Experiential learning is based on practice. People practice what they’ve been taught by themselves or others. They practice what they invent or clone from precedents. In every case they learn something by doing it, usually over and over until they get it right.
Make way for an exciting new paradigm. Learning by doing now has a partner called learning by being.
The idea is simple. Instead of just training people by giving them tasks to perform, we also give them environments to inhabit. The environments are interactive, multidimensional and multi-sensory.
Once in such an environment, people can learn in bolder better ways through immersion. Immersive learning is the process of seeing and understanding not as a role player, but as a participant.
Immersive learning is not new. You could say it started with baptism and communion, but it's actually older than that.
The planetarium is an example that began in antiquity and still thrives. Occupying the center of a virtual universe, people engage with the physics of energy and matter. They learn by becoming one with the stars.
Dr. Stan Cohen, a gastroenterologist with the Children’s Center for Digestive Health Care in Atlanta, uses an immersive technology much smaller than a Zeiss (“we make it visible”) projector. Weighing less than four grams, the PillCam SB is a vitamin-sized capsule with a miniature video camera inside. A patient swallows the capsule. The capsule takes flash photography as it travels the length of the GI tract, two shots per second for about eight hours, producing more than 50,000 detailed color images.
The images are transmitted from the capsule inside the patient to a storage device on the patient’s belt. Software transforms the data into a virtual world. Dr. Cohen can then explore that world on a “fantastic voyage” of computer-assisted investigation, detection and diagnosis.
This is immersive learning in the service of children’s health and it’s incredibly powerful.
Becker Multimedia is creating powerful immersive learning for a real world producer of fantastic voyages. Our assignment is to orient new employees of a cruise line before they ever set foot on a ship. By the time they arrive, they'll have already seen and understood the ship from the inside out, engaging as participants in an amazingly complex and challenging business environment.
Our immersive learning strategy uses a new robotic camera mount called GigaPan Epic. Weighing less than four pounds, the robot is small enough to stand on a tripod and set up in the smallest spaces imagined by ship designers (the shower in your stateroom).
A photographer tells the robot what to shoot, then presses go. One GigaPan setup may include up to a 360 degree panoramic range-of-motion and a -60/+90 degree tilt range-of-motion.
In other words, the robot can shoot everything you can see if you stand in the same place.
Only the robot sees more than you can. Because the camera is shooting high resolution close ups, details that appear in the resulting photographs are astonishing. (Remember Cortázar's Blow Up, filmed by Antonioni? This is Blow Up on steroids.)
It’s no exaggeration to say that the human eye cannot perceive what the GigaPan system records, because our eyes don’t have zoom capabilities and our brains lack the robot’s capacity to pay attention.
The robot takes pictures without human assistance. Humans are the sherpas of a GigaPan shoot, High resolution digital close ups are then downloaded to computer and processed by stitcher software. The output of stitching is a detailed panoramic photo that viewers can pan and zoom, seeing things in their totality and also in the finest detail.
Check out President Obama to get the general idea.
In the course of one week with three GigaPan robots and six sherpas, Becker photographed the entire interior of the largest cruise ship in the world, taking about 50,000 stills stitched into 150 panoramas. It is now possible to see that ship as though you were actually standing in it.
There's more.
Seeing is the largest part of understanding, but we go beyond seeing. Visitors to the virtual ship navigate completely around various rooms and spaces, zooming into close ups with gorgeous detail. On top of that, they click hot spots programmed onto the photographs. The hot spots support changes of perspective and interactive storytelling.
The interactive panos are published within a larger e-learning Flash application, accessible to new hires and employees everywhere in the world.
So imagine you’re a chef who’s been hired to work in a state-of-the-art kitchen on board a state-of-the-art ship. Immersive learning helps you explore that kitchen and closely inspect its fixtures, equipment and processes. It lets you ask questions, as though you’re on a tour and want the tour guide to explain things. On top of that the guide (the kitchen itself) asks you questions from time to time and scores your answers, making sure that you’re truly present in this virtual moment.
Eventually when you board the ship and start cooking, you may experience déjà vu. Because in virtual reality, you’ve been there before.
As learning pros ponder one of life’s persistent questions, how to use virtual worlds for training and education, immersion should be near the top of our design priorities. In many occupations and industries, there’s just no substitute for learning by truly being there. Once you are, anything and everything is possible.
The first time research brought me to Ireland, I was struck by a national oxymoron: "it is and it isn't." As in...
To someone with Germanic bloodlines like mine, it either is OR it isn't. It can't be both. And furthermore once we believe what is, then "strait is the gate, and narrow is the way" forward.
I was recently reminded of the oxymoron by guru Donald Tam, for whom it is a credo. Like most rabbis, Tam's vocation is teaching rather than preaching, questioning rather than vouchsafing. His faith is centered on learning and intellectual growth. Its scripture and devotions are spiritual and yet practical templates of education and training for life.
For Tam, "it is and it isn't" explains how traditional Jewish learning works, and works very well at that! Among other things he told me about two defining principles of Jewish learning. These principles happen to be alien to popular instructional design theory; they are missing from the standard corporate curriculum:
Disciples of Robert Mager may scratch their heads. "Are you serious? How can empowerment be missing from the corporate curriculum, when training exists ONLY to enable people to do things?"
