DML2015 Ignite Talks - Allison Cook
0//Online Training That’s On Fleek//
What if the Kim Kardashian: Hollywood app instilled you with tangible and meaningful skills for engaging in your neighborhood, your community, your government?
With rare exception the current landscape of online educational and training programs is relatively stale, from the pre-recorded PowerPoints that seem to suffice for HR training to online college courses that are scarcely more than a receptacle for .pdfs and multiple choice quizzes. Our own forays into online training at the Story of Stuff Project have not been immune to some of the same failures of technical and pedagogical imagination.
And yet, despite the lackluster quality of many an online course, their exponential growth and the stunning rates at which people sign up for them, indicate that there is some real there there.
So, how do we use everything that’s great about the internet to make online training great? There is already tremendous community building and skill-sharpening transpiring online: from my father who is teaching himself to fix his vintage Volkswagen by way of YouTube videos to a transgender teen who finds support and community online in a way that isn’t possible in their own hometown to a blacklivesmatter hashtag that weaves together disparate moments of civic unrest from Baltimore to Oakland. Let’s use what’s working and build upon it. Let’s innovate and imagine. Let’s create and code beautiful, experiential online training that is human and loving and challenging and honest.