Stories

Tag: learning design

  • Taking the pulse: why and how we change everything in response to learner signals

    Taking the pulse: why and how we change everything in response to learner signals

    The ability to analyze and respond to learner behavior as it happens is crucial for educators.

    In complex learning that takes place in digital spaces, task separation between the design of instruction and its delivery does not make sense.

    Here is the practical approach we use in The Geneva Learning Foundation’s learning-to-action model to implement responsive learning environments by listening to learner signals and adapting design, activities, and feedback accordingly.

    Listening for and interpreting learner signals

    Educators must pay close attention to various signals that learners emit throughout their learning journey. These signals appear in several key ways:

    1. Engagement levels: This includes participation rates, the quality of contributions in discussions, how learners interact with each other, and knowledge artefacts they produce.
    2. Emotional responses: The tone and content of learner feedback can indicate enthusiasm, frustration, or confusion.
    3. Performance patterns: Trends in speed and volume of responses tend to strongly correlate with more significant learning outcome indicators.
    4. Interaction dynamics: Learners can feel a facilitator’s conviction (or lack thereof) in the learning process. Observing the interaction should focus first on the facilitator’s own behavior: what are they modeling for learners?
    5. Technical interactions: The way learners navigate the learning platform, which resources they access most, and any technical challenges they face are important indicators.

    Making sense of learner signals

    Once these signals are identified, a nuanced approach to analysis is necessary:

    1. Contextual consideration: Understanding the broader context of learners’ experiences is vital. For example, differences between language cohorts might reflect varying levels of real-world experience and cultural contexts.
    2. Holistic view: Look beyond immediate learning objectives to understand all aspects of learners’ experiences, including factors outside the course that may affect their engagement.
    3. Temporal analysis: Track changes in learner behavior over time to reveal important trends and patterns as the course progresses.
    4. Comparative assessment: Compare behavior across different cohorts, language groups, or demographic segments to identify unique needs and preferences.
    5. Feedback loop analysis: Examine how learners respond to different types of feedback and instructional interventions to provide valuable insights.

    Adapting learning design in situ

    What can we change in response to learner behavior, signals, and patterns?

    1. Customized content: Tailor case studies, examples, and scenarios to match the real-world experiences and cultural contexts of different learner groups.
    2. Flexible pacing: Adjust the rhythm of content delivery and activities based on observed engagement patterns and feedback.
    3. Varied support mechanisms: Implement a range of support options, from technical assistance to emotional support, based on identified learner needs.
    4. Dynamic group formations: Adapt group activities and peer learning opportunities based on observed interaction dynamics and skill levels.
    5. Multimodal delivery: Offer content and activities in various formats to cater to different learning preferences and technical capabilities.

    Responding to learner signals

    Feedback plays a crucial role in the learning process:

    1. Comprehensive acknowledgment: Feedback mechanisms should demonstrate to learners that their input is valued and considered. This might involve creating, at least once, detailed summaries of learner feedback to show that every voice has been heard.
    2. Timely interventions: Using real-time feedback to address emerging issues or confusion quickly can prevent small challenges from becoming major obstacles.
    3. Personalized guidance: Tailor feedback to individual learners based on their unique progress, challenges, and goals.
    4. Peer feedback facilitation: Create opportunities for learners to provide feedback to each other to foster a collaborative learning environment.
    5. Metacognitive prompts: Incorporate feedback that encourages learners to reflect on their learning process to promote self-awareness and self-directed learning.

    Balancing act

    When combined, these analyses provide clues to inform decisions.

    Nothing should be set in stone.

    Decisions need to be pragmatic and rapid.

    In order to respond to the pattern formed by signals, what are the trade-offs?

    The digital economy of effort makes rapid changes possible.

    Nevertheless, we consider the cost of each change versus its benefit.

    This adaptive approach involves careful balancing of various factors:

    1. Depth versus speed: Navigate the tension between providing comprehensive feedback and maintaining a timely pace of instruction.
    2. Structure versus flexibility: Maintain a coherent course structure while allowing for adaptations based on learner needs.
    3. Individual versus group needs: Balance addressing individual learner challenges with maintaining the momentum of the entire cohort.
    4. Emotional support versus learning structure: Provide necessary emotional support, especially in challenging contexts, while maintaining focus on learning objectives.

