Learning and thinking a step ahead – Part 1: Redesigning and realigning learning concepts

by Antje Duffert |
Feb 4, 2019 |

E-learning and digital learning have long been common terms in the business world. But how can learning and personal development in a corporate context be shaped in the digital age? Can anything of the agile principles be adopted here and can a form of agile learning be created in this way? Gain insight and valuable tips on how your health influences your learning, how learning can be shaped when the learner himself is at the center and how the company can influence the further development and innovative power of its employees through its learning and leadership culture. In this blog series, I present my ideas and would be happy to start a fruitful exchange with you.

It’s high time to talk about a transformation and realignment of learning

Learning starts with us, with you, with me – with each of us. Learning means to cope with things that were new to us before. If you look closely, new things surround us every day: the new colleague in our department, the new dish in the canteen, the new requirements for my project work or even the new TV commercial or my kid’s new question “Where does the Watussi cattle come from? [1]”. We often look at new things with mistrust, because we do not know whether these changes are positive or negative for us. Does the change pose a danger to me or can I continue to live in my safe environment?

A major topic, which is currently being addressed everywhere and discussed via the most diverse channels, is the digitalization of the working world. Probably, you did not witness the first industrial revolution. If, however, we could get a cross section of emotions or a mood barometer of contemporary witnesses of this epoch, we would be able to draw many parallels to current voices from our environment. The whole spectrum of anxiety, fear, mistrust, ignorance, hope and joy would be part of it. The concern for our job would probably be the most severe.

The great technological changes in the course of digitalization already are and have been discussed a lot in the media, politics and our society. They come and are partially already here. Nevertheless, isn’t it also time to talk about a transformation and realignment of personal development, learning and collaboration? All of us are more than just users or consumers of technology.

The beginning of my learning journey

Motivation for this blog series is my quest to improve things in my environment and empower people to change their own world for the better. My own educational path was not exactly straightforward. I graduated from high school, was a year in the USA as an au-pair and then started studying theology. Meanwhile, I realized that my main interest lies in philosophical questioning the perception of the world – and ancient Greek and Hebrew are two pretty difficult languages. After that, I changed my course of studies, but my reason sounded very loud here: don’t let the previous semesters be in vain! So I started to study religion and English for the teaching profession. During my first general school internship I realized: Teaching people is great, English is a lot of fun, religion as a teacher is too brain-dead for me, the institution school is indeed nothing at all for me. Where do we go from here? At this moment, I listened to my gut feeling for the first time and did what I enjoy doing. It was important for me to successfully complete my studies. Of course, I had to deal with the fact, that there is not THE predefined job for me. My experiences, my curiosity and my willingness to learn characterize me. Especially through trial and error and taken detours, the direction to go became clearer. For me, learning is a journey that lasts and will last my whole life.

My journey brought me to the fme AG and there into a passionate team which deals with all topics around > Change Management & E-Learning. The exchange with employees during the support of change processes in customer projects, the development of learning content, as well as my own experiences as an employee in a company have repeatedly led me to the following question: Which ways and possibilities must be created to incorporate lifelong learning and knowledge in companies?

In this context, the want to emphasize the active exchange and the experiences I made during the last 2 years with the method Working Out Loud in particular. Precisely these experiences have inspired me to this special form of sharing this topic. I value the open, inspiring and respectful interaction created by Working Out Loud [2]. In this blog series, I present the current working status of my ideas to you and I want to encourage you to discuss it with me.

The goal: inspire ideas to reshape learning

Based on experiences, especially from Change Management, employee motivation, the development of learning concepts and the practical philosophy, I developed my own holistic approach to learning, which is called Holistic Learning Approach (HLA). With this blog series, I would like to inspire you with new ideas for reshaping learning in the enterprise, but also for your personal learning.

By connecting different aspects to one holistic learning approach, I emphasize the need for learning and personal development. I want to provide you with possibilities how you can deal flexibly with new topics in the future, how you can make your own learning and that of others more successful and sustainable, how you can become more satisfied and have more fun in new situations – try it!

You can expect the following topics in this blog series:

  • Holistic Learning Approach (HLA) covers my understanding of learning in the digital age and deals holistically with the learner in the corporate context.
  • The human health – I examine here how your health can encourage or block mental work.
  • Learner centrism – covers how learning content, its teaching and learning can be shaped when the learner himself is at the center of attention.
  • Continuous improvement – introduces methods to continuously develop and improve learning content as well as your own personality.
  • Holistic Learning Concept (HLC) transfers the previously presented content into everyday work and shows the implementation possibilities of the HLA as well as which methods can be used using specific use cases as examples.

A wide variety of topics has an influence on our learning in general and our learning in the work context in particular. Does these topics also concern you? I would be happy if we could exchange ideas about these thoughts and bring this important topic more into focus within the corporate world. Would you like to be informed by e-mail as soon as another part of this blog series is published? Then simply click on “Subscribe blog series”.

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You don’t want to wait until the next part of this blog series is available to get more information about learning? Then have a look at our (German) brochure

Fünf einfache Schritte, um jedes E-Learning in Ihrem Unternehmen zu boykottieren  or visit our landing page  Change Management & E-Learning

 

 

Did you like it? Here you can read more:

Part 2 ” Holistic Learning Approach”

 

[1] The Watussi cattle comes from East Africa and you can have a look at it, for example, in the zoo “Essehof” in Braunschweig.

[2] Working Out Loud (WOL) is a program developed by John Stepper to make work visible. It means sharing – especially knowledge and recognition – as well as dealing with oneself and a topic that is important to me.

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