Jon Levy is one of the true visionaries in the eLearning industry. Over the past decade he has developed a unique approach to on-line learning, one in which the learner is front and center and it is the content that is adopted to the learner not the learner that must adopt to the content. This learner-centric approach is closely associated with the idea that learning, to be effective, must be woven into the environment.

Over the past three-and-a-half years, while working at Harvard Business School Publishing, Jon consulted with many leading Chief Learning Officers on the best way to design and deliver content for effective learning. He has led the development of advanced technologies such as Harvard Universal Access, a way of packaging content so that it can be used on many different systems, and an advanced system for integrating learning resources into a personal performance portal.

How did you get involved in eLearning?

My first use of media for learning took place in my junior year of high school, when a teacher allowed me to do a training film for Driver Ed class instead of doing a final paper. I shot it in 8mm, complete with manually-synchronized sound track on a separate tape recorder. The program also included a live discussion in class, which made it-in 1964-one of the first "blended learning" programs! I got an "A," and the rest is history.

While primitive by today's standards, that program validated my early notions about the use of technology for learning. I was able to demonstrate that media can expand the boundaries of the classroom and in some instances, replace it entirely.

You are a man of wide interests and many passions, how does eLearning relate to your broader interests?

The notion of expansion or dissolving of boundaries has been a constant over my life. We are all running on tracks laid down by a couple of thousand years of teaching history. My focus has been more on the process of learning, on how humans learn, on the reasons for knowledge itself, and on what is possible. For some of those answers I turned to the ancient bodies of knowledge that describe human consciousness and human potential. In 1973 I sought out Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and learned to teach the Transcendental Meditation technique. I taught TM for many years and continue that practice daily.

Given the importance of knowledge workers in today's economy, and the fact that technology is now taking us about as far as it is possible to go objectively, it is likely that the next major wave in human capital development will be the teaching of techniques to expand the conscious capacity of the mind, enlivening the potential and thereby increasing the efficacy of knowledge workers.

How do you learn?

Like all of us, I learn in order to fulfill desires. If I desire to succeed in a particular endeavor, I first must learn what I need in order to do so (gap analysis). Then I go after the tools and information I require, taking the shortest possible path to the goal. As I child I did this by asking my parents, teachers and friends. Of course I learned as much through play as through study. Sometimes "learning" is simply a matter of realizing that I already have the answer, but it is disguised in a different context. Sometimes "learning" is simply letting go of self-imposed boundaries. Often "learning" is the recognition of a familiar element in something that I had coded as foreign. This often happens as I travel in foreign countries, or play with my grandchildren, or take on a new project, and especially when I teach what I know to others and discover that I have gained more through teaching than have my students.

Taking this 'lifelong' approach to learning, how have you applied it to the challenges that Chief Learning Officers face in their day-to-day work?

I believe that what CLOs are looking for is "sustainability." The sustainable model for the use of technology in learning—one that invites investment and that has predictable measurable outcomes—has yet to be widely recognized. The landscape of knowledge acquisition and knowledge use is changing. It is important to differentiate between the academic model and the performance model. Academic programs, classes, courses, are all employed when the main goal is knowledge itself, intellectual achievement. In the workplace it is performance that matters, the sustainable performance of the individual, teams and the organization itself.

Tell us more about what makes learning sustainable.

The sustainable model is based on the notion that taken collectively the time of the learners is more important and less available than the time of the subject matter expert. Rather than building a structure around the provider, the new paradigm builds a support system around the learner.

This requires a system that makes learning more relevant to the person learning and the organization where she or he works. You build this system through context. Lots of context. There has to be a personal profile of the learner that describes their learning styles, learning history and learning plan, performance objectives and that captures the tasks they are engaged in. This allows learning to bring in knowledge management and performance support.

We need to move away from the old academic model of "courses" and "grades" and focus on a new system of knowledge management that supports knowledge workers' individual needs.

How does this effect the way in which learning resources are created and used?