    Learning is research

    Each learning experience should be treated as a research opportunity:

    1. Data collection: Systematically collect data on learner behavior, feedback, and outcomes.
    2. Team reflection: Conduct regular debriefs with the instructional team to share insights and adjust strategies.
    3. Iterative design: Use insights gained from each cohort to refine the learning design for future iterations.
    4. Cross-cohort learning: Apply lessons learned from one language or cultural group to enhance the experience of others, while respecting unique contextual differences.

    Image: The Geneva Learning Foundation Collection © 2024

  • Tower of Babel

    Tower of Babel

    What happens when a fledgling, start-up foundation convenes learning leaders from all over the world to explore digital learning? Over 800 participants from 103 countries have joined the Geneva Learning Foundation’s #DigitalScholar course developed in conjunction with the University of Illinois College of Education and Learning Strategies International.

    The course officially launches on Monday. Yet participants  joining the online community have begun introducing themselves and, in the process, are already tackling challenging questions on the pedagogy, content, and economics of education and its digital transformation.

    “Look at all the people here!” exclaimed one Digital Scholar. And, yes, we are from everywhere. You could start from “cloudy England”, a hop-and-a-skip away from “rainy Amsterdam” and then keep travelling, stopping in any of the 103 countries where participants live. You might end up in the “paradise island” of Mauritius, “sunny but chilly” Sidney, or “hot and humid” Puerto Rico.

    Think about it. When Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis describe the affordance of “ubiquity”, the anywhere-anytime in digital learning, that describes the ability of learners to connect to a course. But ubiquity also enables our connections to each other, across time and space. A banal weather report becomes a way of relating here to there, a way to refer the diversity of contexts and paths that have led us here.

    “Thrilled” and “excited” and “delighted” come up more than once. But why are we here? In the words of one Digital Scholar: “I hope to learn and obtain skills to rock!” It is the “opportunity to learn new skills” about the “nuts and bolts” of digital learning. It is also for “professional and educational growth”.  Yes, technology is the “new shiny” but our task as learning leaders is to be “always thinking about how it can best be used in learning”.

    So we are here to begin building our own digital course. Not everyone is sure what to expect – and I was surprised by the number who do not know what course they want to develop. That will be the first order of business on Monday and throughout the first week of the course. What we express is of course situated in our context of work and life. The diversity of contexts is staggering – and harder to wrap my head around than the weather. I get that the choice, for example, to focus on “citizen-centered community action”, education, peace, or social justice issues is of course no accident.

    The Geneva Learning Foundation’s initial call for applications focused on its own network, in the humanitarian, development, and global health space. So there are public health specialists, evaluators, crisis mappers, knowledge managers, leadership developers, school principals and teachers.

    But our bet was that the call would then escape the boundaries of our known circles and reach other industries. And we have. Hence we find decision-making and risk management, writing, faculty development, and the occasional topic that intersect specialties, such as the course on “Twitter for health professionals”.

    The common thread is the yearning to share, translate, grow, develop, fusing experience and practice and networks.

    So you want to build a course. How do you know that there is a demand for it? Yes, that is the crass language of Economics 101 supply-and-demand intruding in a world of learning that we would like to imagine pure and removed from material considerations. But one of the key lessons we hope to convey in this course will be the realization that there is a political economy to knowledge and learning. “There seems to be an interest to learn more” about Twitter for health professionals, explained one participant, after giving presentations “at various local medical organizations”. Is that sufficient to demonstrate demand for a course that will require investment of time and resources and possibly carry a price tag? There is, in fact, only one business model for education that can happen fast and be sustainable: institutions, individuals or both must be prepared to pay enough to cover the costs of the operation.

    Traditional institutions of higher education already have channels for marketing, recruitment, sales, and so on. But what about those of us who do not work within one of these institutions – or who wish to develop learning that does not fit into their sometimes-narrow constraints, especially as we push to innovate the practice of education?

    For one participant, the logic is one of austerity, of how to do more with less: “Due to the sharp decrease in training funding from the government, we are looking seriously at the fully-online mode” rather than blended learning that had been used in the past. The caveat is that the mere fact that technology does enable you to make “services more widely accessible” does not mean they will be more affordable – and nor does accessibility mean that people will come (much less pay for) an educational programme.

    My premise is that content and pedagogy are the easy parts (tongue in cheek) to figure out. The real challenge is in taking it to market (even if the learners won’t be the ones paying for it). In developing their course announcement, #DigitalScholar course participants may well find that this is the most challenging part of the endeavor. How do you test and verify your assumptions about who would actually want to take your course? What if you are wrong?

