A tale of two learning superpowers
From his recent travels in US and Asia, Martin Addison reports on how China is taking advantage of a lack of legacy systems to leapfrog the US in terms of learning technology.
I recently returned from a business trip overseas that took in two of our biggest markets: USA and China. As well as far too much time on long haul flights, surviving on a diet of plane food and in-flight movies I got a unique chance to reflect on the state of learning and development in these two vast countries.
First up was the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD) International Conference and Exposition, which took place in sunny Orlando, Florida. This year’s event theme was ‘Learning to lead’ and included more than 270 educational and networking sessions. Those that particularly caught my eye were focussed on the growing role of social media and particularly the use of Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. All three have captured a huge following and give L&D professionals a new set of tools to make training more engaging and effective: the idea of a trainer embedding a live Twitter feed into their PowerPoint presentation to facilitate audience response was new to me.
As a business that’s approaching its 40th anniversary, at Video Arts we are very familiar with the changes that have driven our market and the adoption of learning technologies. In the US I suspect that the size and scale of implementing changes has sometimes produced a time lag between innovation and large-scale adoption. For example, the US market was amongst the last to move away from the use of VHS tapes in the corporate classroom. However, I saw plenty of signs that this is changing and that the learning technology adoption curve is speeding up.
The shift from viewing ‘training as an event’ to ‘learning as a journey’ was very obvious. In this new mind-set dynamic learning becomes integrated with an employee’s work and results in changed performance. The ASTD took a very American analogy - the trainer is no longer the Lone Ranger, they’re a business partner and member of a collaborative team focussed on business performance. Or to put it another way, the ‘sage on the stage’ is becoming ‘the guide on the side’.
Social media is driving this shift from the traditional notion of the trainer as researcher and source of information to trainer as learning designer creating an environment where their customer-driven content and solutions can flourish. I’ve no doubt that by the time that the conference reconvenes next year in Denver, the balance of training in the US will have tilted further away from the classroom and closer to 24/7 access to a myriad of learning assets.
From the US to China; specifically Shanghai, the epicentre of technology and fast-moving change. It is nine years ago that Video Arts launched in the Chinese market. In that time we have been lucky to have a front row seat in the remarkable growth of new training technologies.
Nine years ago the learning technology market in China was based solely on resources for the classroom and in particular VHS tapes. Now, however, China is fast becoming a learning technology superpower as a high training need and technological capability accelerate changes in L&D. China is up-skilling its workforce and making itself even more internationally competitive by adopting a leap-frog style of learning technology implementation. Without the barriers of updating past systems, procedures and technologies, the shift from classroom to informal learning that has taken so long in the US is happening very quickly in China. As a result China’s learning community has avoided many of the problems we encountered in the west with early online training. And they are racing ahead by embracing mobile learning.
With hundreds of millions of potential learners with smart phones China is quickly establishing itself as the learning superpower to watch: watch this space.
