Leadership and Knowledge: The Future of Online Learning and the Power of an Informed Workforce
Online learning is a global phenomenon, enhanced by innovative technology and the free assembly of teachers, students, companies and entrepreneurs.
More to the point, a platform now exists to further a trio of noteworthy, mutually beneficial goals: Education, Engagement and Success. Each element advances an individual mission or a collective ambition, while creating a marketplace of ideas and a community for people to network and expand their contacts.
This opportunity – call it the Classroom of Tomorrow Made Available Today – is also a way for businesses to offer their own libraries of content, as a package or as a series of topic-specific programs, to an international audience.
In this scenario, a company can monetize its intellectual capital; and other corporations can purchase these tutorials without having to structure and write the same curricula. This relationship is the result of connecting people through a shared online destination. The community that ensues from this activity is the reason education is now – and should always be – dynamic and interesting.
That destination also transforms experts (of any specialty) into potential teachers and entrepreneurs, who can respond to requests for services or present their credentials to fellow members as a way of announcing that they are open for business, so to speak. Thus, technology simultaneously transcends borders and countries – it moves at the speed of the electron – while bringing users together for educational enrichment and personal empowerment.
I write these words as a university lecturer and as the Founder of Monimus.com, which is the very platform where education, engagement and success may flourish. I issue this assertion as a summons to companies to maximize the value of their online courses, and as an invitation for individual experts to instruct a global classroom of students, managers and professionals, among many others.
With these resources, online learning is a powerful and interactive experience – it is visual and communicative – resonating with users in a more intimate way, which is convenient (a person can study from home, or anywhere he or she likes) and instantly accessible.
Freedom is, in the end, the definition of this experience; the freedom to increase the spread of information, the freedom to be an educator and an entrepreneur, and the freedom to learn something new. That freedom begets opportunity, which can propel an individual's career or broaden his or her perspective – about work, professional advice, and tutelage and mentorship; about life itself.
Globalizing Success by Globalizing Access to Education: The Platform in Action
The takeaway theme to this discussion is simple: Globalizing access to knowledge is a proverbial win-win position, in which everyone profits (economically or educationally).
Every executive, therefore, has a stake in the success of this effort because every executive has an interest in an informed workforce. Convening in this common destination – amidst this virtual world, where representatives of every industry (and every soon-to-be created industry) can meet, trade, barter or teach – is the essence of modern communications.
Innovative technology makes these things easy to use, and even easier to maximize. That technology serves a larger purpose, though; it benefits all of us by providing intelligence to all of us.
That is the purpose of online learning. That is the reason good technology – no, great technology – exists: To make something better, so we, individually and collectively, can do something (or many things) better.
That is the way forward for teachers, students, companies and entrepreneurs. That is a blueprint for a revolution in online learning, as well as a path to leadership and wisdom.
Welcome to education, engagement and success.
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Keith Williams is the Founder of Monimus.com, an innovative online learning platform where users can educate, engage and succeed on multiple levels.