    My last question to incoming participants is about the Digital Transformation. Yes, that’s with capital letters, originally used in management theory to describe how conventional industries are transformed by “e-business”. I believe that this is one useful lens to reframe our role as learning leaders, to help us adapt and perhaps even stay a step ahead of the accelerated pace of technological change.

    Some Digital Scholars are not sure about what it means. For others, it referred to the impact of technology on learning, “how we interact with content” or “with each other in a Digital Age”, “how content is made available, and how it is utilized” in a “mix of dynamic possibilities”. Others ascribed the concept with inspirational or aspirational aims, leading to “a transformed learning experience” “potentially offering innovative and dynamic courses”, in the name of “deeper, more meaningful learning” and “rich interactions with peers and the instructor”.

    Many of us keep coming back to scale (““improving access of education to more learners”) as the starting point for thinking about what we can afford to do through effective use of technology. What we will explore in the course is that there are, in fact, many more affordances of digital learning’s amazing economy of effort.

    You can still join to become a #DigitalScholar until Sunday, 3 July 2016. The course will launch on the 4th of July. Read the full course announcement and apply here. We also have Facebook, Twitter, and Slack.

    Image: The Tower of Babel by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1563).

  • Insomnia against the grain – and putting Bloom to bed

    Insomnia against the grain – and putting Bloom to bed

    Summer 2016, Day 1. “So, that puts to bed Bloom’s Taxonomy… that reliable workhorse,” sighed C. “What do we use in its place?”

    “We don’t”, answered the Walrus. “There is no successor to neatly replace Bloom’s. It’s still there – and can still be useful. It’s about changing the way we think and do the design of learning. Just look at how we are building our course in real time.”  And we are. Observing the accelerating flow of applications for the #DigitalScholar course is more than a spectator sport. It is turning me into an insomniac. It is about feeling who is out there in the interwebs, somehow ending up with a course announcement from a brand-new (read: obscure) foundation based in Geneva, Switzerland. Reading motivation statements, trying to figure out how they connect to boxes ticked… It is on that shifting knowledge landscape of what is shared, across time and space, that we are sculpting the experience we hope amazing, starting on the fourth of July.

    In fact, we’ve already started. Slack, Facebook, and Twitter accounts are all set up to connect participants to each other even before they connect with the course and the #DigitalScholar team. Never mind that some folks might struggle with Slack, may legitimately feel overwhelmed, frustrated, or annoyed by so many different platforms before the course has even started, and that using Facebook for anything related to work could well be anathema… Yet getting used to the multiplicity of tools, purposes, and intent is part and parcel of what we need to learn.

    This course doesn’t even have a name. Instead, it is about becoming a #DigitalScholar. That is no hipster hashtag, by the way. It is part of a taxonomy of New Learning that sees technology as not just enabling or mediating learning, but affording us a new economy of effort, the means by which we can afford to  extricate ourselves from the miasma of the learning-and-development of the Past. Becoming a #DigitalScholar is not about content. It is about metacognition (thinking about thinking) far more than about cognition. It is about figuring out what it means to be human in a Digital Age, a far more significant question than the gruesome dichotomy between real and virtual that leads to the sterile dead-end of our IRL fetish.

    In Minecraft, you do not have to sit through six-minute video lectures about the different kinds of building blocks before taking a quiz testing your ability to recall them. Mastery learning implies that there is some end point, some learning objective that you reach. You can build and measure what you build or how you got there – but isn’t what you build (and how you did it) what really matters? Can a badge – or even 1,000 discrete, specific, networked ones in the blockchain – represent what we know and experience?

    Winter 2014. Cointrin, Geneva’s airport lounge. “Just stick to what you know,” said the Roly-Poly High Priest of Learning. “Maybe you can convene a group of humanitarian folks and build an L&D network around shared needs. Start there.” A sensible enough proposal. I already knew more than a few really bright folks pushing technology for learning in various international organizations. Yet my gut hated the idea, recognizing something unsavory about that pattern. It has taken me two years to figure out why – and to build something the potential of which rests on success (or failure) in convening learning leaders from as many different quarters as we can.

    One key weakness of our humanitarian learning culture rests in our insularity. (There are also many strengths). We think we are different because of the nature of the business we are in. So we neglect meaningful connections to external systems. And yet when we engage with learning leaders outside our little corner of the Universe, the gaps between what we do and what they do can lead to a kind of ghoulish fascination for the opulence and the confidence of the corporate learning space, where CLOs erect brick-and-mortar campuses, deploy transformative leadership acceleration (not just development) programs to tackle their most wicked business problems, and lead teams with capabilities that we can only wish for. Witness the rare heads of learning and development who lavish budget to join corporate learning networks with no clear strategy of what might be transferable or how, given the differences in context and mission. Meanwhile, most of us work with shoestring budgets and struggle to lock down an appointment – never mind recognition, support, or funding – with our CEO, or, more likely, the head of HR that we report to.

