Stories

Category: #DigitalScholar

  • Don’t cancel or postpone your conference, workshop, or training – go digital

    Don’t cancel or postpone your conference, workshop, or training – go digital

    How we respond to the threat of a disaster is critical.

    Organizations planning physical-world events have a choice:

    • You can cancel or postpone your event OR
    • You can go digital.

    Why not go digital?

    • You think it cannot be done.
    • You do not know how to do it.
    • You believe the experience will be inferior.

    It can be done. You can learn. You are likely to be surprised by how much you can achieve.

    The Geneva Learning Foundation is inviting conference and other event organizers to a Special Event in which we will share how you can rapidly move or ‘pivot’ your events online.

    What is The Geneva Learning Foundation?

    The Geneva Learning Foundation is a Swiss non-profit with the mission to develop trial, and scale up new ways to lead change to tackle the challenges that threaten our societies.

    We are purely digital. This means all of our operations and activities take place online.

    • Nearly every day, we organize and facilitate one or more digital events that convene hundreds or thousands of participants from all over the world.
    • We want to help other organizations by sharing our experience and know-how.

    Why are we doing this?

    • We believe that the digital transformation can strengthen the resilience of our societies.
    • Cancelling or postponing a conference weakens ongoing work that may be significant or important.

    Why attend this Special Event?

    If you are planning a conference:

    • During this Special Event, we will share the critical success factors for digital events. You are likely to be surprised by what we have found makes the greatest difference.
    • Attendees will receive an invitation to join our #DigitalConference short course, in which you actually build a practical plan you can use to go digital.

    If you are an event organizer, we know you may be already facing severe consequences.

    • If you have experience in providing services to design and run digital events, we invite you to share your services with participants.
    • If you have been primarily focused on physical-world events, we invite you to share how you are adapting.

    Here is a case study.

    We just organized a conference that was attended by more than 1,700 participants from 95 countries, including those hardest hit by COVID-19.

    • This conference ran in English 3-13 March and in French 16-30 March.
    • World-class presenters shared their expertise with practitioners.
    • Dialogue was constant – 24 hours a day, given participants spread across time zones.

    We were awed by the number and diversity of participants and the quality of their contributions in this Pre-Course Conference.

    How do we compare digital and physical? It is comparable?

    In the past, our partner had organized three successive face-to-face events in Barcelona and Dar Es Salaam.

    • Each event was attended by around 80 people.
    • Each event was well-planned and executed.
    • Each time, 80 people went back to their countries with new knowledge and relationships.

    After the third time, our partner was ready to go digital.

    Previous conferences were limited to around 80 participants.

    • They required everyone to stop their work in order to travel.
    • This is the hidden opportunity cost of face-to-face conferences.
    • It often adds up to far more than the actual expenditure on the event itself.

    What about the intangible serendipity of a conference?

    We know the real value of a physical event resides in the impromptu meetings of minds and bodies on the conference floor.

    • Sharing a drink or a meal provides the occasion to establish or strengthen informal relationships.
    • Yes, there are dozens of digital tools that can match individuals and organizations, schedule ad hoc meets, and stir idea generation and serendipity.
    • Yet, it is undeniable that some aspects – and the ones that matter – are difficult to replicate.

    Conversely, you may discover new ways of doing new things in a digital conference that can accelerate and multiply serendipity.

    If you cancel or postpone, you will get nothing.

    Is it expensive?

    • No. You can make an awesome event digital using only free tools.
    • You can also hire people and providers with the right combination of tools, talent, and vision.
    • The secret sauce is in the know-how required: not to use the tools, but to figure out how to both replicate and augment the experience you wish to create.

    This is where organizations and service providers with experience can help.

    Is it difficult or time-consuming?

    No. If you already have an event scheduled, there is a simple method to:

    • Identify what is the value and significance provided by the event – including the intangible, serendipitous bits
    • Think through how to recreate and augment this value
    • Convert everything you planned into a digital format

  • Think and do

    Think and do

    The assumption that countries have the capacity to take on recommendations from the best available knowledge, achieve understanding, and turn them into effective policy and action, leaves unanswered the mechanisms through which a publication, a series of meetings, or a policy comparison may lead to change.

