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Learning Engineering and the Future of eLearning
Interactive, smart, and portable consumerdigital technologies, from computers to wearable devices, have had dramaticimpacts upon our daily lives. The effects of these technologies on learning, whetherin formal education, workplace training, or life experience, continue to appearas eLearning practitioners put them to work in instruction and performancesupport. This domain, a new interdisciplinary field, has the name “learningengineering.”
As learning and performance support technology becomemore sophisticated, eLearning professionals are realizing their need for new skillsets. Among these are data visualization, programming and coding, andtechniques from learning science and data analytics. At the same time,instructional designers will find it necessary to collaborate with developmentand engineering partners who can support our efforts to innovate and implementinteractive, interconnected digital teaching and learning systems.
The Learning Engineering Summit: An important opportunity for you
The growing interest in the field of learningengineering is fueled by this recognition. The Learning Engineering Summit,hosted on October 23, 2018 at The eLearning Guild’s DevLearn Conference &Expo, is an opportunity to be among the first in your professional learningnetwork to learn about this new discipline. The summit offers a first look atthe past year’s efforts of the ICICLE Special Interest Groups, as the ICICLEcommunities have undertaken this historic first dive into understanding thekinds of knowledge, skills, and competencies needed for producing market-leadinglearning technology platforms and tools.
The IEEE and its practitioner advocates areworking together under the banner of ICICLE. They envision learning engineering as an emerging professionthat integrates engineering sensibilities and systems thinking with learningscience and instructional design. Its purpose is to support optimizing digitaltechnologies for use in the learning setting: artificial intelligence,augmented reality, mixed realities, virtual realities, and data analytics, toname some examples. There is a shared belief that technologies optimized forlearning through scientific methods will be more likely to systemically andreliably improve learning outcomes.
Learning engineering and the future of instructional design
In this context, learning engineering may evenbe asked to draw on engineering techniques to expand our body of evidence abouthow to scale the adoption of technology in arenas affecting human development.With more consistent development processes and more reliable methods forassessing the impact of those systems, the hope is that learning andperformance improvement practices will be more effective, replicable, andsustainable.
Along with understanding the technologicalcompetencies required for responsive platform development, there is anotheressential element to consider. The discipline of instructional design must makedesign thinking more than simply imagining what a great learning experiencemight be. To engage as a full partner with learning engineers in the future, instructionaldesigners will need to revisit their analytical expectations. What is needed toconduct true learner and learningassessments? What does it take to conduct valid and reliable measurements oflearning? What is measurement in the context of learning? Is there a full, operationalappreciation for formative and summative evaluation?
How is learning engineering evolving?
According to research currently underway byEDUCAUSE and Steven Pelletier (see Resources at the end of this article), newmanifestations of learning engineering continue to evolve. Definitions of whatthis field is and does are currently somewhat amorphous and fluid. More clarityis needed, even down to the level of job titles and job descriptions forlearning engineers. Because much of this field is charting new territory,integrating it into university program development and the education technologyindustry may initially create disruption and confusion. Digital learningpractitioners and researchers alike will have to be educated as to the valuethat learning engineers can add. Practitioners and researchers will have tolearn how to best work with such professionals. It may take considerable effortto fully recognize the value of learning engineering, bring it into practice,scale it, and integrate it to the extent that it can realize its full potentialin terms of adding value for eLearning.
Given the newness of this discipline, being apart of these early days of learning engineering development providespractitioners and strategic thinkers alike with myriad opportunities forcontributing to the birth of a new profession. With this expansion will likelycome deeper research into the meaning, definitions, and practice of learningengineering, and more studies yielding evidence about how it works and worksbest. As the field expands, it will develop more robust policies, regulations,and standards for the practice of learning engineering. Professionals in thefield will define effective practice for learning engineers, perhaps in tandemwith the development of professional societies and opportunities forprofessional development. There is literally no better time to get involved inan evolving new profession than in its earliest daysif one is interested in making a meaningful contribution to the evolution of anew field.
What are the implications of learning engineering for eLearning?
Civil engineering, mechanical engineering, andelectrical engineering have led to better practices across society. In the sameway, learning engineering hopes to bring the power and discipline ofengineering to bear in the development of better tools for learning and forlearners. In contrast to current practice, where development of learningtechnology is often ad hoc, learning engineering has the potential to help enterprises,agencies, and institutions take more direct control of the development anddeployment of instructional technology.
We expect that, in the future, learningengineers will provide architectures and techniques to help develop new andbetter tools to apply what research is finding out about learning, cognition,and human development. In essence, this will advance progress in appliedlearning sciences in new and potentially transformative ways. Instructionaldesigners, working with learning engineers, may provide contextualized solutions.These will be personalized, adapted, and normed for specific groups of learnerswith specific problems to be solved and specific circumstances addressed. Inthis way, human system requirements will be treated with the same attention tooptimization as requirements in scientific systems.
Learning engineers, working together with IDs,have an opportunity to bring new holistic perspective to learning technologyutilization by leveraging both human and technological systems to achieverepeatable, reliable success.
To learn more about this new evolution of skillsand opportunities, please join us for the LearningEngineering Summit at DevLearn 2018 onOctober 23 to learn how learning engineering is going to rock the world ofeLearning and how you can be ahead of this exciting evolutionary curve in ourever-evolving profession.
