Stephen Walsh’s reputation preceded him and attracted one of the largest attendances we have had at the Lunchtime Series. Stephen was to cover two topics on the day, but that was possibly a bit ambitious from a planning perspective. When Stephen had covered the first topic of ‘10 Learning Insights from the UK’ we were out of time, but he has promised to return in the future to complete his talk.
The ten insights Stephen covered were the views from City & Guilds Kineo (C&GK) clients from around the world who had contributed to their annual Learning Insights Survey.
The report is very well written and does not need to be summarized point by point here, instead to relay the directions that C&GK see coming down the tracks.
The direction in general terms is a continuing trend towards the need to embrace pervasive learning, learning that happens mainly outside the LMS, this in turn requires an agility and an ability to deal with diversity and speed of change across platforms and learning design, to provide more ‘empathy’ in learning design toward learners’ needs.
The other broad development area is that of informal learning, the need to pilot initiatives, measure and acknowledge results as an ongoing activity and to promote social and apprenticeship approaches to learning.
And of course one of the final findings was that budgets are still tight, so show the value of the investment.
The final point refers to the agility of sites like Google to know about us and predict what we need or want, Stephen believes we need the LMS of the near future to be able to provide a similar service.