    Technology has already transformed the ability of international organizations to move from knowledge production and diplomacy to new forms of scalable, networked action needed to tackle complex global challenges. This has created a significant opportunity for leaders to deliver on their mission.

    Some organizations are already offering high-quality, multi-lingual learning. Many are using digital technologies to scale, often at the cost of quality, helping large numbers of learners develop competencies. On their own, these are no longer innovative – much less transformative – goals. Several international organizations have built corporate universities and other types of learning functions that remain confined to the margins of the business and under threat from the next restructuring. None of these initiatives have moved the needle of impact.

    At the Geneva Learning Foundation, we have developed a low-cost, scalable package of interventions for international organizations to leverage digital transformation to: (1) bridge the gap between thinking and doing at country level; and (2) foster the emergence of country leadership for positive change.

    In our first three years, we have worked with partners across several thematic areas, developing this package to translate global guidelines into effective local action, to support capability development from competency to implementation, and to perform multi-country peer review at scale.

    This package can complement or replace existing low-volume, high-cost face-to-face workshops and conferences that are difficult to scale and measure.

    It is entirely digital (motivating participants without offering travel, hotel, or per diem) and embedded into work (participants do not need to stop work), significantly reducing both expenditure and opportunity cost, while improving efficacy.

    It has fostered the emergence of informal, self-led and motivated groupings of professionals operating across agencies that may provide a different kind of lever for systemic change than traditional top-down approaches to addressing challenges and can replaced failed, conventional training-of-trainer and “cascade” models.

    Recognizing the value of such emergent dynamics creates authentic opportunities to accelerate the transformation for impact.

    Fostering such emergence is the hard part.

    Last but not least, our business modelling demonstrates that, if the organization has healthy relationships with its stakeholders, financial sustainability (cost recovery) can be achieved within three years, so this is not one more mechanism dependent on donor good will.

    As we have seen existing partnerships leads to promising results – above and beyond our own expectations – we are slowly growing in confidence about the strengths and sustainability of what began as a series of small-scale pilot projects and experiments.

    Along the way, we have also learned how difficult it is to find the right mix of ingredients to move from ideas to successful execution to develop such a programme if it is to contribute to systemic change.

    Image: Labyrinth in Trigonos, by Reda Sadki.

  • Missed opportunities (2): How one selfish learner can undermine peer learning

    Missed opportunities (2): How one selfish learner can undermine peer learning

    The idea that adult learners have much to learn from each other is fairly consensual. The practice of peer learning, however, requires un-learning much of what has been ingrained over years of schooling. We have internalized the conviction that significant learning requires expert feedback.

    In a recent course organized by the Geneva Learning Foundation in partnership with an international NGO, members of the group initially showed little or no interest in learning from each other. Even the remote coffee, an activity in which we randomly twin participants who then connect informally, generated only moderate enthusiasm… where in other courses, we have to remind folks to stop socializing and focus on the course work. One participant told us that “peer support was quite unexpected”, adding that “it is the first time I see it in a course.” When we reached out to participants to help those among them who had not completed the first week’s community assignment, another wrote in to explain she was “really uncomfortable with this request”…

    That participant turned out to be the same one demanding validation from an expert, speaking not just for herself but in the name of the group to declare: “We do not feel we are really learning, because we do not know if what we are producing is of any quality”.

    Yet, by the third week, other participants had begun to recognize the value of peer feedback as they experienced it. One explained: “I found reviewing other people’s work was particularly interesting this week because we all took the same data and presented it in so many different ways – in terms of what we emphasised, what we left out and the assertions we made.” Another reported: “ I am still learning a lot from doing the assignments and reading what others have done [emphasis mine].”

    Here is how one learner summed up her experience: “Fast and elaborative response to the queries. […] The peer system is really great arrangement [emphasis mine]. The course is live where you can also learn from the comments and inputs from course participants. I feel like I am taking this course in a class room with actual physical presence with the rest.” (She also acknowledged the “follow-up from the organizers and course leaders in case of any lag”.)

