Features

Published March 2004

The Learner-Centric Approach to Enterprise Education

Evan Berglund

Information Overload
Consider this: If it's true that on average 50 percent of transferred knowledge is lost in a month if not applied, and almost all of it in two months if not applied, what are the chances that your doctor will recognize a disease out of the ordinary at your next visit? In fact, each year there are about 400,000 articles added to biomedical literature-much more material than any doctor can possibly hope to pick up through required continuing medical education courses. The same is true for most dynamic disciplines.

How can you deal with this information and knowledge overload? The answer: A major shift in thinking. (It's already happening in leading health care institutions.) Accept the fact that we are dealing with adults, not children, and that in a complex work environment, there are far more problems and procedures than can be addressed by a library of courses based on pedagogic principles (the teaching of children)-no matter what the size of the library or the quality of the courses. Nor can the challenge be met by collaborative systems in which the most competent workers are transferring knowledge to colleagues. These systems lack the critical vetting and chunking functionality built into course development and therefore run the risk of being persistently skewed toward preference, rather than best practices.

The challenge is to establish a system of enterprise knowledge management and transfer that retains all the relevant qualities of a library of courses, with a delivery component that's both easier to use and more useful than putting in phone calls to more knowledgeable colleagues. It's the second part of this equation that represents the greatest challenge. It's also the second part of this equation that requires a learner-centric approach.

While it's tricky to create a knowledge-transfer system accepted by users as both useful and easy to use, it's not necessary to completely reinvent the wheel. But it is necessary to accept the fact that being learner-centric essentially means exactly the same as being market-oriented, which in turn means to let potential customers propel sales by catering to their already-established concerns and desires. In fact, since more education takes place through advertising than takes place through schooling in a person's life, it's worth paying close attention to how advertisers educate their audiences. This multibillion-dollar industry already has the learner-centric approach down to a science.

Understanding the Motivation to Learn
In the world of goal-oriented paid communication, any good campaign starts with defining the target audience. This typically involves some market research and psychographic profiling, which is first used to define the "process of purchase" for the product and target audience in question. Then different tools and designs are used to make sure the communication closely matches the target audience's preferred style of learning.

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