#LSCon Reflections: Alexander Salas on 3 Impactful Learning Moments from LSCON16

Welcome to the #LSCon Reflections blog series, where we invite members of the eLearning Guild Community to share there thoughts on the Learning Solutions Conference & Expo, including what they learned and what they took away from the event.

Today we welcome Alexander Salas, Training & Quality Manager at Health First Health Plans, as he shares three of the impactful moments he took away from the event.

The eLearning Guild’s 2016 Learning Solutions Conference just wrapped up yesterday after a week of amazing discussions and keynote speeches. This was my second conference and I was lucky not only to present a Bring Your Own Laptop (B.Y.O.L) workshop of Gamification Basics in Storyline2, but also participate in LSDemoFest. The latter is best described as a “science fair” for eLearning designers where they get to demonstrate and explain their creation. This post discusses some of the many powerful learning moments I experienced at LSCon and the significant value for all of us devoted to workplace learning.

1) Bill Nye

A sketchnote of Bill Nye’s keynote address.

Bill Nye “The Science Guy” gave us a wonderful look at the world from within and outside our atmosphere. He described how his father’s unfortunate experience as a Prisoner of War (POW) during World War II led to an infatuation with sun dials. Of course, this behavior was a reaction to having all watches removed by Japanese guards during imprisonment. It turns out that years later Bill would make some significant discoveries about solar energy and its interaction with our atmosphere leading to bluish, yellowish and orange hue shadows cast using sun dials. Since he discovered them, he got to name them #cerulescence (blue), #xanthodescence (yellow) and #orangidescence (orange). This reminded me that no matter how much we think we know about the world, there’s always more to learn and we must keep exploring. A sobering image that led me to deep reflection on this topic was a picture of Earth taken from Saturn. As I paraphrase Bill “The Earth is a speck in the universe and we are a speck of a speck in a nothingness of specks.”

2) Breaking Out of the L&D Bubble

Here’s a selfie with me and Craig.

This Craig Taylor session provided an insightful look at learning facilitation and social learning opportunities in contrast with the known habits of L&D. Craig’s recommendations for content management were provocative with aim to disrupt the traditional corporate thought process about content. He’s knowledge of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and a strategy to curate rather than recreate content was a progressive proposition. Although there might be some barriers with Copyright infringement, I see MOOCs as a powerful tool for professional development. This approach can save you a ton of money and time, which is always nice to have right?

3) Andragogy-to-Workplace L&D GAP!

The most powerful learning moment for me did not come from any of the speakers or the sessions held. It all came from interacting and having great discussions with many of the L&D professionals in attendance. Andragogy is adult learning and its supporting theories thanks to the contributions of Malcom S. Knowles to our field. It stands in contrast to Pedagogy. However, the more I engaged with representatives from various companies, the more I realized their training programs were not supported by the application of essential adult learning theories. Of course, this assumption may not ring true for all organizations out there but, I have experienced a few. It was truly refreshing to make this finding because it motivates me to share and collaborate more with anyone I can going forward. I’m also confident there are many of you colleagues out there that feel this way and would like to do something about it.

It’s a Wrap!

There you have it friends, three powerful learning moments from one of the best eLearning\L&D conferences in the world: #LSCon! I’m elated to have attended, presented in it, and most importantly…. learned from it ; )

Interested in sharing your reflections on this year’s Learning Solutions Conference? Contact David Kelly for details!

NOTE: This post was originally posted here and is shared here with the permission of the author.