    This is about more than Daphne Koller’s 2012 TED Talk assertion (quoted in Glance et al.’s 2013 article on the pedagogical foundations of MOOCs) that “more often than not students were responding to each other’s posts before a moderator was able to”, which addresses the concern that peers may not be able to find the one correct answer (when there is one). It is not only about peers learning from each other, but also about the relevance of artefact creation for learning.

    Week after week, I observed participation grow. Discussion threads grew organically from this shared solidarity in learning, leading to self-directed exploration and, in a few instances, serendipitous discovery. This helped above and beyond my own expectations: “The more we work with peers and get validation, [the more] confidence grows.” After having peer reviewed three projects, one participant wrote: “This is a great experience. Every time I comment to a peer, I actually feel that I am telling the same thing to myself.”

    And, yet, that one lone wolf who displayed negatives attitudes stuck to her guns, reiterating her demands: “I would really like to get more feedback on the assignments. I know individual feedback might not be feasible but it would be great to see a good example to see what we could have done better. I would like to learn how I could improve.” Furthermore, she then ascribed her negative attitudes to the entire group… while completely ignoring, denying, or dismissing the group’s experience. (A request for expert feedback is entirely legitimate, but this does not require disparaging the value of peer feedback.)

    Admittedly, for various logistical reasons, the course’s subject matter experts were not as present as we had intended in the first three weeks of the course. This, combined with aggressive, negative clamoring for expert feedback, put the course team on the defensive.

    That led to a week in which subject matter experts impressively scrambled to prepare, compile, and share a ton of expert feedback. That they were able to do so, above and beyond expectations, is to their credit. As for me, it was startling to realize that I felt too insecure about peer learning to respond effectively. There are substantive questions about the limitations of peer learning, especially when there is only one right answer. “Peer learning” sounds nice but also vague. Can it be trusted? How do you know that everyone else is not also making the same mistake? Who would rather learn from peers with uncertain and disparate expertise rather than from an established expert? Doubts lingered despite my own experience in recent courses, where I observed peers teaching each other how to improve action planning for routine immunization, analyze safer access for humanitarians, improve remote partnering, or develop sampling procedures for vaccination coverage surveys.

    Learning technologists‘ interest in peer review is premised on the need for a scalable solution for grading. They have mostly failed to acknowledge much less leverage its pedagogical significance. Reviewing the education research literature, I find mostly anecdotal studies on K-12 schooling, interesting but unproven theories, and very little evidence that I can use. This is strange, given that peer education is nothing new.

    This reinforces my conviction that we are breaking new ground with #DigitalScholar. Building on Scholar’s ground-breaking system for structured, rubric-based peer review and feedback, we are adding new layers of activity and scaffolding that can more fully realize the potential of peers as learners and teachers. I do not know where this exploration will take us. It feels like uncharted territory. That is precisely what makes it interesting and exciting. And, following this most recent course, my own confidence has grown, thanks to the audacity and invention of those learners who learned to trust and support each other.

    Image: Two trees in Manigot. Personal collection.

  • Missed opportunities (1): making a dent requires rethinking how we construct medical education

    Missed opportunities (1): making a dent requires rethinking how we construct medical education

    “We are training 30 people to become doctors. My focus is on developing content for open educational resources (OER) that we can use to transmit foundational knowledge.”

    Training 30 people at a time is not going to make a dent. Cost and scale are related. Quality does not need to diminish against lower cost or higher scale.

    OER are obviously about producing knowledge, but seldom question agency in epistemology. How do we know what know? Who knows how we know? Is the democratization of learning about producing new resources by conventional means, albeit in an African context in partnership with a U.S. university?

    I realize then that we understand the content trap in very different ways. For me, it is avoided by embracing pedagogical transformation from transmission to knowledge co-construction. The trap is to remain mired in transmissive modes in a world of content abundance. For various reasons, some people cannot see this distinction or its significance.

