My Love Hate Relationship With Digital Learning

Strange as it may seem, I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with Digital Learning. In my personal life, I rarely go a day without looking something up online, learning something from social media, listening to a podcast or watching a video to learn something new.  

These are some key factors that make digital learning so effective: 

• Huge variety of delivery formats

• Any time accessibility

• Personality and social learning

• Ability to refer back at the point when the knowledge is needed

But yet, when used commercially, digital learning solutions so often result in an underwhelming experience for the learner. Whether because of the content itself or the overall delivery model or style, front line teams generally have a poor impression of digital learning and rarely consider it a legitimate method for genuinely developing their knowledge or advancing their skills. 

In my experience, digital learning strategies are too often… 

• Purely for box ticking

• Laborious and disengaging

• Disconnected from real life processes and real life people

• Generic and slow moving

Doing it better and empowering front line people through easily accessible, high impact digital learning solutions is my passion and I am really pleased to have just started my professional diploma in digital learning design with the Digital Learning Institute. My hope is to align my own thinking with some academic principles in order to help you leverage those positives and minimise those gremlins that limit the effectiveness of your digital learning solutions.

Over the next few weeks and months I’m going to write a series of blog posts to share some ideas and some key takeaways from what I am learning. Hopefully you find them useful.