Well, that may be true, but a more precise statement of purpose for criterion-referenced instruction is that "training exists only to enable people to do as they're told." That is no closer to empowerment than training animals to perform in a circus.
In contrast to this, empowerment is primarily about engagement. The individual is taught to engage directly with the text, and encouraged to "own" the message.
Training of this kind does not exist to produce workers who do as they're told. It exists to cultivate human beings who can do what they believe is right, necessary and best in any situation.
There is a huge difference between these outcomes. And I am sorry to report that most corporate learning is admittedly about circus-like performance rather than empowerment.
In contrast, Jewish learning is mainly about empowerment and really not about performance. That may be why Jews (like the Irish) tend to argue about everything!
Corporate learning takes direction from business leaders, as it should. However the leadership model that prevails in most businesses is a top-down hierarchy.
I think you'll agree that clarity, certainty and decisiveness are hallmarks of effective business leaders. Most don't condone dissent among employees. They expect performance rather than empowerment. They want employees to do as they're told quickly and expertly.
Is anything wrong with that? Well, there is and there isn't.
At the risk of citing way too extreme an example, I ask you to recall a scene in Schindler's List, when the Jewish inmate of a lager protests the faulty construction of a building. The lager's CEO, Amon Goeth, has the inmate shot on the spot, but not because she was wrong (she was a professional engineer trained to do what is right, necessary and best in any situation.)
No, he ordered her immediate execution because she dissented. She did not do as she was told.
I know, the example is provocative, but I use it to make a point. In contrast to an organizational model premised on obedience, traditional Jewish learning prizes dissent. Jews who are empowered by learning to become more authentic human beings are not expected to agree with authority all the time. On the contrary, they are encouraged to investigate, doubt, reconsider, reframe; and yes, to argue with peers, parents and even teachers (poor rabbi!) for their personal and informed point of view.
A concept that underlies Jewish learning is that no individual stands apart; that everybody exists in the community. For that reason, people who dissent are nonetheless bound by their common purpose, a social contract in practical terms. Dialectics get them to truth together, better than marching in lock step with transient and imperfect leaders.
Fair enough, I thought, but what about productivity and efficiency? A business can't be run with arguments! I asked Rabbi Tam why chronic dissent doesn't lead to anarchy. He had a ready answer.
Yes, Jewish learning is messy; but no, it doesn't lead to chaos. Why? Because underneath the differences is a bedrock of values. Jewish learning promotes empowerment and encourages dissent. But it doesn't tolerate deviance from core values of the faith.
Values rather than discipline and obedience have been enough to sustain the Jewish community through unimaginable vicissitudes. I was amazed to learn that there were never Jewish police until Nazis created them.
Ireland has a traditionally scholastic Christian culture. But the hero of Ireland's national epic, Leopold Bloom in James Joyce's Ulysses, is Jewish.
Joyce's vision of his native land was that nothing is absolutely certain for everybody. Everything can be known, and lost, and found again in something different and perhaps nearer the truth. Every student is a seeker. Every teacher is a guide and fellow traveler.
If I were to say that traditional Jewish and Irish culture have much to offer the designers of corporate learning, you could say, well, it does and it doesn't. And I would reply, now we're getting somewhere!
As we brace for landfall of Hurricane Economy-Run-Amok, let's recall a happier time for retail: the eighteenth century.
According to Judith Flanders, in 1759 the greatest retailer of Western Civilization opened his first store in Staffordshire. His name was Josiah Wedgwood. He was the Ralph Lauren of his era.
For Wedgwood then as for Lauren now, life began humbly. With astonishing imagination, both men built vast commercial empires around luxury brands, and made plenty of room for the aspiring middle class to partake.
Flanders explains Wedgwood's success. For him, "selling was an intellectual pleasure, an art form." I know exactly the same is true of Lauren. No business model or formula explains their success. They are beyond the template.
However for most of us in the 21st century, selling has degenerated from a service that informs and delights consumers, into a custodial task of looking after the store.
I don't know why this is, but I suspect it's because selling is no longer a pleasure or an art among those who do it for a living. It's a grind, done for the paycheck. And learning pros bear some responsibility for this.
The typical sales training we design is about memorizing product information and greeting the customer, discovering needs, identifying solutions, overcoming objections, and closing the deal.
Let's be honest, this is manure.
There's nothing wrong with the proverbial five steps of selling, except that almost no retail sales associate actually performs them today. We train sales associates to do things that rarely actually happen on the selling floor.
Why? Because the five steps of selling are behavioral expressions of something that is missing from the average girl or the boy at the counter; something richer and deeper in the soul of a true retailer: Wedgwood's intuitive grasp, his flair, his zest for selling.
In so many words, experts as diverse as Len Berry and Scott Bedbury tell us that retail sales training should cultivate intuition, flair and zest for selling. If it does, then the five steps will occur naturally, maybe inevitably.
But not because associates follow a sterile template. Rather because they can connect more uniquely, relevantly, sincerely with consumers. Those are the selling skills we should teach after the current storm clouds disperse.
Becker Multimedia has designed orientation for several fine organizations, including a global shoe and apparel company that was a top 100 Great Place to Work for many years running.
The company's CEO admired social activist Bill Shore, so I took a look for myself. I found this gem in The Light of Conscience. I imagine it's what Stephen Covey would say about onboarding new employees:
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