    “Imagine if you could convene 1,000 doctors,” I say, “to take this foundational knowledge and develop localized guides, grounded in their indigenous expertise. In four weeks, they would produce hundreds of high-quality, peer-reviewed guides with the synthesis of their collective, practical experience of how to challenge health inequity in practice, in situ…”

    They know what others do not know. Imagine connecting medical students to such a global network of practitioners who find it immoral that they can only treat those who can pay – and who are already doing something about it. The standard of care may be the same everywhere, but how you drive change to achieve it is so dependent on context. Surely, he will grasp how transformative this could be?

    “You may want to speak to our colleagues who do in-service training. They do a lot of that. They may have a real interest in what you are doing here.”

    We have already done this with topics completely disparate from each other: pre-hospital emergency care, safer access for humanitarian teams, immunization… But this confuses those who still think in silos of subject matter expertise. There is no topic specificity to what I am proposing. Yes, my proposal breaks with the conventions of medical education. You do not connect students to global action networks. You confine them in a controlled environment to train them, tell them what they must do and how they must do it in order to avoid killing people who are sick, and ensure that they can recall (or look up) the information they need to do this without you.

    Is that really all that we can do? Is that really all that must be done?

    He ends by boasting how the new campus will have fiber optic. By this point, I can only smile wrily. Fiber enables two-way knowledge flows. Ideological or epistemological limitations confine us to using only half of this potential.

    Changing medical education is more than changing locale, revising enrollment criteria, producing “free” resources (subsidized by university endowments), or considering political economy as part of medicine. It requires a change in education as a philosophy.

    Image: Mother and child. Fountain on the roundabout, Kigali Convention Centre, Rwanda (personal collection)

  • Why learning professionals should strive to be leaders, not just service providers

    Why learning professionals should strive to be leaders, not just service providers

    The learning landscape is changing fast. Even the most jurassic face-to-face trainers I know are now embracing the digital transformation or at least trying to. Ephemeral fads such as the Social Age or gamification are proliferating alongside newer, more sustainable and productive approaches that match the learning contexts of humanitarians and support the development of their capabilities in a volatile world. Everyone in workplace learning – save a few proverbial ostriches going the way of the dodo bird – is trying to learn the new skills needed to operate in new ways to do new things. This is like a dream come true.

    But rethinking our roles, I believe, is going to be far more important than learning to run a webinar. Are we service providers? Are we a support service (like HR, security, and finance)? Who are really our clients, when those who pay are seldom those who learn? Can the business models of the past sustain us in the future?

    The relevance of training is being questioned. In Profit & Loss (P&L) terms, we represent a cost center with often intangible return and consequently shrinking budgets. Cooking up a new evaluation framework is not going to change that. There are more people learning in the workplace than in universities. Yet it is higher education that remains a juicy business with 60% or more gross margins and lush endowments. (How did you think universities erect all these buildings?)

    Years ago, a defrocked high priest of corporate learning called me a learning leader. Conflating leadership and authority, I had never been pretentious enough to see myself as a “leader”, much less one for learning. Yet, within my organization, I had become an advocate of learning innovation, building the case, gathering evidence, engaging with stakeholders, and doing everything else I could think of to help the organization improve how it learns.

    The idea of learning leadership initially seemed merely inspirational and aspirational. That changed once I met Karen Watkins and discovered that her research over the last three decade has demonstrated that the strongest correlation to strengthened learning culture is exercising leadership committed to learning.

    Thinking in leadership terms enabled me to see beyond my narrow job description. To truly serve the organization’s mission, I had to transform from a technical manager overseeing a procurement pipeline of over 80 dull, single-loop e-learning and find the courage within myself (there was none in management) to stop the assembly line. As the first Ivy League MOOCs made headlines, I struggled to figure out what these changes in higher education might mean for humanitarian workers and communities strengthening their resilience. Increasingly, the realization came that I would have to challenge the boundaries, to explore new approaches. And then George Siemens‘s clarity in describing what the changing nature of knowledge means for learning blew my mind.

