FLEXIBLE LEARNING SYSTEMS DESIGN
SUPPORTING PROFESSIONALS WITH AUTHENTIC LEARNING experiences
Daniel Novak, Ph.D.
Consider this for a moment: A company’s most valuable asset leaves the workspace every evening at quitting time. Every night, machines and computers sit idle, assembly lines go still, and the company’s lights go out until the next morning.
All of these physical attributes remain within the building’s walls, but they cannot produce value without the vast pools of organizational and individual adaptive expertise that exist in the company’s workforce. That expertise is the thing that transforms a company from a collection of metal, brick, and silicon pieces into a machine that produces valuable products and services.
For this reason, every organization that employs specialized labor holds a stake in the cultivation of expertise in adult populations through continuing education, professional development, performance improvement technologies, and life-long learning programs. Organizations that adopt and adapt solutions to augment their workforce’s expertise may gain a competitive advantage over other actors in the market place of dollars and the marketplace of ideas. However, experts must engage in the 'right' kinds of practice in order to continue developing their skills and knowledge in valuable and productive ways. In this century, professionals are also faced with less and less available time for the deliberate and long-term practice that will lead to those advantages.
This line of thought led me to my ongoing research agenda, where I ask:
All of these physical attributes remain within the building’s walls, but they cannot produce value without the vast pools of organizational and individual adaptive expertise that exist in the company’s workforce. That expertise is the thing that transforms a company from a collection of metal, brick, and silicon pieces into a machine that produces valuable products and services.
For this reason, every organization that employs specialized labor holds a stake in the cultivation of expertise in adult populations through continuing education, professional development, performance improvement technologies, and life-long learning programs. Organizations that adopt and adapt solutions to augment their workforce’s expertise may gain a competitive advantage over other actors in the market place of dollars and the marketplace of ideas. However, experts must engage in the 'right' kinds of practice in order to continue developing their skills and knowledge in valuable and productive ways. In this century, professionals are also faced with less and less available time for the deliberate and long-term practice that will lead to those advantages.
This line of thought led me to my ongoing research agenda, where I ask:
How might we design and construct flexible learning systems and environments that support learners as they build their expertise in practice?
To help illustrate how this question plays out in my research, I have selected a number of recent publications and projects that explore this question, and used this website to put together an evolving, curated set of answers to that central question.