Modern Workplace Learning and Learning Relationship Management (LRM)
Hybrid workforces and access to a new range of learning experience tools associated with Zoom, Microsoft Teams and such initiatives as Microsoft Viva, Learning Management Systems’ aficionados are scrambling for new models to match emerging practices.
Terms such as ‘Learning Experience Platforms’ (LXP’s), ‘Connectivist Systems’ and ‘Modern Workplace Learning’ all point to agility, self-service, utility, mobility and connections as the critical responses to learning in the hybrid, post covid-19 workplace.
These circumstances have drawn me back to my work around 2008–2011, published in my doctoral thesis “Towards Learning Utility” (Keough 2011). Here I defined a new model for learning ‘management’ based on relationships called Learning Relationship Management. There are many recent practitioners who have proposed a modern approach tio learning in workplace settings, and among adults. Prominent among then is the excellent ideas established by Jane Hart (https://www.modernworkplacelearning.com/cild/mwl/about/) .
Theory and Practice
As practitioners develop methods, academics such as Otto Scharmer (Theory U and the Presencing Institute) offer relevant ideas, and a theoretical background for the post covid era of education. https://medium.com/presencing-institute-blog/ten-lessons-from-covid-for-the-decade-of-transformation-ahead-73302926629e
The LRM model aligns well with these ideas and practices. It is interesting to compare the 4-ds of learning in Jane Harts material to the utility associated with the LRM model. It is also informative to see how these ideas connect to Scharmer’s understanding of transformation.
Other contributors who have informed my thinking on these ideas include Steve Wheeler and Gilly Salmon.
The common thread is the importance of self-fulfillment in learning, and the role of connections and connectedness.
My LRM model is grounded deeply in social theory, particularly the ideas associated with Habermas’ Communicative Action.
The Learning Relationship Management model aims to promote Learning utility. That is the usefulness of learning in the hands of the learning. However, in my view, education has always suffered from being programmatic and institutional. It favours the slow and controlled process of supply. As a result, learning supply meeting learning demand in a timely and accurate fashion has always been problematic, and never more so in the hybrid world of work and professional practice world we find ourselves during and following the COVID 19 era.
Enter the Learning Relationship Management (LRM) model. This model offers structure to modern andragogy. Learning demand resulting from an ‘agile’ demand profile can be met by an equally ‘agile’ supply of learning.
As learning needs demand, learners can move up and down the layers to match the learning requirement, desired learning style, and required certification. This movement between layers is paramount to satisfaction levels and andragogy. Through choice and natural selection, learners are encouraged to find the correct knowledge transfer and recognition level. The layers are best demonstrated in a pyramid. See Figure 1 below.
Figure 1. LRM Model
We are tracking the move from LRM to Learning utility.
My journey through LRM and beyond seeks to come to terms with the impact on Learning Utility of the new, personalized, fast-speed and mobile communication technologies — such as home broadband internet access. It endeavours to locate and examine the changes in learning practice when new communications technologies naturalize, becoming an uncritical experience within everyday communication, such as a Learning Utility as convenient as electric power or reticulated water. In doing so, it proposes to de-naturalize those impacts: to pull them forward, into the critical consciousness of the researcher — even where this means relocating the many formal and less formal responses noted at the initial encounter.
What is particularly poignant is the issue of how we are coming to understand informational exchanges and ‘flows’ within the field of Internet-enabled learning. Much emphasis in the development of workplace learning theory has been given to pedagogical issues, techniques, and theories for delivering education to adults rather than to children (see Knowles 1975, 2014; Maslow, 1970). At the same time, further issues are raised as to whether learning cognition (Piaget 1971; Vygotsky, 1987), as outlined within the major classic studies, ‘holds up’ inside the new informational systems. Do online teaching methods (Berg, 2003), having adapted to the affordances and the social directedness of the latest delivery technologies, encourage us to ‘think differently? If so, how?
The debate has raged in both popular and academic circles about the benefits or otherwise of learning systems that utilize a range of new digital technologies. These are primarily derived from internet protocols, developed in the interests of the technologists who designed them, so are they suited to educational and training needs? Do they promote the kinds of learning most valued within contemporary paradigms? Do the new communicative systems operate within those same paradigms — or is something entirely new and perhaps not yet well described or understood in play?
