The next China: revolution

T+D, May, 2003 by Jonathon Levy

Given its size, need, technological capacity, and track record of success with improbable scenarios, China could become the global e-learning giant.

My keynote address--a look at the future of online performance support--had just ended. As I was making my way off the stage at the CEO Online Learning conference in Beijing, a reporter for a large Chinese newspaper pushed through the crowd and intercepted me.

As we chatted, a TV crew entered the conversation and requested an immediate interview for the evening news. Simultaneously, several reporters and a photographer from two major magazines joined the throng and requested a two-hour appointment later that day.

I was amazed at the Chinese media's interest. They were treating my speech about knowledge and corporate growth as a breaking story. The more I talked, the more they questioned. I noticed that most of their inquiries were right on target, suggesting a good understanding of the field. Their prior knowledge and unexpected enthusiasm piqued my curiosity. In the days that followed it became apparent that, in China, the development of online learning may have far greater importance and urgency than in the West, and that the recent marriage of technologies enabling online performance support may be an important accelerator for China's overall economic development.

Primed for a surge

There are three reasons for China to develop quickly. One is the scale of the challenge and opportunity: There are as many companies in China as there are people in New York City. Two is the dramatic need for growth: Nearly 400 new cities and millions of new jobs will be created over the next 20 years. Three is economic inequality. China has an extreme bimodal distribution of wealth. There's a vast difference in economic development between the wealthy provinces in the east and the poorer provinces in the west. As a new member of the World Trade Organization, China is feeling the pressure for a rapid transformation from a labor-based economy to a knowledge-based workforce--a task that has pushed learning to the top of its agenda.

Combining scale, growth, and immediacy of need into a single scenario, a cogent picture of China as the perfect target for core investment in a scaleable e-learning solution begins to emerge.

But such ambitious plans carry the burden of retraining most of China's 1.3 billion citizens. The spectrum of people in need ranges from those who currently perform menial or agricultural labor, to those who will manage the new knowledge workforce but who have little or no education or experience in a market economy. In addition, as many as 30 million new jobs will be created within the next decade just in high-tech and management areas.

China can't get there from here. It's generally acknowledged that the existing educational infrastructure is inadequate to prepare its men and women for those positions. Contemporary management knowledge and techniques were developed and have been taught in an established market economy in the west. But most Chinese managers have had little or no access to that material. The Chinese Cultural Revolution relocated millions of students and businesspeople to agrarian collectives in eastern China, while their western counterparts were attending business schools and cutting their teeth in market economy positions.

Even following that period, managers learned skills within a socialist economy. China's Second Revolution of a shift to a market economy is only 20 years old, so most Chinese managers learned little about market economies in their university years.

Even those younger managers just out of school are the product of an educational system that focuses mote on traditional knowledge and less on skills training. Classical teaching methods combined with a lack of appropriate content continue to exacerbate that problem.

China knows it must rapidly retool for the knowledge economy of the 21st century. Its people are aware that they face a dangerous lack of skills and knowledge at a critical time of increased expansion and global competition. But in the Chinese language, the pictogram for the word crisis is composed of two elements: the symbol for danger joined with the symbol for opportunity. And opportunity there is aplenty.

The next steady state

The current state of online learning is like a model from quantum mechanics that suggests that a field in a steady state will enter a turbulent phase transition as it moves into another steady state. For example, water in a glass and water vapor in a cloud are both in a steady state. But to transform the water from liquid to vapor it must boil, churning with great turmoil and chaos. Similarly, the Field of learning has been in a steady state for hundreds (some would argue thousands) of years. But now faculty-centered reaching is slowly being replaced by more robust just-in-time personalized support. At the moment, however, the boundaries between old and new are ambiguous and intertwined, and no sustainable model is available. Traditional learning content is sometimes shoveled on to the Web (thus the term shovelware) and passed off as new. It isn't. It's essentially the same wine in a new bottle. It's nor sustainable, as demonstrated by the large number of failed ventures in that field over the past few years.