Digital rebellion in L&D or digital fast food?

Is social learning or social collaboration with tools like Microsoft Teams the “new” informal learning?

Becker: Let’s say: A good camera does not make a great photographer. Similarly, structured social learning most certainly needs more than simply using Microsoft Teams. However, providing a good tool for social learning is the first, important step in the right direction. The professional development organizers must then step up and look into the underlying concepts.

How should teacher training be designed to make the most of the opportunities offered by digital education?

Becker: A great range of excellent offers for teacher-specific CPD is already available. The focus must now shift towards curating this content and structuring it in line with appropriate curricula. This should be handled – and financed – centrally. In the long term, this whole process needs to start one step earlier, as part of the initial vocational training. Digital teaching and learning concepts should really be included in the degree course.

Why not structure professional development like Netflix? That could encourage employees to engage in continuous professional development and keep learning.

Becker: “Netflix-like learning” has been used as a synonym for the necessary change in learning experience for several years now. However, we must be careful not to set entertainment at equal with learning. Especially the side effects of Netflix, like binge watching, are not always useful or desirable for learning. We can learn from Netflix how to create incentive models. But we must also consider that increased consumption doesn’t always mean a better learning outcome. Quite the contrary, in fact: We need to learn the right thing in an appropriate dose.

What does the internal knowledge transfer at Ergosign look like?

Wallach: Ergosign uses various complementary channels for knowledge transfer. Thanks to this diversity, factors like the learners’ individual level of experience can be taken into consideration appropriately. For example, our internal and external specialists utilize workshop formats, live-stream Lunch & Learn lectures to all locations, and run practical kick-starter campaigns for 1-2 days at a time. This provides an introduction to basic topics and progresses to advanced UX design and development. A comprehensive and ongoing Ergosign guide provides answers to (almost) all questions about structures and processes in the company. Finally, onboarding buddies are allocated to each new team member to help them find their feet at Ergosign. After all, a quick chat at the coffee machine is often used as a welcome opportunity to clarify urgent issues.

How can I reach people of different cognitive abilities without making things boring for those starting from a good place?

Karapanos: Differentiation makes it possible. Two possible ways to approach this are to divide the learning group into sub-groups of homogeneous performance or by differentiating internally. Organizing school classes by year or dividing school kids into different forms of secondary education based on interests and achievement is based on the idea of creating sub-groups of homogeneous performance. In some countries, like Germany, kids even need to achieve certain marks to qualify for more ambitious secondary schools. As the examples show, homogeneity is relative. There are, of course, stronger and weaker students within a class, regardless of where the line is drawn. Internal differentiation strives to catch the differences within a learning group by differentiating learning offers according to the difficulty or scope of a task. Both approaches mean more work for teaching staff. For several decades, the hope that this additional effort could somehow be “outsourced” to intelligent adaptive learning systems that automatically tailor the learning path to the learner’s learning potential has persisted. Thus far, realization has been of limited success.

I really need configuration options like personal interface set-ups when using Zoom and GoToWebinar. We often use conferencing tools even though many interaction features are missing. Is a UX revolution our only hope for using it with our colleagues?

Karapanos: We should expect evolutionary development, rather than a revolution. However, UX will play an important role. The basic feature range is comparable across all video conferencing tools. None of them really offers more than the competition. Looking at it pragmatically, the providers are in a quality stalemate. To stand out from the competition, they can leverage pricing and service differences, and emphasize product use quality by addressing specific needs.