What Is Active Learning? And Why This Should Be The Way Forward For Corporate Training.

There is one famous quote from Benjamin Franklin, “An investment in knowledge definitely pays the best interest”. This perfectly explains today’s corporate market. Many organizations have started investing in the idea of corporate learning as it continues to become indispensable in the organization’s quest towards faster growth.

How do you increase your employability skills as quickly as possible and ensure that the learning is effective at the same time?

To solve this problem, companies must opt for that type of learning that is transformational and deep. True transformational learning happens when you put all the learning into use. After much research and approaches for corporate learning, companies have begun to centralize their training according to the needs of their business and develop these programs using active learning methods. The concept of active learning is something familiar; it requires interactive, learner-centered training that develops learners’ ability to process and use information. But working it into E-training and using it for remote employee training and team building has its own barriers.

What is active learning?

Active learning is a type of learning that sticks to the learner's mind. A valid collaboration of the trainer and the learner. It is like your own understanding and verifying its result against provided metrics. With the help of active learning, learners can take authority from the trainer and take responsibility for the process as well as its direction and progress with it.

Let’s simplify this: remember the time in school or college, when you were interested in a new subject which you had no prior knowledge of. How did you start learning? Before reaching out to an adult, you try to look it upon and research yourself. You come across several questions while exploring and look for the answers over the internet or through books. This helps you to shape a better understanding of the subject. Then comes the part where you start sharing it with your friends, parents, colleagues and it continues to add value to your understanding. This process of learning and assessing your knowledge is what active learning is.

Difference between passive and active learning

Passive learning requires less effort from a learner. In this format of learning, the learner is given information from details and explanations of the topic and is expected to absorb knowledge passively. Passive learning goes way back to the traditional learning approaches like seminars, lectures, textbooks, discussions, online lectures, and courses where communication is mostly done from one end only.

Now it completely falls on the learner to concentrate on those lessons taught and do well in their exams. As you can understand from this, passive learning leans more towards the theoretical side.

Passive learning falls in the definition of spoon-feeding by the instructor and active learning allows the learner to broaden their knowledge with multiple versions of understanding. While passive learning categorizes people into roles of either speaker or listener, active learning applies fluidity to the roles. Learners are free to ask or answer questions and be active members of discussions.

Reasons why active learning will transform the future of work:

It could be used in different situations and contexts:
Organization leaders need to explore multiple options before arming their employees with new skills. Active learning methods give the freedom of exploring knowledge in more than one way– once the skills are honed, employees can showcase their new capabilities within the organization, essentially adding a new tool to the company’s toolbox. Knowledge workers are inherently more desirable than tactical workers, so why should we differentiate training and development?

Promotes learners to perform independently:
One of the key motives of active learning is practice, and practice doesn't make perfect, it makes it valuable. Active learning helps better in the retention of knowledge, and once employees have enough experience on a subject, they are better decision-makers, drive and execute strategy effectively. Moreover, they’ll have a stronger foundation to continue to build upon their skillset as they move up the ladder in the organization, scoring long-term assets to the company.

Focuses on subject matter expertise:
Cringe videos and tutorials are mostly what an employee expects when thinking about corporate training. But videos like these, surely helpful for a brief time, are likely not driving the emergence of experts in an organization. In fact, in a study, it is found that watching YouTube videos, Instagram demos, and Facebook tutorials do little when it comes to driving the acquisition of desirable skills. The study was the result from 193 participants on their dart-throwing abilities, finding that those who watched a demo video more than 20 times scored no better than those who saw it just once. What could be the reason? Learning through practical application, rather than in a passive way, is more effective to understand specific topics, and the success of upskilling will be dependent on the active learning instruction.

In the end, we can sum up by saying that active learning is used to gather knowledge that employees are able to access, adapt and learn repeatedly, and reskill from it. Active learning is specifically designed to develop skills that are able to be effectively used in a corporate world.