Before choosing a tool, there is a question that very few organisations ask seriously: what learning model are we choosing along with it?
The decision usually arrives from somewhere else entirely. From the available budget. From the pressure to improve metrics. From the appeal of what the market is doing or what a provider has just presented in a well-produced demo. Rarely from a prior pedagogical question. And that inversion of order has consequences: technically well-implemented tools that transform nothing. Not the learner’s experience, not the real quality of what is being offered, not the results that actually matter.
The problem is not the technology. It is the order in which decisions are made.
Leading technology in learning and development requires starting with a question that comes before any catalogue or commercial proposal: how do adults learn? This is not a rhetorical question. Decades of research on adult learning offer concrete answers. Adults learn better when they have autonomy over their own process, when they can connect content to their prior experience, when they perceive an immediate applicability of what they are working on, and when motivation is intrinsic rather than imposed. Authors such as Malcolm Knowles, with his andragogy model, or David Kolb, with his experiential learning theory, have spent decades offering useful frameworks that remain valid — and that continue to be ignored the moment a conversation about platforms or tools begins.
On that foundation comes the second step: having a learning model of your own. Not the provider’s. Not the one that comes as default in the chosen platform. One built from the questions that define your formative proposition: what kind of experience do you want to generate? What role does mistake-making play in your model? How do content, practice and transfer to the workplace relate to one another? What role do facilitators or tutors play? An organisation that has not answered these questions is not in a position to choose technology, because it does not yet know what it is asking technology to do.
And only then, in third place, comes the tool. Not as a starting point, but as a response to an experience already defined. Chosen not because it is the most advanced or the most widespread in the market, but because it best serves what you already know you want to build.
This is not incompatible with having limited resources. An organisation with a tight budget can follow this path just as well as one with ample means. The difference is not money: it is whether academic leadership has a voice in the technology conversation, or whether that conversation happens without it. It is whether someone at the table, when tools are being discussed, asks out loud what pedagogical model that tool is being chosen for.
That is the voice that is missing in too many organisations. Not out of bad faith, but because the habitual order of decisions leaves it out from the very beginning.
When was the last time the conversation about technology in your organisation started with the pedagogical model, and not with the budget or the provider?