    And so I took a webcast lecture series and was astonished by how easy it was to transmute it into an open, scalable learning experience connecting a thousand staff and volunteers from over 100 countries. The hard part had been to overcome resistance from the gatekeepers and then helping stakeholders grapple with the significance of both the economy of effort and the potential of impact. This drew on what we were already learning from MOOCs, but without mimicking a higher university model that is not directly transposable to our context (as some are trying to do now, six years later). It cost nearly nothing and was more inclusive and productive than the face-to-face, three-day event that happened concurrently. Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis visited me in Geneva shortly thereafter.

    It became morally wrong to do what I had been tasked with by a clueless manager. I left the relatively-comfortable seat and position I held to jump into the unknown. The rate of internal change was simply too slow.

    By then, I had found like-minded leaders and innovators to forge a new, unbeaten path, leading me to create LSi and then, in March 2016, the Geneva Learning Foundation. Along the way, my understanding of the significance of leadership for humanitarian work in general and for learning in particular grew tremendously, mostly thanks to the vision and clarity of others walking on the edges.

    I understand that instructional designers and other learning professionals need to eat. Acquiescing to a client who has, for example, become a gamification zealot may be easier than challenging them to consider other approaches. Requests for proposals (RFPs) may leave no room for suggesting quality improvements, to put it mildly. Some people prefer to bet on slow career progression, hopping from one role to the next, biding their time. These are very individual choices. Not everyone can afford to be a risk-taking maverick. There are many ways to exercise leadership for learning, regardless of position, rank, or experience.  I do question, nevertheless, whether slow-and-steady survival strategies remain as viable today as they were in the past, given the volatility and uncertainty of change.

    In 2016, during the Foundation’s first #DigitalScholar experiment, tutoring a young learning leader quickly morphed into mentoring. She initially described her role as figuring out which tool to use for e-learning production in relation to the learning needs she had identified, to then apply sound principles of instructional design, and finally to deliver a high-quality learning product. There was nothing wrong with her thinking, except for a startling lack of imagination about her own potential. Within ten or 15 years, she will be in a decision-making role. If the learning function is to achieve relevance and impact as a strategic business partner, she needs to think critically beyond her own role and explore what future roles are likely to demand. She needs to make her best effort to see look around the corner, to anticipate what is coming next while managing the unknown. And she needs to challenge her own capabilities by looking beyond her current but obsolete learning technologist role to a more holistic view of herself as a leader for learning, growing her skills to wield multiple lenses that can shape learning culture to not only drive performance and results but also help her blossom and thrive.

    Image: Goldfish in Efteling. Personal collection.

  • #DigitalScholar Reboot Day 1

    #DigitalScholar Reboot Day 1

    On Monday, July 3rd 2017, an expanded course team from three continents, supported by LSi’s Scholar Apprentices, began to trial a completely new approach to the development of digital learning.

    This is the story of how we came to reboot the amazingly successful #DigitalScholar initiative offered by the Geneva Learning Foundation just one year ago.

    Earlier this year, new #DigitalScholar course team member Iris Thiele Isip-Tan built the Learning Module (Scholar account required to view) for the 2016 #DigitalScholar course. This is more than just an archive.

    • A learning module describes the sequence of events and includes all resources in a course.
    • It includes all learning resources and activities, including the projects and their rubrics.
    • In addition, the learning module provides guidance (metacognition) for the facilitator or course team.
    • A learning module may also be used to support blended and self-guided learning.
    • It can also be used to replicate and localize the course.
    • Every element in a Learning Module can be pushed to a Community, where its members can respond to it as they collaborate and progress through dialogue and project development.
    • The sequence and content of activities remain flexible, as they can be edited and remixed as soon as they are shared with a Community.

    Digital Scholar Learning Module

    With the Scholar Approach, everything is about dialogue driven by activities (Community) and projects (Creator). The question is: “What does the learner get to do?” Unlike content-driven digital learning that requires front-loaded media-intensive resource development, we simply map out day-by-day the learners’ guided learning journey, structured by the Creator project rubric.

