ITIL is rich with opportunities to implement these principles. In real life, Single Points of Failure (SPOFs) serve as, well, single points of learning.

Design needs to place the learner at the helm. ITpreneurs makes a point of qualifying its content as “learning content” as against the conventional “teaching or instructional content.” Lessons from pedagogy (from the Greek words for "child-leading") and andragogy (from the Greek words for "adult-leading") have influenced our approach to designing our learning content.

Malcolm Knowles, acclaimed as the father of andragogy, held that andragogy should be distinguished from the more commonly used pedagogy.

Knowles' theory can be stated as four simple postulates:

1. Adults need to be involved in the planning and evaluation of their instruction (Self-concept and Motivation to learn).
2. Real-life incidents, including mistakes, provides the basis for learning activities (Experience).
3. Adults are most interested in learning subjects that have immediate relevance to their job or personal life (Readiness to learn).
4. Adult learning is problem-centered rather than content-oriented (Orientation to learning).

All a teacher can and, indeed, should do is to show the light. It is up to the learner to learn. Each student picks up what is relevant to her or him at that point in time.

This takes us, interestingly, to the feeding habits of babies – modern child nutritionists and psychologists emphasize the need to present the child with various foods, and allow the child to pick what she wants to. The child will end up picking the food with the nutritional component she is deficient in at that time. This principle applies, we believe, to learning.

How does this translate when we are constructing learning, though? For one, we design content into easily digestible chunks that learners can pick from, and two, offer multiple paths of assimilation to choose from, including real-life connects, games, content, and exercises… Most importantly, we design a problem-based learning program rather than a content-based learning program. This is to celebrate the fact that every learner is and will be different!

Learners are really at different points of knowledge, skill, and ability. Add learner types to this, and the mix gets complex. Each of us has our own unique learning style. Some of us prefer to be taught while others would rather learn at their own pace. Some love the discipline of academics while others are just reading up to pass an exam. Some need to understand and contextualize clearly while others will simply rather remember by rote.

Effective learning material presents the learner with the right levels and types of components to choose from, based on where he is in his learning cycle. That is, components of content, or the core ITIL content in this case, and components of learning aids, or the learning tools that help connect the core content for the learner.

ITpreneurs has solved for variances in learning styles using multiple learning tools. Each module, topic, and subtopic provides several tools or paths for learning and opportunities to learn, revise, understand,and self-evaluate. The academic learner, for example, may skip the real-life connects, scenarios, and exercises, and go directly from content piece to content piece; likewise for the learner who would rather memorize by rote. The learner who seeks to understand and contextualize the content has at her disposal, the scenarios (we used the hotel as a motif for the scenarios), the SPOFs and incidents situated within those scenarios, and problem-solving for the same, connecting all this to the content at hand.