Category: Learning and Development

Working from home, for the past two years has been the go-to option for most organisations, and sectors across the globe.

While schools were restricted to having classes online, organisations including large tech giants like Infosys, had to switch to working from home.

The questions left behind –

Are employees spending a judicial amount of time learning whilst working from home? or is WFH taken advantage of, by both employers and employees?

1) Employers going beyond their expectations for productivity in their employees

2) Employees on the other hand lack productivity due to improper monitoring, unavailability of tools to improve performance, and unclear determination of the organisation’s targets and goals.

In order for organisations to sustain in their competitive space, constant learning and development of skills are indispensable. While most organisations focus on completing tasks and milestones in time, they miss out on taking care of their employees skills being aligned to the industry demands.

However, most employees, after an understanding of the importance of being competent with skills at a given period of time, pursue learning programmes to keep themselves updated and prepare themselves for newer opportunities.

Whether or not businesses would work just as they did in the pre-covid era is still questionable and uncertain. With random thought and predictive analysis comes the benefit of understanding that most businesses would likely leverage opportunities that might have scaled up due to the crisis, requiring new skill sets and competency.

Organizations that took a vow that they would focus on transforming their employees through talent retention, training and providing required tools to their employees in order to be relevant to the current world and its demands, are the organisations that could essentially survive any other crisis in the future.

Organisations like these also stay on the edge of thinking through and strategising for the business in the new normal.

Learning and assessment platforms designed for use in the corporate world are also seeing increased roll outs and implementation. Building an assessment module that provides a situation and requires decision making is likely to build the necessary changes and development of skills for an employee.

LMS platforms could be leveraged to conduct successful skills development programs in several ways.

A Learning Management Platform could help employees boost both their technical and soft skill sets. An employee could be competent enough in knowing the technical aspects of the business with little or no soft skill sets. This in turn hinders their performance due to the inability to communicate their technical capabilities to the client.

Development of skills must also be very job-specific. An LMS could essentially help employees develop skills that actually matter and directly relate to their on-the-job performance. Organisations must shun their ideas of a “One-size-fits-one” approach to dealing with their employees. Training and development are required to be given to each employee according to their role in the organisation, their needs and preferences.

Through this, employees would understand the value and role played by these programs and relate to the subject matter better.

Content that includes simulations, and gamification of business scenarios will be more valuable. Tools that can author such content, the learning design approach/techniques will make corporate training more effective. Technology platforms that enable role play and teamwork will be more sought after.

• • Most schools started using these boards only as a factor of portraying themselves as a “Smart/Fashionable School”.
    
  • Video content was played on these smartboards when teachers were called in absent.

• • The benefit of one-on-one interactions, the efficacy of the amount of explanation needed for a particular concept, and the identification of body language and eye contact of the students were lost.
    
  • And soon, as schools incurred additional costs for the same and the lack of interest in parents with schools having these boards forced a number of schools to limit the use of these boards.
    

These LMS platforms gained much traction with their key feature being: Study anytime, anywhere with live interactive sessions, assignments and quizzes online. The sum total of the power of a Learning Management System with that of the internet made the fundamental value system of eLearning or education technology happen.

LMS also came with its own drawbacks such as the lack of simplicity in usage and too many features to configure. However, a “One-size-fits-one” approach of catering to the individual needs of each educational institution and what they deal with i.e., School Education, Higher Education, Centres for Competitive exam training etc, solved this.

Offices switched to Zoom calls for meetings, whereas schools switched to Online Classes which made Technology a ”Must-have” factor for every educational sector globally. 

However, the question here was, how effective are these Online Classes? What learning outcomes could the teachers track?

Fortunately, technology had answers of its own and all key stakeholders in the education sector, and the testing sector evolved and adapted to it, contributing significantly to the maturity of using technology in education.

Conducting virtual activities, collaborative tasks and even conducting test and assessment papers were made possible with making paper and pen exams becoming a fast disappearing approach.

Education post-pandemic is also likely to bring in a drastic change, not in terms of evading traditional methodologies of Teaching-Learning processes, but in terms of bringing in the right balance between technology and education to create a blended learning experience.

This put teachers in a state of jeopardy with not being able to complete the required syllabus on time, due to overloading of information and the lack of required learning outputs delivered by the students.

For this, schools gradually discovered podcasts as another great way of teaching new content to their students.

Students could listen to them at their own pace and gradually get themselves sunk into some great content that not just kept them engaged, but also kept them informed about the various updates happening across the globe.

Each teacher is different, and they evolve different teaching styles, many times also factoring in the ability of the class of students.

Digital content can be in any form i.e., Videos, Concepts, PPT’s, Notes or even Quizzes in order to create a collaborative learning experience.

However, it is based on the teacher’s ability to interact with their students with this combination of teaching methods.

How we learn, and how we teach is different for different age groups. Technology tools and digital content have to be more tightly glued. The educational institutions need to witness clear segmentation of content requirements for each particular age or class of students.

This also makes it easier for Digital Content creators to maximize the efficacy of content delivery, leading to a higher level of understanding for students. 

Our education systems, particularly school education systems have always been too well organised and less predictable. The education systems were driven by Curriculum frameworks, National Education standards and clearly defined learning outcomes etc.

However, the given situation of the Pandemic forcefully changed the methodologies of Teaching-Learning processes, leading to the inability of setting targets for learning outcomes from its students.

The situation also caused a lot of panic and anxiety amongst teachers and other people, leading to anger, resentment, fatigue, negativity, fear and a sense of inevitability.

Wouldn’t it be wiser of us to leverage technology to its fullest to fight this together? New wisdom of positivity, creativity and a constructive approach is crucial. The new wisdom that can help us create systems, education, environment, behaviour, tolerance to diversity, the pathway to peaceful living and individual and community wellbeing.