The Learning Explosion
Book

The Learning Explosion

9 Rules to Ignite Your Virtual Classrooms

Matthew Murdoch and Treion Muller
FranklinCovey Publishing, 2011

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Editorial Rating

7

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Recommendation

Matthew Murdoch and Treion Muller are senior online learning executives at FranklinCovey, a premier corporate training firm whose clients include many Fortune 500 companies. Their outstanding, authoritative book makes it clear that they have the chops to teach you how to organize online learning initiatives and how to plan, set up and run virtual classrooms. True to the authors’ “keep it short” philosophy, their book is concise. Mirroring their protocol for virtual learning, each chapter ends with interactive exercises. getAbstract recommends their concrete, easy-to-understand, highly enthusiastic explanation of virtual learning programs to chief learning officers, as well as to corporate education and training professionals.

Summary

The New (Virtual) Reality

The virtual classroom is “the new learning reality,” the boundary-free corporate training method of the future. Consider the possibilities: At the exact same moment, a Japanese teenager is using his mobile device to teach himself a new subject, an Australian entrepreneur is getting helpful advice from an online social network of peers, and a blogger in Denmark is sharing data with subscribers. This dramatic quest for knowledge – via the Internet, computers and mobile devices – represents a virtual “learning explosion,” whereby information comes in short bursts, practice and feedback mechanisms are instant, and the future is unlimited.

Thanks to rapid advances in technology, the traditional learning model has “exploded” into billions of discrete “learning fragments,” from blogs, social media and wikis to podcasts, apps and online communities. The learning explosion began, perhaps, when Johannes Gutenberg developed the Western world’s first printing press in 1439. Various catalysts accelerated the process along the way, from Guglielmo Marconi’s first radio transmission in 1907 to the invention of the computer at Bell Labs in 1937 and Tim Berners...

About the Authors

Matthew Murdoch is the global director of online learning at FranklinCovey, an international training firm, where Treion Muller is chief e-learning architect.

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