    Yes, the learning I know is about saving lives (think first aid, disaster response, or emergency health) and about building a sustainable future. I’ve learned many humbling lessons about how difficult it is to apply theory and principle to chaos. The chaos of your industry may be of a different nature. But they are connected, part of the same messy world we share.  Education is privileged to be the science of sciences. It is the meta layer of the networked data society. It eats communication and knowledge management for breakfast. And I can no longer think of what I do in learning in isolation of the rest of the world. Limiting the unit of analysis to one organization, its people, or even its industry is a constraint of the past. In fact, I refuse to conceive a learning initiative that does not cross boundaries. It is a necessary condition for learning to provide a way of seeing trends developing in the world today. The incoming signals amplify the sense of what that condition might mean. That is why I am finding it hard to sleep. And so eagerly looking forward to walking on the edges for four weeks with a multitude from everywhere.

    Image: WallpapersCraft.

  • Beyond MOOCs: the democratization of digital learning

    Beyond MOOCs: the democratization of digital learning

    It is with some trepidation that I announce the Geneva Learning Foundation’s first open access digital course in partnership with the University of Illinois College of Education and Learning Strategies International.

    The mission of the brand-new Geneva Learning Foundation is to connect learning leaders to research, invent, and trial breakthrough approaches for new learning, talent and leadership as a way of shaping humanity and society for the better.

    This open access, four-week (16 hours total) online course will start on 4 July 2016 and end on the 29th. It will be taught by Bill Cope, Catherine Russ, and myself, three of the eleven charter members of the Foundation.

    We’ll be using Scholar to teach the latest digital learning pedagogies. Everyone will develop, peer review, and revise an outline for a course relevant to their own context of work. This outline is intended to be the practical basis for developing and offering an actual course – so this is no academic exercise.

    The course is tightly aligned by this mission, both theoretically and practically:

    • Theoretically, learning – like almost everything else – is being remade by digital. Learning in a knowledge society is a key process to change, hence the urgency and centrality of thinking through what digital transformation means with respect to knowledge and learning.
    • Practically, it will convene learning professionals who will collaborate to develop new ways of teaching and learning

    You will notice that there is no reference specifically to the humanitarian context in the course announcement. I hope that participants will come from many different industries, and that all stand to benefit by new learning approaches we have developed on the edge of chaos.

    Please do share the course announcement with trusted colleagues and networks. And, if you are free in July, don’t miss it. I am betting that this first run will gather an eclectic group of learning mavericks and at least a few of those whom Cath calls edge-walkers, not just fellow humanitarians but folks from other industries operating in the same, increasingly-complex world.

    So why claim that this is “beyond MOOCs”? I do not mean to imply that this course is somehow a successor to massive open online courses (MOOCs). Rather, I have written elsewhere about how MOOCs remain mostly about the transmission of knowledge. This course is about learners as active knowledge producers. I believe this is an important distinction. (Seb Schmoller argues that strong learning design can organize a beautiful, effective learning journey in just about any architecture. This, to me, is akin to saying that even a car can be made to fly – you just need to strap on some wings…)

    There is an equally important distinction when defining what we mean by the democratization of learning: is this about scale (more learners with access to education)? Or is it about a paradigm change in what learners get to do: learning anywhere and any time by actively designing meanings and making knowledge they can use, thinking about thinking (metacognition), giving each other recursive feedback as they collaborate to solve problems… in other words, being teachers in a Digital Age?

    [x_button shape=”rounded” size=”x-large” float=”none” block=”true” circle=”false” href=”http://learning.foundation/2016/06/10/call-for-applications-open-access-course-to-develop-your-own-scalable-digital-learning-course/” title=”Click this big red button to learn more…” target=”blank” info=”none” info_place=”top” info_trigger=”hover”]Click this big red button to learn more…[/x_button]

     

  • Experience and blended learning: two heads of the humanitarian training chimera

    Experience and blended learning: two heads of the humanitarian training chimera

    Experience is the best teacher, we say. This is a testament to our lack of applicable quality standards for training and its professionalization, our inability to act on what has consequently become the fairly empty mantra of 70-20-10, and the blinders that keep the economics (low-volume, high-cost face-to-face training with no measurable outcomes pays the bills of many humanitarian workers, and per diem feeds many trainees…) of humanitarian education out of the picture.

