Why we should stay hands-on in a hands-off learning world

RSVP Design fielded a strong team at the ATD Conference and Expo in Washington DC last month. As ever it was a great opportunity to meet friends and clients from all parts of the world, to see how the world of adult learning is evolving, and to have a lot of fun flying the flag for experiential learning. My #1 takeaway is a memory of the number of people who came to our booth and said things like "It's good to see people who are still hands-on" or "You're offering real experiences!". Looking around the expo hall it's easy to imagine why we elicited these reactions, it seemed to me like there was a massive overrepresentation of companies selling AI solutions and psychometric approaches. It would be easy to believe that the learning industry has collectively agreed that all future learning will be mediated by some form of device screen.  

The numbers seem to support this perception. According to Devlin Peck ‘online learning is the fastest-growing market in the education industry, with a 900% global growth rate since the year 2000’ and, ‘America’s online learning industry is projected to be worth $687 billion by 2030.’

As somebody coming to the end of a 50 year career in education and learning I find this very strange in that we, as scientists, are only just coming to any kind of understanding of what human learning is; we still can't fully define the process of human learning. It's only recently with ideas around neuroplasticity, and being able to image-scan brains in action, that we're starting what I think will be a long process of moving towards any adequate definition. Yet in that Devlin Peck article we read "Also referred to as eLearning or distance learning, online learning is remote learning via the internet." - a worthless statement if we can't define learning in the first place.

I come from a background in experiential learning, and part of my belief in that approach is that "Every human being is in an ongoing and never-ending process of self-constructing his or her own unique understanding and meaning from all of the information and experiences they are exposed to (including unconsciously)" Cassie Janisch

In accepting this as a basis for my work I have also to accept the limitations of the andragogical designs I create - no matter how elaborate the design, or how apparently creative the lesson, at the end of the day each recipient of that input will always self-construct their own meaning from what they are exposed to. And the implications of this?

No teacher can ever predict the exact learning (if any) that will emerge as a result of a given learning input. 
Only the learner knows the meaning they have assigned to that information, and what other information he or she has combined it with in order to reach the understanding they have reached. 
Every single person combines all of the inputs they receive in their own completely unique and individual way to construct their own understanding.
All teaching is only ever a potential catalyst to learning and does not definitely result in learning in and of itself. 

Pretty salutory statements I acknowledge - but they underline my endorsement of why every educator needs to leave their ego outside of the classroom.

So, for me, this explains why well designed experiential learning tools are such an effective learning method – every aspect of the learning environment (both deliberately included and serendipitous) is combined in a way that is unique to the individual learner in a way to create greater understanding of their world. If scaffolded by a disciplined experiential learning process, this produces learners who are far better at transferring learning to their 'real world environment' and effectively applying it there.

Every human being is capable of incredibly complex multi-sensory reasoning and original thinking, but this is so often disabled by the environments in which we learn, what we are forced to learn, and how our learning is measured. And I'm afraid that I don't see a lot in the rapid growth of AI that challenges this disablement. If we can accept that all learning is self-constructed and subjective we need approaches that will radically shift the ways that we catalyse learning, rather than approaches which seem intent on reinforcing them.

It's interesting to reflect that, in the past, a much broader range of human development was valued. The curriculum was broader; character development was seen as a core purpose of learning and societal relevance was vital. In that sense I would suggest that if we are to equip people to demonstrate competence to operate happily and effectively in an increasingly diverse and interconnected society, we need to reverse this trend. And there's a place for Ai and distance learning in this, but to make that happen online educators need to focus on using technology to amplify student interactions through balanced and collaborative approaches, such as Peer-to-Peer learning that allow students to bring their individualised learning context into the learning programme. To do that I would suggest it's better to drop the term 'learning' as being a probable assumption, and call what this is 'distance teaching' Until that happens, I'm happy that so many people vote with their feet and come to us stating "It's good to see people who are still hands-on".