From Static Learning to Dynamic Learning
Years ago, we used to run peer-to-peer learning events through Suffolk Internet Marketing Specialists.
They were successful because they were not really about formal training.
They were about people coming together, sharing what they knew, asking questions and helping each other understand a digital world that was changing around us.
At the time, we probably did not have the language for what made that model work.
Now, I think we do.
It was dynamic learning.
The old model of learning
For a long time, education was largely built around static information.
You learned something from a page.
The page had a fixed size. The information was presented as settled. You absorbed it, remembered it and, at some point in the future, were asked to reproduce it.
That model made sense when information changed slowly.
But digital changed the relationship between knowledge, time and application.
I watched that happen particularly clearly around the shift to mobile.
Businesses had spent years learning what a website should look like, how pages should be structured and how people were expected to use them.
Then behaviour changed.
Devices changed.
Search changed.
Customer expectations changed.
The information people had learned was not necessarily wrong, but it was no longer enough.
Knowing a fixed answer became less useful than being able to recognise change, find the right information and apply it within the context of your own business.
That is the distinction I make between static and dynamic learning.
What dynamic learning looks like
Dynamic learning is not about learning everything in advance.
It is about developing the ability to work out what you need to know, when you need to know it.
It is:
Contextual
Collaborative
Responsive
Practical
Continuous
It works particularly well through cohort learning.
A group learns together over time. People bring different experiences, questions and problems. As they begin to understand one another’s businesses, the conversations become more useful.
You are no longer discussing an abstract idea.
You are discussing a real problem, in a real business, in the context of a possible solution.
My first strong experience of this was through the Help to Grow: Management course with the University of Leicester.
More recently, I experienced it again through Tech Educators.
The value was not only in the formal material.
It was in staying together long enough to understand each other’s challenges.
Someone would raise a problem, another person would recognise a similar pattern, and the theory would suddenly become practical.
The learning lived inside the conversation.
Businesses do not need more disconnected information
Small businesses already have access to more information than they could ever consume.
The problem is not usually a complete absence of advice.
The problem is knowing:
Which information applies to them
What order to tackle things in
Which problem they are actually solving
Whether a particular tool or service is appropriate
How one decision will affect the rest of the business
It is increasingly difficult to separate a business into neat component parts.
A website problem might actually be an offer problem.
A marketing problem might be a customer journey problem.
A sales problem might be a trust problem.
An automation problem might actually be a badly designed process.
A business owner does not simply need to learn marketing, technology, finance or operations as separate subjects.
They need to understand how to find the right answer in real time and make it relevant to the wider progression of the business.
Bringing SIMS back
This is the thinking behind the relaunch of Suffolk Internet Marketing Specialists.
SIMS used to create space for peer-to-peer learning, and it taught us a great deal about how people learn from one another.
This time, we want to build on that deliberately.
We are not trying to create another programme of long presentations in which an expert delivers a large amount of information and everyone goes home hoping they remember the relevant bit.
We want to create small, focused learning sessions.
One problem.
One useful piece of knowledge.
One conversation about how it applies.
Topics might include:
How customers actually buy
What makes people trust a business
Why websites do not generate enquiries
How to build a simple marketing funnel
When SEO matters
How to choose the right digital support
What a business should understand before paying a specialist
These are intentionally granular subjects.
The purpose is not to turn every small business owner into a marketer.
It is to help them understand the next decision, ask better questions and recognise when they need support.
Supported by the local community
We also want SIMS to create greater visibility for Suffolk’s marketers, developers, virtual assistants, creatives, consultants and business support specialists.
The local community already contains an enormous amount of knowledge.
Our job is to connect that knowledge with the people who need it.
That means asking two questions:
What do you want to learn?
What could you teach?
Over time, those answers will help us build a locally supported learning cohort around the real needs of Suffolk’s small and microbusinesses.
The curriculum will not be fixed and handed down.
It will evolve through the questions people ask, the problems businesses encounter and the knowledge local specialists are able to share.
That is dynamic learning.
Not memorising an answer that may be out of date by the time you need it.
Learning how to find, understand and apply the right answer as the world continues to change.