    This affords us amazing flexibility to tailor activities in response to the behavior of the cohort. It is akin to agile development used in software development. It is a wonderfully creative and adaptive process. However, it also means that as we are building the course just-in-time, some learners lose the visibility that they expect as to what happens next.

    The Learning Module resolves one dilemma that results from Scholar’s adaptive, agile learning development. If we had run a repeat of last year’s course, every participant would gain visibility of the entire set of activities.

    And, in fact, this is what we were going to do with the second run of #DigitalScholar in 2017. The Learning Module is comprehensive. The first run of the course in 2016 was amazingly creative and productive. So it was tempting to just do a repeat.

    However, we have learned so much in the past year about the design and execution of Scholar-based courses that we launched a reboot on Monday.

    Google Hangout with the #DigitalScholar Team
    Google Hangout with the #DigitalScholar Team

    With transmissive MOOCs or Moodle-based courses, the focus is on content collection and curation prior to the start of the course. The question is: “What content do we prepare for the learner to consume?” This means that no matter how dynamic, interactive, or gamified the course activities, the content remains fixed. Updating a resource is a momentous event. Double-loop learning becomes improbable as there is no way for learners or teachers to reshape content and activities without undue stress and effort. This is the content trap that George Siemens described with amazing acuity over a decade ago, and that scholars such as Bharat Anand have more recently written about.

    So on Day 1 of the reboot, we disarmed the content trap. Can’t wait for Day 2.

    Images: Flowers in my garden (July 2017). Personal collection.

  • 4 rules for the digital transformation of partnerships

    4 rules for the digital transformation of partnerships

    This is a recorded version of my presentation, followed by Catherine Russ‘s report on a session that I presented and facilitated at the Remote partnering workshop held on 23-26 January 2017 in Caernarfon, Wales.

    Here is what Catherine Russ wrote in the workshop’s Report on Technology and Learning.

    In this session we delved into the reality that partnerships often become remote because those involved can no longer afford to meet together physically. Increasingly, collaboration, dialogue, and feedback are simply assumed to take place from a distance. What do we lose – and is there anything to gain – when the rules have changed:

    1. Sharing physical space is no longer a necessary condition to partnering.
    2. Sharing physical space is increasingly a medium in which we can no longer afford to develop partnerships.
    3. The value of shared physical space is primarily cultural, a rapid way to accrue social capital that underpins social relations.
    4. What we are enabled to do from a distance using technology is changing rapidly – more rapidly than what we can do in a shared physical space – leaving us confused, and perhaps even fearful, of what this change means for the quality or even the future of our partnerships.

    In addressing the use of technology at the Remote Partnering Project Design Lab, the irony did not escape us that sixteen or so of us were sitting face-to-face. The plan had been to bring some participants in from other continents on a remote basis to input as and when possible, but several factors prevented this from happening. Experience and advice has suggested in the past that combining remote and face-to-face can often cause more problems than opting for one or the other and this experience seemed to confirm that advice.

    Reda Sadki, who leads a partnership that is tackling such questions to improve digital learning, was invited to facilitate a session to explore the current challenges being experienced by those working remotely and uncover some of the emerging solutions. The idea that working remotely is a ‘second cousin’ to and ‘second best’ option to face-to-face had already been challenged and (somewhat) deflated in previous sessions and therefore this session focussed on how to leverage the new economy of effort that technology allows for working remotely as outlined in the following affordances (literally and figuratively what we can ‘afford’ to do).

    So, rather than addressing technology from the perspective of trying to replicate what partners produce when face-to-face and addressing the shortfalls of these, Reda proposed that participants think through how their partnering work is already being transformed by digital technologies. Could partners – who mostly seem to experience remote working as a constraint – leverage this transformation to resolve dilemmas inherent in such common partnership challenges as:

    • Moving from strategy to implementation
    • Putting reporting practice to use
    • Documenting experience (e.g. case studies) o Fostering collaboration across silos
    • Bringing static knowledge to life (e.g. making global guidelines relevant and useful to communities)

    In fact, Reda provided practical examples of an emerging approach (known as the “Scholar Approach”) that aims to connect partners, from centre to periphery, to strengthen networks through peer-to-peer collaboration:

    • The Norwegian Red Cross mobilized a global community of action, convening over 800 pre- hospital emergency workers from 70 countries to co-develop over 70 case studies of violence and risk in four weeks.
    • The World Health Organization connected public health officers from 30 countries to develop country-specific action plans based on new global guidelines for routine immunization.
    • The Geneva Learning Foundation mobilized over 900 participants from over 100 countries to jointly develop 94 new digital learning initiatives – effectively showing how this approach could be replicated and democratized.