This project takes the view that the most critical change factor associated with digital communications technology and learning lies in the nature and effectiveness of the learning communications relations. These complex relations are enabled and fostered within the current design of the specific technologies used, rather than in models and practices of learning itself — at least in this relatively early stage of (re)development of electronic and mobile learning systems. Without moving to a position of technological determinism, this project seeks to accommodate within its model of what it will call a digital Learning Utility, considering the communicative relations favoured within digital communications flows. It is critical to examine how we might understand the way/s that these impact users who seek educational instruction online within the self-directed ‘search’ modes of digital communication and its new ‘pull’ services.
Contemporary understandings of learning relations
Learning can be and is today often considered to be, in itself, a type of ‘Communicative Action’ (Habermas 1986). It is closely allied to and dependant upon the communicative relations established and practised within its delivery and developed across broader facets of less formal communicative practice produced inside society. In other words, digital learning practices and theories, unlike earlier models, tend to stand as much outside established educational systems and the institutions that design, deliver and regulate them as within them. Without proposing for this perhaps inherently de-regulated sector a set of limiting definitions (see Castells, 2001, for an account of the internet as in part the product of a culture of de-centralized peer-collaboration), I want to come to understand where learning now resides and how learning relations are evolving, once they shift away from traditionally institutionalized ‘top-down, centre-to-margins’ controls.
The first step in bring structure to the current ‘rush’ to connected learning technologies lay in foundations based of Communities of practice and Communities of interest. While much has been written about Communities of Practice, the original insightful ideas of Etienne Wenger, (Wenger 1998) remain cogent and simple as a starting place. LRM is a plan to bring those principles to a contemporary education structure.
The LRM Model further:
·Relates learning activity directly to work/career and life aspirations by primarily focusing on an individual’s unique needs and interests
· Constantly informs and educates by operating as a media location, with news and information for daily life utilizing Blogging and Podcasting techniques.
· Can teach universally By allowing the incorporation of scenario-based learning, gaming and simulations and video demonstration in its learning programs
· Promotes a continuous sense of achievement by offering modular programs that bring short term results while accumulating credit towards longer-term Certification and Qualification goals
· It is convenient, cheaper, and more value-laden than a traditional learning institution while still maintaining social contact benefits through partnership locations.
· Empowers the individual through a guided program promoting choice and specific pathways.
· Is socially inclusive through the provision of low-cost entry points, including some free learning. It mainly provides access to those unable to reach a learning institution.
· It is standards-based, allowing for a high level of partnership and interoperability.
Successful ‘Modern Workplace Learning’ or ‘Learning Relationship Management’ as I would coin it, relies on understanding the shift in power to the learner. The enterprise learning climate, in my view, needs careful management with new structural approaches suited to the self-service and demand-driven behaviours that have transformed many other human practices such as travel, public services, finance and retail.
References
Berg, G 2003, The knowledge medium. Information Science Publishing, Hershey PA.
Castells, M 2001, The Internet galaxy: reflections on the Internet, business, and society, Oxford University Press, New York.
Habermas, J 1986, The Theory of Communicative Action. Reason and the Rationalization of Society. Polity Press, London
Hart , J 2021 https://www.modernworkplacelearning.com/cild/mwl/about/
Keough, M., 2010. Toward learning utility: the evolution of online learning as a network utility in industry settings (Doctoral dissertation)
Knowles, M.S., 1975. Self-directed learning: a guide for learners and teachers.
Knowles, M.S., Holton III, E.F. and Swanson, R.A., 2014. The adult learner: The definitive classic in adult education and human resource development. Routledge.
Maslow, A.H., 1970. New introduction: Religions, values, and peak-experiences. Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 2(2), pp.83–90.
Piaget, J., 1971. The theory of stages in cognitive development.
Scharmer, O 2021 https://medium.com/presencing-institute-blog/ten-lessons-from-covid-for-the-decade-of-transformation-ahead-73302926629e
Vygotsky, L.S., 1987. The collected works of LS Vygotsky: the fundamentals of defectology (Vol. 2). Springer Science & Business Media.
Wenger, E., 1998. Communities of practice: Learning as a social system. Systems thinker, 9(5), pp.2–3.
