Not a SciFi imagined headline of the future, but a headline “ripped” from today’s online news sources. Training is of course learning, and education, and apparently Walmart thinks the VR technology is a good bet for a million employees. This follows on another Walmart program announced this year to give access to college degrees for large numbers of their employees. Combined, these two programs show that US enterprise feels education of their employees is the way forward.
Which begs the question of “Would Walmart be doing this if US Public Education was doing its job well?”. Also begs a followup, “Is US Enterprise going to go their own way on worker education, or are they somehow going to work together with public education?”
In a previous post from a VC who invests in “Re-inventing education” he notes that not only are we seeing corporations taking on forms of education that are new, but that even the idea of accreditation and certification might change in a brave new world of distributed learning opportunities outside the present educational institutions.
And part of the answer is changing the way employers think about education. At USV, we do not require any sort of degree to work for us. But we require skills, knowledge, and curiosity. Many larger companies are starting to do the same.
Until recently the role of corporations in US education has been more or less confined to providing “plant” and equipment and services, amounting in toto to very huge sums, and a large % of the US economy. But that has been changing as noted above, with the increasing penetration of ed tech hardware and software into the classroom, the homeroom, and the home.
In one view of the future, large US employers would take the lead in learning technology innovation and programs, and would be able to move much faster than the ginormous educational bureaucracy in the US, and would end up “routing around” the problem, as Bucky Fuller suggested.
In that possible world, education would still be a huge part of the US economy, but it would be structured very differently. However, not all problems would “go away”…and there would be new ones, if the educational initiative moves to enterprise entities.
For example, while corporations might focus mostly on skills and knowledge they specifically identify as needed by their employees, we as a nation still want to somehow ensure a broad focus for learning, which enables critical thinking.
Some other challenges include:
• Learning “fields” like History. It’s a given, that if we don’t know the mistakes of the past “we are condemned to repeat”.
•General knowledge, that allows us to discern what might be “fake news” and how to live life pragmatically, is always needed. That’s one of the main topics we teach immigrants applying for citizenship, as well as HS dropouts working on GED.
•Having some idea of how science works, which includes an ability to recognize the value of research, so that our national policy isn’t driven by ignorance and bad ideas such as the anti vaccine fad.
•Understanding our own healthcare in all its complexity.
•We’d of course also need to protect the rights of equal access to “quality” education. We presently struggle to provide that through our public educational system. Would Enterprise led education be less based on the income demographics of the student?
*Other “parts” of knowledge that an employer may, or may not, be motivated to support
Enterprise swims in a different sea, and if they feel the present requires a better educated workforce, they might find the means to bring that about on a massive scale (Walmart) especially if in partnership with government. However providing the full spectrum of what a citizen needs to learn to be a good citizen, and part of society, which is the presumed utility of “public education”, could be hard to obtain from an enterprise established educational system.
Then there’s the issue of church/state separation, and of whether to allow using tax revenues to support a particular religion’s educational approach. Very complex issues ahead for US Educational Policies.
Perhaps we can find a way to have the corporate educational initiative and innovation for learning, in a public education context. That would require some new thinking, and some new structures for public/ private cooperative endeavor. Some of this public/ private melding exists today in some charter schools in some districts. Today, partisan gridlock is in the way, but that doesn’t mean it will always be in the way. And in the meantime, corporate america is moving ahead with employee learning opportunities.
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Such employee supported learning describes learning today as something that can be accomplished in “new places”, and doesn’t have to be confined to “school buildings” and our traditional conventional centuries old approach to education. PSA feels it is thus extremely important for the future of learning that we understand what these new places are like (see new series of posts on “A New Place”) how they “work” and how they “don’t work”, and what the parameters are for maximizing learning.
No doubt we will hear much more about the Walmart program in the months ahead, because they will need new VR learning and training apps, and new learning places for student workers to support each other in collaborative learning. New Social Learning Constructs.
[gview file=”https://publicservicesalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Walmart-buys-17000-Oculus-Go-VR-headsets-to-train-a-million-employees-VentureBeat.pdf”]
Kudos to Gary for the link