There is a degree of uncertainty about what we should call the learning experience platform, with the grounds of contention seeming to be chiefly around the word ‘experience’, the ‘x’ in LXP. Why is this word so contentious? And does the lack of agreement signal a deeper unease about the concept of ‘a learning experience’?
Adding an ‘x’ to an acronym tends to confer an air of mystery. We’re used to associating this final letter of our alphabet with something missing, omitted or deliberately concealed, like the spot on a treasure map where they buried the gold. X is a wild card, an unknown. It could mean nothing or everything. Such a range of possibilities gives the letter an ambivalent, and therefore all the more powerful, charge.
Perhaps this is why, in the war of three-letter acronyms, LXP seems likely to triumph over the more pedestrian LEP. However, some reject the word it stands for in those two acronyms— ‘experience’—all together.
And yet more and more people are talking about learning experiences. Google searches for the term ‘learning experience’ have increased steadily over the last decade and a half, while searches for the ‘learning course’ have declined equally steadily during the same period.
What’s in a name?
Changes of terms across an industry often signal significant changes of thought and opinion. And often these changes come about not through the relatively orderly process of academic publication and citation, but through a communal agreement mostly tacit and unspoken.
Resources not courses
Arguably, ‘learning experience’ became more useful as a term once it was widely believed that we needed to move beyond the training course as the default mode of instruction in organizational learning. Nick Shackleton-Jones was perhaps one of the most high-profile learning gurus to point out that the over-reliance on courses was, in the age of Google, becoming counter-productive. What had once been a means of disseminating information was now beginning to look more like a mechanism for hiding it.
As the rapid growth of internet-connected personal devices such as the smartphone put these tools into the pocket of every employee, it seemed less efficient to carry on disseminating information to employees in the form of courses (either offline or online). Momentum grew behind the Shackleton-Jones idea of ‘resources not courses,’ a mantra that achieved widespread use and has since become his catchphrase (he fears it might end up on his gravestone).
Atom-smashing
However, smashing up an entity like ‘The Course’ that had seemed so fundamental to training for so long was a bit like splitting the atom—not only in that it produced a surge of energy, but also in that it released and revealed constituent particles, which now had to be studied and named. The ‘content’ particle is the easy one to identify. But once you have stripped out the informational content from a course and turned it into a set of resources, what remains?
Shackleton-Jones is not in any doubt: he says we should be creating two types of things—resources and experiences. Those are the two particles, if you like, that he sees resulting from the nuclear fission that happened in that atom-splitting moment when we began to move beyond the limiting idea of the course.
The main point here is that a learning experience is far harder to define than a learning resource. And this is where some of the mystery creeps in. We all might feel that we know what we mean when we use the term ‘learning experience’. In popular jargon, it has quite a clear meaning. When someone says, "Well, that was a learning experience", we understand that something has happened to them, e.g., "I won’t run with scissors again".
But when we use the phrase in the context of L&D, do we use it with a similarly clear sense of common understanding? A learning experience in the professional context could mean anything from watching a short video to attending a five-day residential course, to cleaning out a nuclear reactor in a VR simulation. What are the commonalities that these very disparate experiences share, the necessary and sufficient conditions that allow for them all to be categorized as learning experiences... do we know?
Some will have answers to this question that they find satisfying enough. The vast majority of people will not trouble themselves about definitions and just forge ahead creating learning experiences. However, others (present author included) will continue to be curious about the term and will want to enquire further. Perhaps, for the moment, ‘x’ marks the spot.
This article is sponsored by:
