Personalisation in Learning
I just love Elliott Masie’s work and his passion for learning.
Are any of my readers heading to his conference in November? Steve Wozniak is keynoting. Looks set to be fab.
One of the contributions that Elliott makes each year to learning is his learning trends report and of course I read it with a firm eye on learning transfer.
Personalisation is one of the key trends he has spoken about this year.
I think personalisation is something we are seeing across society in general, not just in learning. Think Coke’s ‘Share a Coke with…’ campaign. Or every day when I read the Sydney Morning Herald at the moment advertisements pop up for flights to LA. Nice work Google on knowing I’m about to book a trip and encouraging me to get onto it! (…And if I have one more discount voucher in my email for the Westinghouse refrigerator I looked at 2 or 3 times I’ll scream!)
That’s the annoying side of personalisation maybe – or perhaps not so if I hadn’t just bought a Samsung fridge!
The good side of personalisation for learning is that we can tailor it specifically to the learner’s needs. Everyone is of course unique and the sheep dip approach is no longer valid. But what’s the hybrid? We still want people to learn in groups, interacting, collaborating and sharing learning, and having people sat solo at their computer reviewing content just isn’t appealing.
In addition, where is it best to put the personalisation – in the content or the application? My argument of course is that the application is what needs to be personalised. How someone will personally use the learning or the content is the most important aspect.
‘People learn in groups and change as individuals’ is a phrase I’ve heard to tout and I fundamentally see that individual follow up post learning is so much more powerful that group.
In practice, groups rarely facilitate or improve the transfer of learning. They may be better than nothing but they don’t make much difference. They may allow people to exchange views and discuss the material but they can too easily be viewed as a convenient ‘break from work’ or a forum to vent and complain rather than a constructive place to solve ongoing implementation issues and resolve challenges. Plus there is rarely any accountability in a group session. Having an opportunity to personalise the training and reflect on how the new information and skills could help an individual is key to transfer of learning and yet this process does not happen in groups.
In a study by Marilyn Wood Daudelin, (1996), a group of 48 managers from a Fortune 500 company were divided into four groups. Each group was to engage in a one-hour reflection session where they were encouraged to think about what they had learnt. The first group, labelled the ‘individual group’, was asked to reflect on their own. The second group labelled the ‘helper group’ was asked to reflect with the help of a coach. The third group known as the ‘peer group’ were joined by three or four other people from the study and asked to reflect together. And the fourth group was the control group who did not engage in any reflection. Each group was asked to follow the same four-stage reflection process and use the same reflection questions. As expected, the individual group and helper group achieved more learning than the control group, who did not engage in any reflection activity. What was surprising, however, was that the peer group did not show a statistically significant improvement. The reason for this was put down to three things. First, the peer group focused on finding similarities between each other’s experiences, which actually prevented them from personalizing the training and assimilating the learning more fully than groups one and two. The need to discuss a number of different topics prevented the group from going into useful depth about any one issue and, because there were more people in the group, it was much less structured. None of these peer groups followed the reflection process or asked the reflection questions, whereas those who reviewed the material alone or in one-on-one groups did.
In groups, topics are often only discussed superficially so as to give everyone a chance to speak rather than reflecting on the genuine value of the training to each individual personally. Personalised reflection is key to the transfer of learning and it is this exact personalised reflection that is so often missing in follow-up discussion groups.