Hooked on Professional Learning: A Virtual Learning Strategy

The Challenges. Why do online learning programs struggle to engage and retain users? Why do users complain about learning management systems?  Why doesn't content relate to user needs and schedules? Why is e-learning so boring? What can we do to turn these challenges around?

My Moment of Clarity. It all became clear to me how strategies for offering professional learning are missing the mark when I listened to Nir Eyal on a Youtube video. He explained: 

"We've all seen how the products we use change our behaviors; particularly over the past few years when we think about the rise of our personal technologies. For example, the products in our pockets like Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and good old email. These products keep us checking again and again. How do they do it? These products have mastered the art and science of habits; the behaviors done with little or no conscious thought. About 40% of what we do, day in and day out, whether we like it or not, is done purely out of habit (Eyal, 2015)." 

Eyal continues and describes a model for building habits while educators focus on strategies to meet externally imposed requirements. This distinction motivated me to adapt his model for making virtual professional learning a habit of mind. The following is my attempt to make it work as LearningFRONT's strategy for virtual professional learning.

The LearningFRONT Hook. LearningFRONT is a dynamic learning community. We follow Eyal's hook model for building habit forming use of our products in education, business, and government. Our hook is a virtual professional learning experience designed to connect a user's problem to LearningFRONT tools with enough frequency to form a habit of continuous improvement.