Everyone is passionate about something–it’s human nature–and we will relentlessly choose to learn more and more about our interests. I’ve recently developed an interest in history. It’s a topic I have not spent much time on since…I don’t know when, but lately I can’t get enough of it. I buy books, I download podcasts on iTunes, I read blogs…yada, yada, yada. In short, I’ve become passionate about it.

While we are free to pursue personal learning on our own time, self-directed learning in the workplace is often a struggle for employees. Most of us don’t get to pick what we learn about at work, and if we do, the time allowed for self-directed learning is often very limited.

An online training magazine I recently read cited a survey that showed that 80% of survey participants didn’t remember the last time they purchased any self-directed learning offerings. To add further evidence, I’ve observed that nearly 100% of Four51 customers that attend our training courses come because they were asked to by someone else at their company, typically their boss.

It makes sense, right? Companies make calculated investments in their employees and ought to get a return for their money.

Here’s an obvious but interesting fact: Most of us learn the bulk of our knowledge and skill on the job, through ad hoc interactions with our peers. We collaborate with each other on the fly, and learn a wealth of information while doing so. It’s a powerful dynamic, probably more powerful than any classroom or web-based instructor-led training!

That being said, my impetus for this post is a learning website called learnhub.com. It’s a new tool that allows educators and students to teach and learn in a collaborative online community. Basically, it’s Facebook meets eLearning.

But the coolest thing is that you don’t need to be a licensed, certified educator to teach courses. In their words, “Because LearnHub’s communities can be created by both teachers and learners, the system purposefully blurs the line between teacher and student to increase collaboration between learners and educators. By eliminating the divide between students and teachers and combining education with the benefit of social networking, LearnHub has created a niche in education that is unprecedented in the world of online education.”

Pretty cool stuff. These people truly understand how most of us learn: peer-to-peer, collaboratively, in social networks. And, as an added bonus, learnhub.com is a lot of fun. Learners and educators have the ability to create personal profiles, develop communities around any topic, get RSS updates about what other users are doing, and much more.

Why not make learning fun? Shouldn’t Four51 do this? I’m not making any announcements in this post, but I will say that Four51 is currently taking a hard look at ways to enhance our training offerings. In a few weeks, Four51 will be distributing a survey to all our customers asking for input about how we can enhance your Four51 learning. When you receive the survey, I ask you to take it seriously and really let us know what your training needs and wants are.

To me, learnhub.com is a clear indication that there is technology available to support a wide-variety of learning styles and needs. That’s what I want Four51 to do but the question remains, do you?

Owen