4Ds of Learning

The learning and development processes have undergone tremendous alterations in the last few decades. Still, a large number of training activities fail, mainly because they were conducted in haste without adequate planning. If you are planning to incorporate online training as part of your L&D activities, then don’t just focus on creating comprehensive courses for one-time learning, rather focus on creating a holistic environment for continuous learning. This will help you to face the post-COVID-19 era — an era that will expose us to a lot of changes in the way employees work and learn. For instance, most of the employees will end up working from home and the popular mode of communication will be tools like Slack. This means organizations have to reengineer the way they were training their employees in the past to ensure that the employees don’t turn obsolete in the coming years.

One way to be prepared for the upcoming days is by effectively following The 4D model of learning. This model was proposed by Jane Hart in the Modern Workplace Learning 2020 magazine which focuses on steps to modernize the workplace learning. Here are the 4Ds of learning that every organization should follow-

Didactics

Researchers have time and again proved that classroom learning or formal type of learning is the least effective way to learn at work. Employees cite various reasons such as boredom, lack of time, etc. to show their disinterest in this type of learning.

However, classroom training cannot be completely done away with, owing to its importance. The ideal way forward is to convert your classroom sessions into a Livestream or Web Conferences that lasts for just half an hour. LMS like KloudLearn has both advanced Livestream and WebConferencing features that come straight out of the box making your life much simpler. You can also make the training as interactive as possible by incorporating Q&A sessions, live chat, etc. to keep your employees engaged in the process.

To push didactic learning even one step further, create multiple short courses having a wide variety of assets such as video, audios, and texts that will pique the interest amongst the learners. Support the courses with interesting assessments that will make the learners enjoy their learning journey. It also gives the learners the flexibility to learn for themselves. Ensure the courses created are completely relevant to the learner’s job. You can use KloudLearn’s infinite repository of content to create tailor-made courses for every type of skill on the planet. Once you do all these, you will start seeing an improved performance amongst all your employees.

Discovery

The most effective way to make your employees learn is by making them self-sufficient and discover what to learn themselves online. Most of your employees are already doing this, even more now due to the lockdown. But as an organization, you can promote incremental self-learning by encouraging your employees to learn something new every day to support their professional dreams.

Ask managers to give time to all their subordinates every day to learn something new. If needed, conduct an interactive session every week to make them share what they have learned that week with the managers. Managers can use this as one of the KPIs to rate their employees. This will give learning a completely different angle amongst the employees. They will look at it with much more importance and start spending more time on it. Many managers who realize the importance of continuous learning are already doing such activities.

If managers cannot afford to give time for the employees to learn due to various reasons, ask the employees to learn during their such as coffee breaks or while commuting. Make the employees responsible for their own learning as it will help them to grow rapidly in the career ladder.

Doing

This is nothing but experiential learning, the most common type of learning in everyone’s lives. It happens automatically as you do your daily activities. The employees learn or get trained on the job by getting first-hand experience while doing the tasks under their respective roles. They learn the processes and procedures that your organization uses.

However, as an organization, you can create a more conducive environment for on-the-job learning by offering challenging tasks continuously so that the employees will learn something new every day. Giving the same monotonous work might completely stop their learning process.

Similarly, create a structure around on-the-job learning. For instance, checklists can be created on what needs to be learned under every activity of that role, assign a supervisor to look into the employee’s work and the pace of their learning, and create a list of goals that every employee has to achieve as part of this training.

All these might sound difficult to setup due to the time and efforts involved, but they are well worth the efforts and highly effective as you end up establishing accountability on every stakeholder of the organization including your organization, the supervisors, and the employees themselves. This means better learning and better productivity.

Discourse

Discourse or social learning is where employees learn from each other. It also includes learning from various social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. Your employees learn a lot from the people they follow on social media just as they learn from fellow workers. Even during this complete lockdown, remote workers are sharing their knowledge with their co-workers through communication platforms like Slack and Microsoft Teams.

As an organization, you can ensure that the employees share the resources effectively on the platform and not over-share them to get to the top of the leaderboard. You can motivate them the give preference to quality over quantity so that all the employees get to learn something meaningful from every content shared. When a lot of content is shared, the whole activity loses its sheen and the purpose of learning is defeated.

You can also ask the managers to use tools like Slack to host an online workshop where employees can share their on-the-job knowledge with others so that their learning doesn’t go waste and also brings cross-training to the table.

Final Thoughts

By now you would have realized the importance of 4Ds in modernizing the learning process in your organization. Carefully enable each of these types of learning to make your employees more productive and engaged during these difficult times. Remember, the professional growth of every employee is as important for them as it is for your organization. The need of the hour is to create a full-fledged ecosystem of learning that is driven by the 4Ds.