Orbital Learning Communities

This summer I faced a perennial problem in adult education.  A group of twenty bright, motivated and well-intentioned employees of my organization enrolled in a blended (workshops + online) leadership development program I made and facilitated.  Some students were able to keep up with the workload, and others fell behind.  It proved harder than they had thought to fit a formal learning program into their busy lives.  In the online portion of the program, this led to the familiar pattern of having a core group of active participators, some moderate participators and some who rarely contributed at all.

The thing is, this is *my* problem.  In any kind of accredited program, if some students “pass” or “fail” a course, it makes sense.  Part of the value of a credential is that not everybody can say they have it, so exclusionary power fits its logic.  But my program is not accredited.  It makes no sense for me to create something people cannot succeed in engaging.  I am an internal trainer/designer hired to help people learn things.  If my students are too busy to engage my courses as I have designed them, they are perfectly within their rights to say “teach me anyway”.  Aside from any informal learning they might do, they have a right to expect that I will provide them with formal learning experiences to add to their learning mix – focused programs that accelerate their learning towards specific goals in ways that informal learning would be less likely to do.

This summer I had full participators, partial participators and very peripheral participators all involved in the same learning program.  My question, how can I serve them all?

My current efforts to solve this problem rely on the organizing metaphor of "orbits".  I want to design learning programs to support three "orbits" of learners: outer, middle and inner.  Learners in the outer orbit of a learning program share a specific interest in the program’s subject. They may not be ready to devote a ton of time to learning about it right now, but they may in the future.  They'd like to do little bits of enhanced learning about it on an ongoing, opt-in basis.  They want to stay connected to the program in some peripheral way.

Middle-orbit learners could be of many types.  Assuming an open-learning framework, where people who are not formally registered in a course may still participate in it, (posting information, commenting on the postings of registered students, animating discussions and the like) middle-orbit learners would be people with some kind of social presence in the course.  Some might be sporadic contributors of information or opinion.  Some might maintain a regular but low level of participation, e.g. regularly tweeting out topical links or posting them on a program graffiti wall.  Some might participate in the ongoing learning events of a course alongside registered students, or they might stay in the orbit of course because of their subject matter expertise, operating as a voluntary resource for people.  They may act as peer learning enablers, voluntarily sharing some structure/dialogue duties of community facilitators.  They may be alumni of the course who still feel like contributing.  The main feature distinguishing them from actual registered students is that they would be participating entirely under their own steam.  Course administrators and facilitators would not be focusing on them.

Inner orbit students would be registrants in the course.  They would receive a combination of focused structural and dialogical support that would take them through a specific itinerary within a specific time window.  If payment were involved (or departmental charge-back, in my current context), this is what students would be paying for.  That’s not to say that learning facilitators would only ever engage inner-orbit (paying) students.  Norms of reciprocity in an open learning environment would support a certain degree of engagement with middle-orbit participators.  However, facilitator time and attention are limited, and it would be the (paying) students who would get the most sustained and committed attention.

To make a tourism analogy, middle-orbit learners would be like independent tourists, inner-orbit learners would have registered for a whole tour package.  Imagine that the resources of the learning community are like some tourist site of historic or cultural interest.  When you go there, there will be a mix of people around.  Some will be people who work at the site.  Some will be people who live nearby.  Some will be tourists who have organized their own trips and come on their own (like middle orbit learners), and others will be on organized tours sold as a package and led by tour guides (like inner orbit learners).  They all inhabit the same site (the same learning environment), and if the self-directed tourists want to listen in on the tour guides’ explanations, nothing is really lost.   Most guides would even be willing to answer a few questions for people who are not on the tour.  However, people registered for the tour get the whole package: a scheduled set of structured experiences, inducements to stay on schedule, their needs anticipated, resources available at point of use, accommodation of special requests, dedicated attention from the guides, and unlimited consultation with the organizers.  This dense, orchestrated and committed arrangement of structure and dialogue is “the tour” (or “the course”).  Registering for the organized tour reduces search, planning and decision costs, and provides attentional scaffolding and a motivational context that will move people through a specific agenda within a guaranteed time frame.  Independent tourists may tag along or even hitch an occasional ride, but the onus is all on them.  Credentialling – the “official souvenir” of learning – could also be reserved as a paid-for service.

