The first online Educa day (pre-conference session day). After building up our booth I attended a workshop about the future of corporate learning. It was an interesting session. Both the process of creating the scenarios and the scenarios themselves.
Hans de Zwart en Willem Manders led the workshop, they both work at Shell. Shell uses scenarios to get insight in possible future developments (in their case about energy) to base their decision on they make today. And that is the essence of the scenario’s, you create scenarios of the future in order to make better decisions today. Hans en Willem took the initiative to apply this on learning.
The process of creating scenarios is interesting by itself. Hans created a blog for this session (www.learningscenarios.org) which has more detailed information on the process. We where with about 30 people, divided into 4 groups. Each group had a facilitator. Our first assignment was to brainstorm about trends that might influence the future of (e)-Learning. We discussed themes like, speed, information overflow, the economic developments, culture, change in work ethics et cetera. Then we had to cluster the trends and come up with two extreme outcomes for each trend. An example of that is the Euro crises. The outcome can be that we end up with an integrated Europe with one economic policy, but the other extreme is that the European union will collapse and all countries will return to their own currency and policy. We shared the group outcomes and then we had to pick two trends (with their extreme outcomes) and place them in a quadrant. My group chose change of work ethics (extreme outcomes people will work for companies their entire live or people will work as independent contractors and go from project to project) and the availability of information (on the one hand all information is freely available on the other hand information is completely controlled by governments, organizations and corporations). You will get four possible scenarios and we tried to work them out in more detail. The groups all reported back on their outcomes. Hans en Willem gave us an assignment: we must look for trends at the online Educa conference and report them back to them. The idea is that this session was only the start of the process and we will collaborate through the website and work further on the scenarios. Hans en Willem will bring the scenarios we developed in the groups together as a starting point. You are also invited to take part in this process. Just go to the site and join in, next to the site we will use the #lrnscen hash tag to communicate. So please join this initiative, it is fun and interesting!
The Learning 2019 conference
I have been to a ton of learning conferences but this will be my first time at #learning2019. I’m looking forward to it and I’m planning to report on all interesting sessions via this blog.
