The Learning Guys

I’m coming up to the 10 month mark of my study of Mandarin Chinese using ChinesePod. I had 2 goals when I signed up for ChinesePod last January:

#1- To learn as much Chinese as I could in one year.

#2- To assess the effectiveness of the ChinesePod instructional design and delivery model (podcasting, e-learning, social networking, personalization).

Here is the short answer: I have learned a lot of Chinese, and the ChinesePod model is very effective.

Here is what has worked for me:

Continuous and flexible learning: I made a commitment to listen to at least one ChinesePod newbie/elementary podcast every day. Each podcast clocks in at around 10 minutes or so. I figured that I could find at least 10 minutes per day to listen to the podcast, and I believed that my comprehension of Chinese would increase greatly if I could keep this comittment. Aside from a bit of slacking during the summer months of July and August, I have been able to keep this commitment. Ken and Jenny (my podcast teachers) have become part of my daily life. I listen to the podcast on the subway going to the office, when I have a break at work, when I’m on a flight to visit an out-of-town client, when I’m doing the dishes at home, when I’m shaving, whenever I have 10 extra minutes. Continuous and flexible learning, even if only 10 minutes per day, has given me better results than I achieved in 2 previous attempts to learn Chinese in a classroom setting.

Personalized learning ChinesePod offers a “My Feed” option which enables me to select which podcasts I want to receive on a daily basis. I can choose from nearly 700 available podcasts, and I can tailor my learning schedule in a way that suits my own personal learning needs. This is “Just want I want” learning. I do not have to sit through an entire course or complete an entire online module, if only parts of it are relevant to my own needs. Rather, ChinesePod provides learning content in a self service fashion, and provides tools that help me to organize learning content into a personal learning playlist.

I am aiming for 1 year of continuous study of Mandarin. At the end of this period I will be able to make some solid observations about what it means to be a Web 2.0 learner. What will happen at the end of the year? Perhaps I will continue with ChinesePod and work to be an intermediate/advanced speaker of Mandarin Chinese. Or perhaps it will be time for Spanish at Spanish Sense (brought to us by the producers of ChinesePod).

For most of my clients, leadership development has risen to the top of the agenda over the past year or so. As strategies to build leadership capacity are considered, I often hear of dissatisfaction with the traditional model of leadership development (You know the model I’m talking about. It’s the one where you send your people to a one week executive leadership program. You give them a certificate. Then you tell them to get out there and lead).

Most of my clients are moving away from this single event model of leadership development, and moving towards a more multifaceted and multilayered model that emphasises continuous learning, action learning, mentorship, personal development, knowledge sharing, communities of practice and social networking.

For those of us in the learning consulting/design business, the challenge becomes how to take an organization’s strategic leadership plan and turn it into an on-the-ground leadership development program. In particular, how to do you get an organization’s leaders (often driven and fiercely individualistic people) to work as part of a team to mentor, share best practices and collaborate in an effort to build leadership capacity.

From a learning design perspective, here are a few things to build into the model:

1.Provide a challenge: People collaborate best when they have a meaningful task or project to work on. Identify a business problem to be solved or an innovative project to work on. Create authentic business tasks that cannot be completed without collaboration and opinion sharing.

2.Involve leaders in content creation: Identify key leaders and get them to set up leadership blogs. Consider setting up a leadership Wiki. Videotape leaders as they discuss leadership wisdom, and distribute these videos via iPod. Pair leaders with instructional designers to design learning sessions.

3.Promote self reflection: Provide access to self assessment tools (360°, Myers Briggs etc). Create learning tasks that promote individual reflection and thinking.

4.Make great resources available: Provide of menu of leadership content in a variety of delivery formats. Examples are leadership books and articles, e-learning courseware, webinars, lunch and learn, leadership lessons on iPod etc. Set up a one-stop internet/intranet destination for your people to access leadership resources.

5.Develop Communication channels: Begin to incorporate social networking tools into corporate communications channels. For example, have each of your teams set up a group on Facebook. The communication model should promote creative discussion and welcome input from all.

The assumption underlying the new model of leadership development is that leadership is something that can be learned, and that it is something everyone can get better at.

Let me know what is working in your organization.