Towards Maturity Releases Insight Report: ‘Helping Individuals Practise and Perform’
A practical guide for evaluating and implementing Online Experiential Learning
London, UK – Monday 17th June 2013 –Towards Maturity has released a report entitled, ‘Online Experiential Learning: Helping Individuals Practise and Perform’. This report examines the benefits of Online Experiential Learning*, shares Towards Maturity’s recent industry research, and provides case studies from several leaders in the field including Toolwire, a learning solutions provider specialising in online immersive learning environments.
Earlier this year, the Towards Maturity 2012–13 Benchmark report highlighted that twenty percent of organisations are already using online experiences such as games and complex simulations – and this figure is on a steady rise.
“Employers recognise that critical thinking, problem solving, and communication skills are key capabilities needed by today’s workforce,” commented Sarah Frame, EMEA Director at Toolwire. “The need to improve such skills is driving the demand for engaging and authentic training tools that can deliver benefits such as re-usability, scalability, consistency, and integrated assessment. This training approach shortens the time to productivity and competency and can be applied across a broad spectrum of industries including healthcare, social work, engineering, law, call center training, technology, and more.”
The recent Insight Report revealed that delivering effective workplace training is a major challenge for many companies. Over 95 percent of organisations seek to ‘improve the sharing of good practice’, but only 25 percent achieve this goal. In addition, 94 percent of organisations seek to ‘speed up the application of learning back into the workplace’ but in reality only 23 percent are successful.
Laura Overton, Managing Director of Towards Maturity, added, “When it comes to helping individuals practise and perform, classroom-based role play or the simple scenarios offered in the self-paced course is just not enough. Our study suggests that organisations experienced in their use of Online Experiential Learning are seven times more likely to use these environments to help staff understand the consequence of their decisions. They are three times more likely to use role playing and rewards and twice more likely to focus on natural assessment and storytelling in their learning design. And this approach is paying off – over three quarters of the experienced practitioners report that their staff have the opportunity to practise in context and are now more qualified as a result.”
This free report can be downloaded at http://www.towardsmaturity.org/article/2013/06/05/online-experiential-Learning-Towards-Maturity/.
About Towards Maturity
This report has been independently developed by Towards Maturity, a benchmarking research company that provides independent expert advice and support to help organisations use learning technologies to accelerate business performance. It leverages the data of its in-depth Benchmark Study, the largest learning technology benchmark in Europe. Since 2003 over 2200 organisations have contributed to Towards Maturity’s leading benchmarks.
In developing this report, Towards Maturity considers the experiences of both experts and practitioners in the field, gathered through individual interviews, case studies and a short online study with over 50 participants. It also draws on data from the Towards Maturity 2012-13 Benchmark with contributions from over 500 Learning and Development professionals spanning a range of 28 industries and 37 nations.
Twitter: @towardsmaturity
Website: www.towardsmaturity.org
What is Online Experiential Learning?
Experiential Learning is the process of learning new skills or acquiring critical knowledge by doing. Experiential Learning supports students by placing them in context of what is being taught. This is done through an immersive online environment which replicates ‘real world’ settings such as a court, hospital, or a call centre. The integration of theory, practice, and contextual reality gives relevance to the tasks which the learners are asked to perform and provides them with the opportunity to demonstrate their capability to use the knowledge gained. Online Experiential Learning can be applied in a corporate and academic situation.