Open learning programs (where middle orbiters are allowed to mingle and interact with near orbiters around the same resources) are a broad and lively topic of current debate in the learning world, and I really don’t have much new to add to that discussion at present.  The area that is interesting me, and the place where I believe some new thinking is needed, is in serving the needs of the far orbiters of a community.  How can something rich and valuable be offered to them, when they are not ready/willing/able to engage the core resources of the learning community directly very often?

Here, I do think a radical innovation in organizational learning provision is possible.  I think enterprise educators can co-opt and hugely “exapt” tools, concepts, workflows, analytics, metrics and strategies from internet direct marketers, adding a new category of technologies to the e-learning arsenal – technologies for managing internet “direct learning” campaigns.

The concept is to send high-quality, targeted learning signals to the far orbiters of a program.  Through contextual or banner ads on the corporate intranet, to direct email campaigns, opt-in newsletters with click-through to informal or interactive learning objects, text messages and tweets that link to more central orbits of the learning community…  Data is gathered about learners interests and learning goals along the way, message targeting is refined, and learners are nurtured like leads are nurtured, into becoming prospects for learning offerings designed to fit their work/life balance styles.

Something like a sales funnel may be created here, coaxing learners from the outer orbits of the learning community towards the inner orbits, but as in marketing, this would done partly by convincing them of the value of the offerings, and partly by changing and shaping the offerings to enhance their appeal and usability.  The design of inner-orbit packages becomes guided by model offerings which were the most successful at converting outer-orbit information consumers to repeat inner-orbit focused learners.  Alternatively, it might be possible to use metrics, analytics and feedback to design programs that successfully move target students towards their learning goals based entirely on outer-orbit resources.  That is because instead of maximizing profit, the mission of the department would be to maximize organizational learning.  This way, the needs of learners in all the orbits of learning are met.  The ultra-busy learners gain an avenue of legitimate peripheral participation by being able to sign up for learning signals which they are then allowed to ignore, at their convenience.  Meanwhile, the learning department delivers on its duty to do its best to help those learners reach their learning goals despite scheduling constraints - responding to the call from busy employees to “teach them anyway”, regardless of the fragmentation of their schedules.

I am far outside my own area of expertise in considering these kinds of direct marketing ideas, but I am intrigued by what little I have explored to date.  This is an m-learning-friendly model that integrates mobile learning offerings strategically with offerings in other venues.  I am particularly intrigued at how the armamentum of email/web marketing metrics can be rejigged around learning objectives instead of sales objectives, with this data harnessed and then used to drive better instructional design.  I also like this design because it mirrors what people are already doing anyways.  People learn by taking courses, but they also learn by frequenting certain online forums where they may participate occasionally, and in other areas they may subscribe to a few email newsletters of interest.  So this model takes what people are doing already and turns that into a conscious strategy for serving the learning priorities of an organization, educating people even if they don’t have time for anything resembling traditional course participation.

Right now, all I have to work on is the vision: orbital learning communities – with an outer orbit audience for electronic learning outreach, an inner orbit of course registrants, and a middle orbit of people using all of these resources actively as part of their own ongoing informal learning activity.  It seems to me that this orbital design might have succeeded in reaching all of the learners I tried to engage in my inner-orbit-only program this summer.  And now I have to apply the same orbital vision to myself.  Since I have inner-orbit design responsibilities to pursue, and my time for learning is limited, I’ll have to continue learning about outer-orbit outreach techniques from the few email newsletters and RSS feeds I can manage to read on email marketing and other outer orbit techniques.  At this rate, it will be a while before I have anything more to offer on this subject.  I guess it really does pay to have the resources and the institutional commitment of being sent on a formal course to speed up learning on a subject.  I could sure use such a kick-start now, were I to develop this germ of an idea much further.