This week I’ve been participating in the 2019 IEEE IC Industry Consortium on Learning Engineering (ICICLE) Conference at George Mason University, Arlington, Virginia. The event is a gathering of professionals from industry, academia, and government backgrounds investigating “Learning Engineering” as a profession, skill, and practice.
This is the first year, likely of many, for this conference and the output should be of interest to everyone involved in the learning space. This includes Instructional Designers, Software Developers, Subject Matter Experts, and everyone else that participates in the larger ecosystem of tools, strategies, technologies, and products intended to aid in learning and training. The end goal for this effort is to help create the rubric of skills needed to do more, and better, in the learning space. No matter our work product, understanding ICICLE’s constellation of topics will improve our collective ability to impact learners positively.
My own involvement has been leading the Special Interest Group (SIG) looking into what a Learning Engineer needs to understand about Data Privacy to put learning and training programs into place in a responsible way. If you’re here at the conference, I’ll be leading a discussion on Thursday, May 23rd from 10:10-10:40 a.m. if you’d like to hear more. Similar SIGs exist for AI, Competencies, Learning Analytics, and Design. You’ll get a glimpse at what these groups have been working on once the conference proceedings have been published, but in the meantime I encourage Learning Engineers, even if that’s not your official title, to spend some time looking into the IEEE ICICLE group to find ways these ongoing conversations can help you or places where you can get your hands dirty and participate in the community directly.
