Keep Learning Fun

What makes learning fun?

Is it being assigned a compliance training course to be completed by tomorrow, only to get inundated with threatening emails about being out of compliance until you complete the compliance online course?

Is that fun, probably not. Besides, it’s only slightly ironic to be out of compliance with a compliance training in the first place.

Fun while learning should be like the first day on campus when you realize that anything is possible on your journey to a degree. Fun is meeting new people that open your eyes and disrupt your thinking in good ways. Fun is having the freedom to pick what courses you want to complete. Fun is learning in new ways you never thought were possible.

Why is fun so important in the learning process? Because somewhere along the way, I think learning stopped being fun for many of us. At least in corporate America where ‘prescriptive’ trainings have became part of our job.

What’s interesting is that I still hear about how training should be ‘fun’. Just the other day I read a post designed to teach people how to write ‘fun’ content. However, there was nothing ‘fun’ about the post itself which made it confusing.

It was like the scene in Dead Poets Society where Robin Williams had his students rip out Dr. J Evans Pritchard’s ‘Understanding Poetry’ essay from their poetry reader:

“To fully understand poetry, we must first be fluent with its meter, rhyme and figures of speech, then ask two questions: 1) How artfully has the objective of the poem been rendered and 2) How important is that objective? Question 1 rates the poem’s perfection; question 2 rates its importance. And once these questions have been answered, determining the poem’s greatness becomes a relatively simple matter.

If the poem’s score for perfection is plotted on the horizontal of a graph and its importance is plotted on the vertical, then calculating the total area of the poem yields the measure of its greatness.”

Ripping out that essay is fun, the essay itself is not.

If only we could rip out the vast majority of content and learning management systems that try to differentiate themselves by being ‘fun’.

Wait a second… Of course we can!!

After all, you can’t spell LMS without ‘M’ for ‘Management’. Interestingly enough, you can spell LMS without ‘L’ for ‘Learner’? Oh the paradoxes of the world!

From a product standpoint, learning means embracing the learner. So why is this hard? Learner centric platforms have to support the learner first and everyone else after.

For instance, there are subtle differences between assignments and recommendations. An assignment is something we prescribe to a learner with a scheduled complete date whereas a recommendation is something we suggest, like a guided path. Similarly, there’s a big difference between self-monitoring versus reporting by management chain. Self-monitoring allows me to own my learning, management reporting enables my manager to own it.

Consider how people learn now. We learn through Google searches, Facebook posts, and Twitter activism. We learn using Slack in real time and we crowdsource to get new perspectives and ideas. However, it’s still guided by the invisible hand of peer interaction with engaging content.

Learning is about discovery, about wonderment, about growth. And from my perspective, we should do everything in our power to nurture the engagement model by keeping it fun.

And for everyone who disagrees with me, that’s okay. I have a compliance ethics training I want you to take by tomorrow or fear the denial of service email spam coming your way.

#keeplearningfun