In many cases the same resources can be used, but they must be reorganized, often into much smaller units and the way in which resources are described become much more important. The learning resources must be described in a way that makes them meaningful for the individual in the context of what they know and the work they are performing. Instead of assembling disparate learners in the same room, virtual or otherwise, at a common time and force-feeding information as though each has identical prior knowledge, learning styles and knowledge needs, this new system of learning starts with the premise that everyone has different prior knowledge and different needs and therefore optimal learning-high-performance learning-requires a much more personalized and productive solution.

People responsible for learning and performance need to recognize that context trumps content, and that less is more. When planning eLearning content, the CLO may wish to start thinking more like a publisher and less like a buyer. The corporate university is, in many ways, taking over some of the functions previously held by publishers. It is the corporation that needs to control how content is packaged and described and how it is aligned with their performance and competency models.

As the field of eLearning continues to evolve towards more integrative models, the CLO should look for shared risk, for ongoing vendor relationships more than simple transactions. This is particularly true in how content is described and packaged. This must be done with the organization and its learners. Context cannot be created without the participation of the learner.

What is the next step for eLearning?

Learning is in what in physics is called a "phase transition." Using water as an analogy, water is in a steady state in both liquid and vapor forms, but moving from liquid state to vapor always causes chaos, boiling, turmoil. This is "phase transition," and this is where we are now in eLearning. We are moving from the liquid state, where learning is poured into containers that can be moved around, to a vapor state, where learning is mixed with the air we breath. During the phase transition there can be a lot of confusion, but once the new phase is established things become more predictable. What I mean is, that learning is becoming integrated with our day-to-day work and is becoming a part of our life. Of course this has always been the case, but systems and the way learning is organized are finally catching up.

What makes for superior content in a sustainable learning environment?

The best content will be that which does the job required by the learner in the shortest time. Necessarily there will be as many different paths to that result as there are different learners. So content that is granular, capable of being accessed as and when needed, is a big plus. Navigation is important. The learner should never lose sight of the shore. The whole must be available at all times, even as the parts are being explored. The learner should not be abandoned to a lengthy linear process.

Content that serves the purposes of the learners and whose technological infrastructure is designed for multiple environments, ease of enterprise customization and personalization and future migration is superior eLearning content.

How does eLearning content link to personal performance? To organizational performance?

The sustainable model of eLearning for corporations is not a linear extension of the previous phase. Like all revolutionary changes, the new technologies - properly deployed - render the previous model obsolete. These are, in the words of Clayton Christensen, "disruptive" technologies. The old model is left behind in favor of a newer one that works far better. The sustainable model of online learning requires re-centering our attention on the consumer of knowledge, on the individual learner or so-called knowledge worker. Content becomes "content" only when someone is using it. It has no abstract value simply sitting in a repository or on a learning management system.

A winning model will focus on personalized, employee-driven learning that helps knowledge workers decrease time to performance and increase productivity. The new model turns the controls over to the learner. Grades and other learning metrics of the past have little value in a contemporary business environment. They are as useful as are the measurements of the post office applied to the world of e-mail.

What do you see for the future?

There is a gradual convergence taking place, first on the level of vision and ideas, but also in the development trajectories of new technological solutions. I expect to see the market spasms settle down in the very immediate future as a more sustainable model begins to emerge. There will be more investment in solutions that track the trend towards sustainable learning.

As learning comes to mean the support of performance in day-to-day work situations it will truly become part of an organization's overall strategy and attract the attention of the CEO and spending in this sector will increase.

Suppliers need to realize that their future lies in a new business model, one that provides content and infrastructure for real-time change management. The organization's vision and strategy must be embedded in learning and become part of its context.

Further down the road, there will be a gradual adoption of standards and competency taxonomies that will permit transferable personalized knowledge maps between companies. Technology on both sides of the firewall will create personalized "content" according to need: inside and outside content will be seamlessly blended with human and digital solutions on demand. Once this happens we will get our first glimpse of the mature state of this field, revealing the first real efficiencies, the highest value, and the most scaleable returns.

(Images above are from Jon's personal collection)