The End Of The Course As We Know It

The days may well be numbered for the course as the essential ‘unit of learning’. The typical course is a shrink-wrapped offering where every learner receives the same training, regardless of the job that they do or the skills they already possess. As I hope to demonstrate in this chapter, what’s needed is a more targeted approach in which training is precisely tailored to job and individual needs. To make this possible we require a new paradigm for training delivery, one that is based on the intelligent deployment of learning objects.

Halcyon days

In the good old days (I know, here he goes again), running a training department was simple. Each summer you sat down with your printers to put together the next year’s glossy colour catalogue of classroom courses, or personal development opportunities as they were now called. Next year’s catalogue bore a striking resemblance to this year’s, but then there was no point in upsetting the apple cart – after all the happy sheets were still just about managing to keep you, and more importantly your boss, happy. In rare moments of self-doubt, you reminded yourself how you held the moral high ground because, at some stage in the distant past, each of the courses in the catalogue had been created to meet an identified need. Whether those needs still existed (or ever did) is debatable, but then no-one had ever complained. At least not in earshot. Over a period of time, just about everybody who mattered went through every course in the catalogue, perhaps because those were the only ones you had, but also because you held them in fabulously desirable locations.

Before your time obviously. I know, it’s barely credible that such things ever happened and it is surely impossible that practices such as these could continue in these enlightened times. Well, moving on …