Education is a weird field of study (at least in North America). The undergraduate degree in education is a professional degree, intended to provide certification for those wishing to teach in the K-12 school system. It is very much "teachers college". If one wants to learn to teach adults, especially in the context of workplace learning, then a more appropriate degree is a graduate certificate or masters degree.
However, in order to teach at the Masters degree level at most universities and colleges, one must have a PhD (or EdD). What this means is that, for the most part, if you want to teach people how to teach in the corporate sector you must be successful in the academic sector. It also means that we have university professors, who have little or no experience in the corporate sector, teaching us to how teach in the corporate sector.
As someone who has a passion for teaching professionals how to integrate technology into their lives and into their teaching practices, I find this situation rather frustrating. In order to do what I have a passion for, that is online teaching in educational technology and instructional design, I first need a PhD. Everytime I find myself jumping through yet one more hoop in the process of getting a PhD (it is more of a professional hoop-jumping degree than anything else), I wonder, why I need a research degree in order to be permitted to teach what I have been doing professionally for 15 years?
To me, this is clearly a place where academia is broken. We need to either start issuing undergraduate degrees in adult education / workplace learning (as you only need a Masters or professional experience to teach in undergrad), or we need to start looking into who is teaching in these Masters programs. If you are looking for a degree to help you improve your workplace learning, and your professors have only ever worked within academia, can they teach you what you need to be successful?
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