CUES Learning Tracker responds to key trends in professional development. By Christopher Stevenson, CIE
I see it on my own team: People learn in different ways. One of my staffers likes learning from videos and podcasts at her desktop because travel is tricky with a small child. Another was jump-up-and-down excited about taking a massive open online course on Coursera because it was offered by a university she respects. Another stays super current and informed about the CU industry by reading online articles regularly. The variety of preferences my team demonstrates is consistent with trends I’m seeing in the learning design arena. For example, I see discussion about more “vertical development” taking place. That is, more people at all levels of an organization—not just C-suite executives—are striving to learn, improve and lead. In addition, ownership of learning is being transferred from the employer to individual employees. Not surprisingly, research is finding that people’s motivation to grow is highest when they feel a sense of autonomy over their own development, especially as they face business challenges they need to overcome to do their jobs and progress in their careers. All this seems positive, yet keeping tabs on everyone doing learning in their own way, at the times that work best for them, can be a sticky wicket. Enter CUES Learning Tracker, a new, free benefit of CUES membership. When you log in at cues.org or into the myCUES App, what you read is automatically tracked. When you attend a CUES event or take in a CUES Webinar, your attendance is similarly logged. Using CUES Learning Tracker’s bookmarklet feature, learning outside CUES can also be documented by the system. All of these results can be seen on the CUES Learning Tracker dashboard—for your own consideration and to share with supervisors and regulators. As a learning design professional, I see that the future learning environment is an interconnected one, with various teaching applications connected to and sharing data with a central learning analytics platform. Over time, this analytics platform will not only track training activities and outcomes, but also performance. CUES Learning Tracker is an important step in this direction. If you haven’t tried it yet, I hope you and your team members will soon log in and learn.
Christopher J. Stevenson, CIE, is SVP/chief learning officer for CUES.
