knowledge for Learning Professionals?
The Learning Circuits Blog’s Big Question this month is: New skills and knowledge for learning professionals?
For me, there are two key developments that learning professionals should embrace;
- research on adaptation and personalization,
- and communities for sharing learning content.
I’d like to think that facilitating eLearning is going to be about creating new connections with research in the user modeling, adaptation and personalization domain. Learning professionals are ideal players for getting involved in state of the art research. Technology moves fast. Learning professionals combine a relentless ability to keep up to date with new, useful technologies, with being able to to apply better strategies for facilitating online learning. Over the last couple of years it has been necessary for them to develop a comprehensive understanding of the theories, and technologies that best facilitate learning and performance. Even still, developing successful online content takes time. So, what are the two things that can help develop this content? Two things: Technology and community.
Currently, Adaptive Learning Systems (ALS) are stimulating a move towards the needs of the individual. These systems support the acquisition of diverse types of knowledge by mediating the conditions for learning according to individual differences. Multiple models, which describe the user, context, system goals, and other individual differences have been composed in order to generate personalized eLearning experiences. Of course, the creation of these models takes time, and course content is often generated with explicit meta-data in order to work within one of these ALS. Although there has been a move towards automatic meat-data generation from open-corpus content, there is much work to be done.
Simultaneously, in Ireland, there has been a shift towards creating a country-wide learning repository, the National Digital Learning Repository (NDLR). The NDLR mission is “to promote and support Higher Education sector staff in the collaboration, development and sharing of learning resources and associate teaching practices“. The NDLR provides an online repository to support collaboration and sharing of teaching and learning resources within the Irish Third Level Education sector. So far, there are over 20 educational institutes involved in this movement.
What is necessary now? What we’re doing right now, only better. These communities are being developed, but are as yet focused on universities and ITs. How can these communities be expanded to start to include other communities of practice from indstry that provide company training? This content is being brought together into a single repository, now how can we harness user modeling and adaptation technologies in order to support those developing online courses? The technology is there, the research is starting to be proven, and the community is growing, now what we really need is real-world application.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 8th, 2009 at 1:49 pm and is filed under PhD, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
