Thought Leaders in Online Education: Jon Mott, Chief Learning Officer, Learning Objects (Part 1)

Some thoughts on learning objectives driven instructional design.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with introducing our audience to yourself as well as to Learning Objects.

Jon Mott: I’m the Chief Learning Officer at Learning Objects. My responsibility at the company is to bring a learning science, higher education, and learning design perspective to both our product development and to implementations with clients. My background is both in academia and instructional design, as well as corporate education, adult learning, and corporate training.

Throughout my career, I’ve really had this focus on, “How do we help individuals acquire the knowledge, skills, and abilities they need at any given point in time to pursue goals related to the next things they’re trying to achieve in their lives?” What we do at Learning Objects is we work with institutions or educational providers to both design and deliver learning environments that are engaging and personalised, and focused on helping students achieve goals effectively and efficiently.

In part, what that means is taking a programmatic point of view. A lot of times in education or in training, we get stuck at individual course or module level instead of keeping the focus at the macro-level of a student who is working on a degree program or a certificate. Our different approach is to make sure that we’re giving students a more holistic view of what their journey is as a student, as the work with an institution as well as beyond that as a lifelong learner.

Sramana Mitra: Why don’t we start by understanding what kinds of of customer you work with? Then I’d like to take some of your customers and understand specifically what you do for them and how that is special.

Jon Mott: One of our largest customers is Elsevier. It’s a health education publisher. They had a traditional learning management system. It became obvious that, at some point along the way, a traditional learning management system was not getting them, the students, and the faculty support. We worked with them to define the workflows that students need to go through, and what the workflows that instructors and other participants in the learning process need to go through in order to create personalized learning experiences and manage that efficiently and effectively.

Some of what that ended up looking like adaptive test prep experience for nursing students preparing to take the NCLEX. What adaptive essentially means is not every student is treated the same. Every student gets to demonstrate their own unique capability along the way. The system keeps track of, not only their growing progress towards mastery, but also the pace at which they are moving, and it adjusts accordingly to create a unique pathway for them as they work towards achieving their goals.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Online Education: Jon Mott, Chief Learning Officer, Learning Objects
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