Learning Engineering: Merging Science and Data to Design Powerful Learning Experiences
Learning is an organic process where the seeds of knowledge are slowly and steadily been planted and engraved into the minds. This seeds of knowledge eventually bear fruit when it is put into action. As in the words of Benjamin Franklin “Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn.”
Engineering involves the application of practical, scientific, economic, and social knowledge that will hereby assist in designing, building, and maintaining and every form of creation. Engineering discipline is eclectic and has a specialized field of engineering genre. Each deals with a special emphasis on unique areas of technology and its usage.
Since the last decade, a constant effort is been made by various experts in varied fields to amalgamate the art of “learning” and the essence of “engineering” in the form of instructional training modules. This has formulated into a powerful drive to assemble teams from both the fields of learning and engineering to create online courses.
This constant striving to get in diverse people of sound expertise and try and produce some of the finest online training courses is what we would like to call it as Learning Engineer. That being said, it has been an uphill task to create a steady discipline of Learning Engineering.
So how do we describe in layman terms of what does a learning engineer do? Learning engineers are a bunch of proficient individuals who draw conclusions from evidence-based information through human behavior and actions. This evidence that results in actions are then been formulated to create accurate, reliable and more importantly data-rich learning data, based on various engineering environmental scenarios.
In an urgency and need to declare learning engineering as a mainstream profession, the IEEE-SA (http://standards.ieee.org/) Standards Board ICCom gave a strong recommendation for a new 2-year Industry Connections (http://standards.ieee.org/develop/indconn/) activity to provide delineation and sustenance for the mushrooming field of Learning Engineering.
Though the consortium is been formed, the ground reality is that individuals with such skill sets are very rare to find. But in due time with the awareness of this discipline being made available in the market, there shall be experts being born. As of now, the only solution is to have an individual having a background in technology and science work and collaborate with an expert who has a strong foundation in instructional designing that can help create a resilient online course material.
This again brings to a further analysis of whether Engineering and instructional designing is the same. Let’s get some clarification. First and foremost the learning engineer does not come under the function of a support role. Rather, a learning engineer full-fledged contributor and an active member in developing online content. The role of a learning engineer is to “learn” about learning. An instructional designer, on the other hand, is an expert who is given the assignment to create an online course. Now based on the technologies being handed out to them, the instructional designer figures out as to how to write an assignment successfully.
The whole process of learning engineering sounds fascinating. But how does one get into this field? ICICLE has now established Special Interest Groups (SIGs) to track projects pertaining to Artificial Intelligence as well as adaptive learning technologies. Apart from these SIG also tracks on xAPI & learning analytics, learning data standards, competency frameworks, LX (Learning Experience) design, and learning data governance. This will help teams reconnoiter as to how the learning engineering shall shape up both industry wise and academic wise in the future.
Learning Engineers tend to widely engage with technologies that comprise of learning CMS (Content Management Systems) as well as learning management. Mobile e-learning applications and authoring tools are some of the variants that are trending the market. Apart from these mentioned learning engineers also employ dashboards for analytics, video and other similar streaming content in preparing one of a kind online content.
There has been an astounding progress that has helped sustain the process of learning technology standards over half a decade. Utilizing learning engineering mechanism has changed the traditional way we use learning technology and spurred it into the digital zone. Thus, a project on Learning Engineering marks unique skills that cater to those changes in the market. It has been predicted that by the next decade, Learning engineering will be a full-fledged job in the education sector i.e. the educational technology companies, schools, and universities.
In all aspects, certain parameters such as transparency, impartiality and proven efficiency will be demanded by novices and educators as these advancements and technologies are been put into practice to create adaptive learning experiences. One needs to keep in mind that for the growth and sustainability of learning engineering, will require a formidable size of engineers who are well-versed theoretically and contextually That will add more meaning to effective teaching and learning process.
Constant efforts are now been made to put this unique synthesis into work. MIT’s online Education Policy Initiative Group released a report (https://oepi.mit.edu/) stating as to how various learning science could be applied in higher academics. Similar efforts were shown by the University of Virginia who named the process Jefferson Education Accelerator (http://www.jeauva.com/). The motto of this initiative is to help mid-sized start-ups assimilate efficacy data, by helping them connect to learning science researchers.
Large publication house such as McGraw Hill coined the title The Learning Science Company whose primary focus is to delve deeply into the data sets. These datasets, in turn, begin to accumulate through its LearnSmart technology. McGraw Hill also aspires to work on incorporating better design practices into product design processes. Not falling behind was Pearson who made a single-minded focus on the efficacy of the different offerings they give inclusive a series of assessment of dissimilar products and services.
A core group of 30 dean schools of education, having similar interests have come together and are committed to utilizing substantiation to the performance of their staff after they progress to improvise their program. Apart from this, they intend to teach their teachers on how to apply learning science in the classroom as part of their curriculum.
Kaplan a formidable professional education institute has been more than involved in the efforts that have been stated afore. In fact Bror Saxberg, The Chief Learning Officer consistently endeavor to install evidence-based learning on a large scale. The motto at Kaplan was to detail learning strategy and planning to get the right kind of trade-off between learners and learning organization. Dedicating more time and responsiveness to validate the reliability of learning evidence gathering methods. Implementing controlled trails in different parts of an organization with a single focus on knowing what are the processes that make a difference to an individual’s success. Finally, striving to make “learning engineering” decisions in the field, with all the constrictions and challenges the real world has to offer us.
Hopefully, providing you with such valuable insights on Learning Engineering might change your perception on how you conceive the notion of learning collaborating with engineering science. Thus we can strongly aspire that the near future shall accommodate the development and improvement of processes and educational methodologies that will consistently lead to the repeatable development and improvise learning situation here by leveraging the science of engineering. All this shall be proportionate to address instructional challenges.
