Originally published 2021/07/25

Something recently that has made me ponder...

The context is my current organization. We make up the Digital Learning Team, and more specifically I work on the Training team. But we are made up of mostly Instructional Designers who thrive in a human performance setting yet have been limited to building trainings. While we do eLearning very well, in the context of HPI and instructional design, I've been wondering if there is a way to expand on just training while still using the eLearning platform. I know in other courses, it has been said that to get away from just a Training team towards an HPI model, one needs restructuring and a start-from-scratch approach. I am curious if there is an in-between, where we could still build courses, but have them be much more than trainings.

All the talk this semester of the future of eLearning has led me to wonder if bringing in technological advances will help move away from a "training" focus to a "HPI" approach organically. Tracking detailed analytics, recreating environments, bringing in "free will," ... these all seem like features that could help to widen the definition of training and eLearning.

I love that the field of adult learning is a constantly shifting and evolving field, there is always more to know, always more to question. Words take on new meanings, even language itself changes over time. I'm excited to see how advanced in technology evolves the field as a whole.