MRT

I was sitting in my office the other day considering the reading and the reading I've done for other works, especially those for the area of interest I have with this class, emotion and Virtual Reality (VR) and ran across a new area of interest. The terms I hit on were Media Richness Theory (MRT) and Media Synchronicity Theory (MST).

MRT, proposed by Daft and Lengle in 1986 is the idea that processing of learning is influenced by creating more media rich delivery systems. Where MST is the idea of multiple MRT delivery systems working together to create a system or designed more effective learning. Both of these are new to me and I look forward to finding out more. The point of this post is less about the theories (I'll save those for next class) but more about the fact that the more we learn about a subject the more we find out and want to learn about that subject. 

My organization is going through a cultural change in it's views on business and on education and learning. For the past 30 years this organization has been focused on providing training, quickly, inexpensively, to a captive audience. They've made updates to their operationally processes to move contractors through training, and have found ways to scale the training delivery systems, but have struggled at quality and providing an ROI to their members. All of this is catching up to them.

Now they are facing competition from both other non-profits and private companies alike who have focused on quality. Now, their captive audience is being opened up to new methods of delivery that do not include our brick and mortar learning community. The organization is facing head winds in terms of these eLearning delivery systems, and playing catch up to many of our competitors, as well as facing headwinds in training quality. MRT and MST should not be new theories for our organization, yet they are. MRT was proposed in 1986, yet no one at this organization knows what it is. Why not? Why does a learning community not focus on its quality sooner rather than wait until the last second to catch up? I think too often our learning communities are too set in their ways and lack innovative skills to keep up with private organizations until it is too late and they see the world changing. 

The one area where the organization is achieving is in creating a learning community. On page 295 of Taylor and Marienau the authors write, referring to John Dirkx, "adults' feelings about any learning environment and the activities they encounter there are both "unavoidable by-products of learning and the constitutive of the very learning process itself." The learning environment at our organization is in many cases the best that any of our learners have ever been to. The environment is ripe for wonderful and reflective training, but the product hasn't kept up with the packaging. 

I can't wait to dig into MRT and MST more and see how they can help our organization. My question here is I wonder if anyone else has encountered these? In what way have either been effective or not in helping create more effective learning solutions?

Taylor, K., & Marienau, C. (2016). Facilitating learning with the adult brain in mind: A  conceptual and practical guide. John Wiley & Sons.