    We are still dropping people into the deep end of the pool (i.e., mission) and hoping that they somehow figure out how to swim. We are where the National Basketball Association in the United States was in 1976. However, if the Kermit Washingtons in our space were to call our Pete Newells (i.e., those of us who design, deliver, or manage humanitarian training), what do we have to offer?

    The corollary to this question is why no one seems to care? How else could an independent impact review of DFID’s five-year £1.2 billion investment in research, evaluation and personnel development conclude that the British agency for international development “does not clearly identify how its investment in learning links to its performance and delivering better impact”… with barely anybody noticing?

    Let us just use blended learning, we say. Yet the largest meta-analysis and review of online learning studies led by Barbara Means and her colleagues in 2010 found no positive effects associated with blended learning (other than the fact that learners typically do more work in such set-ups, once online and then again face-to-face). Rather, the call for blended learning is a symptom for two ills.

    First, there is our lingering skepticism about the effectiveness of online learning (of which we make demands in terms of outcomes, efficacy, and results that we almost never make for face-to-face training), magnified by fear of machines taking away our training livelihoods.

    Second, there is the failure of the prevailing transmissive model of e-learning which, paradoxically, is also responsible for its growing acceptance in the humanitarian sector. We have reproduced the worst kind of face-to-face training in the online space with our click-through PowerPoints that get a multiple-choice quiz tacked on at the end. This is unfair, if only because it only saves the trainer (saved from the drudgery of delivery by a machine) from boredom.

    So the litany about blended learning is ultimately a failure of imagination: are we really incapable of creating new ways of teaching and learning that model the ways we work in volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) humanitarian contexts? We actually dialogue, try, fail, learn and iterate all the time – outside of training. How can humanitarians who share a profoundly creative problem-solving learning culture, who operate on the outer cusp of complexity and chaos… do so poorly when it comes to organizing how we teach and learn? How can organizations and donors that preach accountability and results continue to unquestioningly pour money into training with nothing but a fresh but thin coat of capacity-building paint splashed on?

    Transmissive learning – whatever the medium – remains the dominant mode of formal learning in the humanitarian context, even though everyone knows patently that such an approach is both ineffective and irrelevant when it comes to teaching and learning the critical thinking skills that are needed to deliver results and, even more crucially, to see around the corner of the next challenge. Such approaches do not foster collaborative leadership and team work, do not provide experience, and do not confront the learner with complexity. In other words, they fail to do anything of relevance to improved preparedness and performance.

    If you find yourself appalled at the polemical nature of the blanket statements above – that’s great! I believe that the sector should be ripe for such a debate. So please do share the nature of your disagreement and take me to task for getting it all wrong (here is why I don’t have a comments section). If you at least reluctantly acknowledge that there is something worryingly accurate about my observations, let’s talk. Finally, if you find this to be darkly depressing, then check back tomorrow (or subscribe) on this blog when I publish my presentation at the First International Forum on Online Humanitarian training. It is all about new learning and assessment practice that models the complexity and creativity of the work that humanitarians do in order to survive, deliver, and thrive.

    Painting: Peter Paul Rubens. From 1577 to 1640. Antwerp. Medusa’s head. KHM Vienna.

  • 7 key questions when designing a learning system

    7 key questions when designing a learning system

    In the design of a learning system for humanitarians, the following questions should be given careful consideration:

    1. Does each component of the system foster cross-cutting analysis and critical thinking competencies that are key to humanitarian leadership?
    2. Is the curriculum standardized across all components, with shared learning objectives and a common competency framework?
    3. Is the curriculum modular so that components may be tailored to focus on context-specific performance gaps?
    4. Does the system provide experiential learning (through scenario-based simulations) and foster collaboration (through social, peer-to-peer knowledge co-construction) in addition to knowledge transmission (instruction)?
    5. How are learning and performance outcomes evaluated?
    6. Are synergies between components of the learning system leveraged to minimized costs?
    7. Have the costs over time been correctly calculated by estimating both development and delivery costs?

    These questions emerged from the development of a learning system for market assessment last year, thinking through how to use learning innovation to achieve efficiency and effectiveness despite limited resources.

    Photo: The Infinity Room (The House on the Rock) (Justin Kern/Flickr)