Donald Taylor, learning-industry visionary, has just come out with his annual Global Sentiment Survey asking practitioners in the field what topics are the most important right now. The thing that struck me is that the results show that data is becoming more and more important to people, especially as represented in adaptive learning through personalization, artificial intelligence, and learning analytics.

Learning analytics was most important category for the opinion leaders represented in social media. This seems right to me as someone who will be focused mostly on learning evaluation in 2019.

As Don said in the GoodPractice podcast with Ross Dickie and Owen Ferguson, “We don’t have to prove. We have to improve through learning analytics.”

What I love about Don Taylor’s work here is that he’s clear as sunshine about the strengths and limitations of this survey—and, most importantly, that he takes the time to explain what things mean without over-hyping and slight-of-hand. It’s a really simple survey, but the results are fascinating—not necessarily about what we should be doing, but what people in our field think we should be paying attention to. This kind of information is critical to all of us who might need to persuade our teams and stakeholders on how we can be most effective in our learning interventions.

Other findings:

• Businessy-stuff fell in rated importance, for example, “consulting more deeply in the business,” “showing value,” and “developing the L&D function.”
• Neuroscience/Cognitive Science fell in importance (most likely I think because some folks have been debunking the neuroscience-and-learning connections). And note: These should not be one category really, especially given that people in the know know that cognitive science, or more generally learning research, has shown to have proven value. Neuroscience not so much.
• Mobile delivery and artificial intelligence were to two biggest gainers in terms of popularity.
• Very intriguing that people active on social media (perhaps thought leaders, perhaps the opinionated mob) have different views that a more general population of workplace learning professionals. There is an interesting analysis in the book and a nice discussion in the podcast mentioned above.

For those interested in Don Taylor’s work, check out his website.