153:365 | Learning Engineer

I’ve resisted commenting on the flurry of posts on social media about the call for relabeling and redefining of professionals in my field as “learning engineers”. Why? Because it’s ridiculous – on so many levels. However, I will address the elephant in the room.

From the best I can tell, the loudest call for the name shift is coming from those outside our field – See MIT’s Online Education: A Catalyst for Higher Education Reforms. This externally funded (e.g., Carnegie Corporation and National Science Foundation) report is authored by an MIT task force “to explore potential future models of teaching and learning on campus and around the world, especially in light of recent advances in online education.” The report lightly and selectively touches on various threads of research and practice related to online learning, but largely omits the decades of existing distance and online learning research and practice conducted in the educational technology field.

I’ve skimmed through the report a few times and have no clear understanding of why the authors arrived at one of the four conclusions (e.g., Recommendation 3: Support the Expanding Profession of the “Learning Engineer”)

The design and implementation of these experiences, based on science, will in our view be best carried out by a new breed of professional—the learning engineer. We use this phrase as a shorthand to describe a person who might more comprehensively be described as a Learning Designer and Engineer … How does this differ from the modern-day
profession of an instructional designer?

Unfortunately, the authors don’t answer their own question but instead talk about the rebranding done at a few prestigious institutions. My hunch is the perceived need is less about a name change than (FINALLY) a recognition of the importance of the role, but this call for an elevation in the role is lost in the arrogance of those outside our field ignoring our history and taking it upon themselves to recast our future direction. As one of my colleagues noted on Twitter, “I’m excited for when astronautics professors will create a health engineering program to solve all the complex medical problems that physicians, nurses, bacteriologists, healthcare administrators, medical researchers, and pharmacists obviously have not been able to solve.”