Schools are responsible to endeavouring students a love of and the skills to participate in lifelong learning. Our students need to view schooling as a continuum rather that a series of disconnected adjuncts and to learn socially acceptable learning behaviours to participate within the globalised digital economy. Our learning services need to remain open, connected with society, embrace transformation of behaviour, as well as entice, excite and engage learning. Bill Clinton highlights the important role of schools in developing a lifetime love of learning - ‘ Your brain is a gift and we now know that people well into their late 60s and 70s can form new neural networks’ ‘by learning something new’ (Clinton YouTube video 2014)
It is important that educational leaders make sense of what a job-hopping career and extended life spans actually substantiate, how T-12 schooling dovetails within lifelong learning and how eLearning can embrace a life of self-transformation. If a career can be seen as ‘a portfolio of projects that teach you new skills, gain you new expertise, develop new capabilities, grow your colleague set, and constantly reinvent you as a brand’ (Peters 99U) what are the new learning behaviours schools need to prioritise? What fundamental changes are required for Distance Education and online learning to embrace a service that provisions learning-how-to-learn and continuous self-transformation? Considering that a large proportion of our teacher workforce are one-job-for-life workers we are have a systemic mindset issue. The provision of lifelong learning principles professional enhancement is required.
It is important to note the scale and trends of professional learning and training occurring in industry. The role of training and eLearning within globally advancing nations is exponentially growing. TrainingIndustry.com estimated global training in 2013 at approximately $306.9bn. Australia’s approximate expenditure was $9.2bn (Harward 2014). IBIS capital states that training will increasingly become ‘peer-to-peer” and “freely available”, “increasingly personalised with e-Learning harnessing big data analytics”, ‘mobile’ through ‘tablet penetration’, ‘classrooms will become the arena for face-to-face tutoring of individual requirements and open discussion’, as e-Learning becomes ‘part of the fabric of virtually every business’. Learning will become a natural continuum originating in school and proceeding throughout working life (IBIS Capital).
Love of Learning Skills by jjfbbennett is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
