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Learning Engineering is an emerging field that applies science, technology, and pedagogy to produce the most effective learning experience. It is an approach to teaching and learning that focuses on engineering or designing an environment to encourage, motivate, and enhance learning.

As small businesses come to grips with the impact of the Pandemic and their ability to survive, some will determine a need to raise funding. However, many of the usual sources of risk capital are sitting on the sidelines until they are certain that the market has bottomed out. And, after throwing band-aids of money haphazardly at the small business community, the federal government is locked in partisan politics that provide no insight as to where, when or how economic recovery programs may be funded.

We've all had bad teachers, and we've all experienced hard-to-use educational content. For the most part, education today is still a hit or miss proposition. You're lucky if you find that one in a million stellar teacher that inspires you to learn!

As we face an economic crisis of unknown size, those businesses that survive the Pandemic must re-invent themselves to address both new markets and volatile business conditions.  With shrunken and interrupted revenue and supply chain disruption, businesses must look to all available means to gain efficiencies.

As communities look to recover from the COVID Pandemic, a good starting point is to build new housing for local workers.

Prior to the Pandemic, a shortage of six million low-income housing units was already a crisis.  With 30+ million newly unemployed, the need for economical housing is soaring.  Addressing this key community challenge presents an opportunity to create jobs now.

The pandemic has created a situation where parents are homeschooling, and teachers are trying to teach online.  Out of frustration, some school districts want to close the school year. What will students do educationally for the rest of this school year and throughout the summer?

The problem is that parents are not prepared to homeschool, and may not have the time since they are trying to work from home.

Teachers are not used to teaching online with the current tools available to them.

As the number of diagnosis and deaths from the COVID Pandemic decrease, we face an economic recovery challenge of unprecedented scale.  The challenge for each small business is how do they participate in recovery:

• Lone wolf
• Community leader
• Piggyback
• Do nothing

While talking with many businesses in different states, the general thought has been that the future is not clear.  Nothing is certain.  Going forward will face a new ‘normal’ or ‘abnormal’.

Once you've identified the concepts that you want to teach (see An Easier Way To Define Training Goals) you have a clear plan of what needs to be taught. The next question becomes "How do you teach each concept?" There are several principles that we can apply that ensures mastery every time.

One of the biggest challenges in training is identifying your students' knowledge gaps and having a strategy for dealing with them.

Generally, you want to identify certain performance goals for your trainees. That sets the target, and then after your intervention, you will want to test to see that those goals have been achieved.

When it comes to developing instruction, are you an artisan, or are you an engineer? What's the difference?

An artisan builds each widget as a unique and unrepeatable project. If the artisan builds a chair, even though we all know the function of a chair and a chair's general characteristics, the artisan will build the chair from scratch. Each leg or arm will be turned and sanded lovingly. The surface will be polished and oiled until it is a work of art. It is beautiful, but it will also be expensive because all of that loving care takes time.