Wednesday, February 15, 2006

Learner driven learning

With apologies for the generic use of the pronoun "he" - I find "they" ungrammatical and "he/she" clumsy. Feel free to substitute the pronoun(s) of your choice.

The learner has realised that he is the customer. All those "customer is king" catchphrases apply to him. He can "vote with his feet", "take his business elsewhere"... pick your cliche. While there will always be learners who want prepackaged learning, an increasing number want to have a say in what they learn, when they learn it and how they learn it... even if they learn it, I suppose.

So we who earn our crust by meeting those needs are going to have to wake up our ideas. We need to re-evaluate the contents our toolkit. We need to buy in to the catchphrases ourselves, remember that the learner is our customer and make sure that he is getting what he wants.

The problem is that the learner, the end-user of the learning, is often not heard by the provider until the material goes live. Perhaps we ought to look at this part of the process. How do they gauge market requirements on the high street?

Hmm. I'm not pretending to know the answers, just reflecting.

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