One of the first major challenges in spaceflight was how to get into space, namely the Launch Problem. It is because of this problem that rocket science became synonymous with complexity and, hence, when talking about non-complex matters, there is the phrase “it’s not rocket science”.
With some poetic license, this article presents a subtler problem in the space sector, namely the Lecture Problem. How do we train people to learn about space businesses, markets, operations, law, finance, and technology in a way, which is appropriate for busy professionals?
Collectively we have borrowed a conventional model, the lecture.
Lectures are a staple method of information transfer in universities and, indeed, have been for centuries. Like it or not, the common practice of a lecture is one, in which a person talks at a group of people, often bombarding them with verbal and visual information.
Academics and students may debate about the utility of lectures. The debate is not whether this is an effective form of teaching and learning (it’s not). The debate is about the extent to which the students should synthesise information during independent study. At the university level there is great value in this approach, helping students to cultivate their abilities to learn and to think.
The pre-requisite, however, is free time.
In the professional context, most people do not have this luxury.
Professional level training often mimics the lecture model. One person (the instructor) talks at a group of people (the professionals in training), bombarding them with information, giving rise to the saying “death by PowerPoint”. Not only is this method ineffective at transferring information to the participants, in the professional context most people do not have the free time afterwards, in which to synthesise the information.
Simply put, in most cases, the lecture model is not appropriate for professional training.
And yet, in the sat-comms sector this seems to be the only model we know, appearing in Continuing Professional Development (CPD) courses, in conferences, and in industry training. So often sat-comms is taught to professionals, as if they had another week of free time to revise the material (normally, they don’t).
To achieve effective and time-efficient training, the sat-comms sector needs to employ different training methods, utilising more interaction, more experiential learning, and more iterative processes.
Moreover, we must collectively acknowledge that the design, development, and implementation of good training is difficult, requires skill, and takes time.
Pedagogics is just like any other skill. The people, who deliver this training, must learn to deconstruct information, present the information appropriately, and support their students. Such work is non-trivial, and developing the skill to do so takes extensive practice.
We return to the problem of limited time. If we want good training, we need to dedicate resources. We need dedicated trainers, people who focus on this task, and this alone, to support the wider development of an organisation. If we rely on people running training as a part-time activity, the training will never quite achieve its potential.
If we want high-performance organisations, we need high-performance people. And for that we need to invest in better sat-comms training.