E-learning in motion

Whether involved in creating, commissioning, consuming or commenting on e-learning, the debate at the Oxford Union certainly got everyone thinking and talking. While most remarks related to the proposing or opposing arguments, some related to the wording of the debate motion. Therefore, I thought I would write a few words about how the motion came about.

There is no escaping the requirement for up-skilling and re-skilling for economic recovery in the UK. On top of that, we are now competing against more than two billion people in China and India, of which five million per year are graduates. Prime Minister Gordon Brown summed up our current state of affairs in a speech to the CBI last year when he said that ‘Britain, a small country, cannot compete on low skills, but only on high skills.’

However, gaining these high skills will undoubtedly require not just ‘education, education, education’, but also good training, ongoing professional support and continuous workplace learning. And there is surely a large part that e-learning can play in this.

It was against this backdrop that Epic began to ask the question, can the kind of e-learning we deliver at the moment (whatever learning model it may be rooted in, learning design it employs, or platform it may be delivered on) fulfil the skills requirements for the future? And it was this question that led to our motion for the E-learning Debate 2009 at the Oxford Union:

This house believes that the e-learning of today is essential for the important skills of tomorrow

In bringing together leading thinkers, both as speakers and in the audience, the hope was that this debate would offer a forum for contemporary issues in learning technologies to be discussed, and the quality of current e-learning to be challenged. And this certainly happened:  more than a few learning and development professionals left the debate and returned to their businesses to question stake-holders on the kind e-learning they commission, more than a few managers dispersed with a re-defined outlook of the place of e-learning in their organisations, and certainly it has raised new questions internally for us at Epic and is having an impact on our thinking and work going forward.

We are delighted that people are still continuing to contribute online at www.elearningdebate.com. And we are already planning a new online motion to be launched in a few months time. If you have any thoughts on the existing debate motion, or what our new motion should be, then please comment below.