    In Reda’s words: “This collaborative, flexible, motivating, participatory and supportive approach is not simply a nicer, kinder and gentler form of learning: Its pedagogical patterns closely emulate the core competencies of 21st century humanitarian workers, who are expected to be able to manage complex, overlapping knowledge flows, to work in networked configurations (rather than command- and-control structures) and to use participatory methodologies to partner with affected populations.”

    You can learn more about the Remote Partnering Project on its web site.

    Image: Dawn in Trigonos, Snowdonia National Park, Caernarfon, Wales (personal collection).

  • #DigitalScholar Apprenticeship

    #DigitalScholar Apprenticeship

    (Please do share this announcement with promising learning leaders in your network. Your support is much appreciated. – Reda)

    The Geneva Learning Foundation, together with LSi and the University of Illinois College of Education, have joined to develop new learning approaches to build capacity, produce locally-situated knowledge, and foster deep learning outcomes. Through this ‘Scholar Partnership’, our aim is to explore new ways of learning that can accelerate the development of new leadership and talent in the face of growing humanitarian, development, and global health challenges.

    In July of this year, the Foundation offered the first #DigitalScholar journey, a four-week course in which anyone, from anywhere, could learn to design their own digital course. Over 800 people joined the course, forging meaningful connections across industries and geographies, creating nearly 100 new digital courses in four weeks.

    LSi is now offering an apprenticeship for learning leaders interested in mastering this ‘Scholar Approach’. The aim is to provide an opportunity to gain practical experience and rapidly develop skills and competencies needed to design, facilitate, and manage Scholar-based digital courses.

    Scholar courses currently in preparation by the Geneva Learning Foundation and its partners cover a range of topics, from the global mobilisation of ambulance and other pre-hospital emergency care workers in the face of growing violence against health care workers… to the first course on collective impact for computer science education.

    Preference will be given to applicants who have completed the Geneva Learning Foundation’s #DigitalScholar course.

    The first apprentices will start in January 2017, but applications are welcome on an ongoing basis.

    Full announcement here. Apply via this link.

    Image: Hands (2016) (Les petits dessins/enfants.click)

  • Towers of technology

    Towers of technology

    This came up in one of the Live Learning Moments in the first week of the Geneva Learning Foundation’s #DigitalScholar course:

    This is for Reda: I’m very used to the Coursera/EdX kind of LMS and I’m finding it difficult to follow the course related postings and schedules on the digital learning community currently. I just feel that we are missing some structure.

    This comment calls for reflection on the knowledge architecture of Scholar in relation to other technologies. In the first week of #Digital Scholar, we examined the architecture of the lecture and the classroom. I understand the yearning and the preference for a container view of knowledge, even though I believe the time has come to autopsy the discipline known as knowledge management. This view is reassuring because it is familiar. It mirrors the experience of mass industrial-age education that has shaped most of us. But does it correspond to the learning needs of today and tomorrow – and those that we are trying to address with #DigitalScholar by inventing a new method for the rapid, agile production of digital learning? Is learning a process or a product?

    Scholar's Activity Stream
    Scholar’s Activity Stream

    What you are seeing in Scholar’s Activity Stream is learning as a process. It moves fast. There is no way to know everything. Learning to navigate becomes a key competency that you develop by doing. This is contrary to the views with which we were able to function in the past. But it models the fast-paced world we live, and it is not going to slow down. (George Siemens’s Knowing Knowledge remains for me the best explainer of what this means for learning.)

