Next Level Learning Environments for Next Level Work: Applying the Learning Sciences to Technology-Enabled Training

The vision for workforce training described in this series of briefs is powerful and ambitious: supporting agentive learners to transfer their skills and knowledge across contexts, to gain the dispositions to handle turbulent change throughout their careers, and to equip them with expertise but also the capacity to apply it flexibly in varied contexts. Achieving this vision calls for equally ambitious and innovative approaches to designing learning environments for workforce training and creatively leveraging digital tools to enable hands-on learning in varied contexts. In this brief, we set forth such a vision. We describe four instructional design principles that enable Next Level Learning for the future of work: contextualization, reflection, agency, and feedback. Applying these principles to the affordances of digital technologies, we illustrate ways workforce learning environments can move beyond a focus on transmitting content knowledge to workers to holistically supporting their development. Specifically, we discuss the ways virtual reality, online learning, and video games can provide rich and varied contexts, interactivity, and adaptive feedback that may be difficult to engineer in traditional classroom or workplace learning environments.