In today's society and world, there are many trends and issues presented and shown to us in various context. I feel that one huge industry that has seen a spike in growth of IDT is business. The corporate world is growing and the responsibility of IDT usually now involves a team that's sole focus is to bring the company up to speed and into our 21st century think forward society. In order to be successful in the business world, being culturally diverse is a plus and now becoming a must! The problem that they are finding is that Cross Cultural Training is an issue because the United States is such a melting pot of diverse culture; because of this we are finding that you must be fluent in a immense amount of various background of cultural diversity. Since there are so many difference, we have to take into factor how different cultures learn, there values and how solve problems, while trying to accommodate all other cultures without offending anyone. With times chasing fast, businesses are having to rapidly keep up as well, thus we are seeing them starting to implement technology based training. This gives the businesses opportunity to deliver training quickly and effectively. Another industry big on IDT is our military system. The military uses IDT when educating and training troops. The military is in constant change when it comes to what there duties and missions are. We actually see some of the issues in the military design be similar to what is happening in the business industry, this mainly being funding. The government is having issues with budgeting and funding, so everything has to be justified in order for us to be able to get the proper military funding to be able to provide ample job training and design. Training in the military is always constant but the environment in which is happens is not. Trainings take up a lot of day to day functions because it is integrated into the work day. Finally, healthcare and it's education is very broad and has a lot of components when talking about its IDT. Designers must be willing to be innovative and be able to design informative instruction meant for the delivery of health services. yet again, this is also another industry that will and is in constant growth and geared towards the future. Again, a major factor is cost, like the other two mentioned above. Health education and training for the profession is significantly high because we need to make sure that healthcare professionals are receiving the education necessary to provide proper care to the masses. Regulations and standards also play a role in affecting education and training. The standards and regulations in health care education and training mostly determines and defines what students must learn. Because of this, there is not much wiggle room to design instruction subjectively.
Something that we must do is prepare our youth to think outside the box and make sure they have the proper training to do so. The need to learn to think for themselves and be creative, not just be a "sheep" and follow the herd. To me, the true definition of the 21st century learner is students that can problem solve and think about various solutions to a problem instead of just one! Students need to be taught how to work as a team as well as how to listen carefully with the intent of following directions without questioning the results or instructions. Although many of us are doing this, unfortunately some students are not being exposed to this at all. Some countries are ahead of us because they are expose their students to the concept at an earlier age and this creates a life long learning pattern for their students.
We are noticing the same trends in the business world as we do in the classroom. The classroom is very diverse in nature. We cannot think that our learners are going to learn the same way whether in the business world or in the classroom. As Reiser and Dempsey (2012) state, "culture si the determining factor in all human expression" (p. 182). We need to be aware of this when designing instruction, which is why most college feel the need to include a Multicultual Education class to prepare teachers for this. Cultural is also a trend in the military sense since we deal with many nations in world. Other countries could be using our training resources as well as we could be using many other countries training resources as well. Cultural is a very important thing to recognize in design.
ReplyDeleteI agree with your stance on how we need to change how our students think. Many of us believe their is one answer to a question and then we're done. I always tell my students, there is more than one way to Walmart so there is more than one way to look at a problem. More teachers need to have a mentality like this or this will deeply hinder our students in the future as they become independent thinkers.
I agree with and like your definition of a 21st century learner. While our kids today can "google" anything in the world that entertains them, they don't want to and/or see the benefit of figuring out how to memorize content specific vocabulary or even looking back over notes before a test. Unfortunately, they don't value their education (and neither do many parents) and therefore don't work for it.
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