If leaders are learners, then possibly the biggest obstacle to people developing their leadership capacity, is finding time to learn. With the high demands on every moment of peoples lives, time is at a premium.
The digital age offers many wonderful learning opportunities for leaders. People download audio books to listen to while commuting, they sign up for online courses, and even source information and potential business via social media.
There are setbacks to digital learning, which includes: cost, effective assessment, self-learning, and engagement with others. These obstacles have less to do with the digital medium for learning, and more to do with our make up as humans.
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The cost of some digital platforms is at a premium, driven by the greed of designers to ensure a good and sustainable monthly income. Obviously people want to be paid for their efforts, but do they have to become super wealthy with the first subscription? Digital learning has the potential to reach into all the corners of the world, but it seems the poor will be excluded from this new age of learning - again.
Competence is measured in three key ways; what you know, how effectively you can adapt what you know, and how well you do what you know. Doing is the practical aspects of competence and difficult to measure over digital platforms. Evaluating practical ability requires designers to think outside of the existing assessment boxes, to find original methods of proving learning leaders competent. Without properly assessing peoples competence, the digital class become as useless as the goverment class, giving people information, but never producing skills.
Finding motivation to learn on their own can be tough for most people, and results in online learners dropping off the course before they complete it. This is a dilemma with few answers. Learners require a different kind of skills sets and a new level of commitment in order for the online learning platforms to be successful. Hopefully learners are able to link intrinsic values to why they are doing the course in the first place, creating a good foundation for ongoing motivation. Without catering for the difficulty of self learning, and failing to actively engage learners, online courses become as ineffective as old methods of study. We need to use the medium to improve delivery AND results to make the effort and cost worth while.
The online learning designers are faced with challenges that reach far beyond just their coding capabilities, and requires them to understand human nature. Developing leadership within this cyber class is going to take two-way communication between designers and students, to chop change and adjust the mix, until we get what we need in this dispensation - effective digital learning that properly, and cost effectively equips people to own their development. Is the technology available to do this? Yes. Does engaging, assessment rich, and affordable learning happen online? Mmm, maybe, but not in a manner that sets the learning revolution ablaze just yet.
The missing ingredient is again - time. With development and change happening at a sonic pace, designers rush their platforms to keep aligned with newest technologies available, taking effective learning beyond the capacity of the end users. My plea is to the designers to slow down, and let us, the learners, catch up with where you are at. Let us get used to the platforms and learn to engage with the learning, and with you, the designers, to tell you what we like, want, and need most. All of that will take a little affordability and just a little while longer.
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