The future of learning is not content curation

Content curation blog graphic only

Content curation is important to the future of learning, however it's the not most important activity that L&D should be focused on. Learning is a process that needs to include practice, feedback and reflection. The risk with content curation is that it focuses on consuming static content and it does not foster an active learning process.

The future of learning is about helping employees become agile learners

The future of learning is about helping employees become agile learners so that they can rapidly change, grow, and improve their performance. This improvement of individual performance then leads to improvement of the organisation.

The capabilities that are needed in our workplaces are rapidly changing. Often, the expertise that employees need doesn't exist within their organisation, but information on the topic does exist online. Curating that online content is a great way to bring new knowledge into an organisation, but merely providing someone with links to an article on data science doesn't make them a data scientist.

Most content curation is just collections of resources

What is wrong with most content curation approaches is that are often are just collections of resources. They might comment about why something is interesting, but those comments don’t transform the resource into an actual learning experience. Frequently, the person that is learning the most is the curator, who is the person putting together the collection. They are actively selecting, sorting and commenting on content, and in the process learning a lot.

There are lots of reasons why eLearning focuses so much on content. Much of our time on the internet is spent engaging with content and, for most of us, our education experiences were also focused on content. This results in us replicating these experiences, which just focus on content. Yet, content is only one dimension of learning.

In our next webinar, we are going to examine different approaches to content curation that are not just about collecting and sharing links. Some of the strategies we will explore include collaborative learner driven approaches, as well as how to take a passive resource and build an active experience around it. 

 

Find out more about the webinar