Elliot Masie’s Learning Consortium newsletter Perspectives has a 17 page report called The Voice of the Learner: How Employees Learn in 2008. It is based on over 6,000 survey submissions, and contains valuable information on what people do and what technologies they use for learning in corporate settings. I was especially interested in the learning tools usage that shows, for example, that 58% of those surveyed took a self-paced e-learning course, while only 6% played a podcast on a mobile device. (GW)
The Voice of the Learner: how employees learn in 2008 | Masie Center | July 2008
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{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
I’m not surprised that only 6% of those surveyed played a podcast on a mobile device. In fact, I suspect the percentage skews high because of the people likely to have completed the survey — much the same way that a survey posted on this blog would skew toward people who read blogs.
To listen to podcasts like this, you’ve got to have a device that plays them; you’ve got to transfer the podcast to the device; you’ve got to download it or subscribe to it in the first place; you’ve got to know it exists in order to get it.
People who’ve done that for more than six months, as they read this, are thinking, “Yeah, so?” But people who haven’t done that are thinking, “Yep.”
Learning via podcast is still a fairly high techno-hurdle, especially when 42% of those surveyed have not take a self-paced e-learning course.
Hi Dave,
Perhaps the problem of lack of use is that podcasts are another form of instructor centered presentation/instruction. I think that we need to create new instructional design models for the use of mobile devices, and see them as tools in a larger educational experience.
Gary: sorry to be late replying — CoComment seems to have let its update ripen for two weeks.
You’ve got a point on the instructor-centered aspect.
Would you say that if I as a learner (or, more accurately, as someone who needs some info or skill) find a podcast that seems likely to give me that info or help me acquire that skill, “instructor centered” is not a completely accurate label? Or at least an incomplete one?
When I was creating courses for Amtrak’s reservation system, we decided we could individualize the hell out of them easily and cheaply by having relatively short, tightly focused topics. Our goal was to have the average course take less than 20 minutes, and to make its objective clear. So if you didn’t want to know how to check train status (“is the train on time?”), you individualized by not taking the course.
Instructor-centered? Sure, in that we weren’t asking you how you’d like to go about learning to check train status. But I thought (and think) there’s a learner-relevance factor at work: if the topic means a lot to me, and if I feel I’m getting what I want, I’ll put up with lack of graphics, low pizazz, what have you.
None of this takes away from your comment about mobile devices: they’re new, and not that widely used (except maybe cell phone screens), but they’re certainly not going away.