    Now, I tend to be fairly agnostic about technology for learning. Basically, my conviction is that if you give a good learning designer a piece of string and an e-mail account, they can use these tools to enable an amazing learning journey. In fact, I have seen beautiful learning design compensate for the deficiencies of even the most broken, nightmarish corporate learning platforms. And I have friends and colleagues who have built amazing learning journeys on MOOC platforms or in Moodle. But to my mind they have had to work against the learning architecture of those platforms in order to achieve these.

    In the MOOC platforms (and in many other similar learning management systems), the container view of learning is expressed by the curriculum. Sign in, and that is what you see: the content. Dialogue is buried in siloed discussion forums. If you are in one compartment, you may not see what is happening in the other. Furthermore, you may have a user profile but it is not really relevant to the course work. You exist only as an individual consumer, with an individual reward (the certificate). You may engage with peers in the forums, but that is mostly in response to specific discussion prompts. You consume content, and then get quizzed about your ability to recall it. Finally, when there is peer review, its purpose is to scale grading without needing tutors. You receive a grade, and then that’s it. There is no revision stage in which you are invited to think about the grade you received and what that means for your work.

    In EdX, content transmission is center stage
    In EdX, content transmission is center stage

    In Moodle, you see the syllabus and, separate from that, a discussion forum. Dialogue is hidden from view, organized into one or more silos. Learners can submit work to the tutor or teacher, and then the assumption is that this teacher evaluates the work. This model requires more tutors for more learners. It is expensive to scale, and not very practical. Moodle replicates the classroom learning architecture. I understand that in the early days this may have been important to reassure professors exploring the use of technology that they could reproduce their behavior and keep the same habits of teaching. It is particularly ironic that, buried in Moodle’s documentation, you will find the claim that its design and development are guided by social constructionist pedagogy. That was a long time ago.

    A linear sequence of assignments in Moodle
    A linear sequence of assignments in Moodle

    Philosophically, there is a distinction when thinking about what we mean by the democratization of education. Is it making learning technologies open source (Moodle)? Is it about opening access to content (MIT’s OpenCourseWare)? Or how about transmitting content from elite universities for consumption by learners who otherwise would have no access to it (EdX, Coursera)?

    These are all important and significant. But there is one more, and it is fundamental. It is about recognizing the value of the experience and expertise of each learner. It is focused on dialogue between learners to foster network formation, that can happen around expert, curated knowledge but is equally likely to take place in relation to the learners’ own needs and context. It is about scaffolding the production of new knowledge that both individual and community can put to use. Individuals take responsibility for their own learning, but then learn from others as they are formulating feedback and inputs to their peers. Ultimately, it is about recognizing that every learner is also a teacher. And that teachers have much to learn from their learners – and this learning strengthens their role, rather than diminishes it. The expert’s value as convener, facilitator,and designer increases in a system in which the expertise of every contributor is recognized.

    The most notable difference between Scholar and other platforms for learning is in the pedagogical model (Bill Cope’s and Mary Kalantzis’s 7 affordances of New Learning and Assessment) that underpins it.

    Cope and Kalantzis 7 affordances of New Learning and assessment
    Cope and Kalantzis 7 affordances of New Learning and assessment

    Functions and features in Scholar are not dictated by a list of IT specifications but by this model. Everything in Scholar is about dialogue, not content. Content has its place: as an opportunity for discussion, reflection, and construction. Content is always shared in a network, whether that’s in the Community or in the more structured and private, safe space of Creator’s anonymous peer review.

    For me, it was a Eureka moment in 2012 to realize how the use of Scholar would give me a new economy of effort to teach and learn. I had been struggling with trying to improve “click-through” e-learning modules that have limited efficacy and that people don’t finish even when it is mandatory. I have never finished a MOOC either. With Scholar, the opportunity to build something, especially if I can then use it in my work changed everything. I don’t know if your experience of this course will lead to the same epiphany. You may be attached to paticular tools and the ways of teaching and learning that they afford. Your practice or even your livelihood may depend on these. At the very least, I hope it will feed your thinking, learning, and doing on the tools and models you are using now, and how you are deploying technology to do new things in new ways, consistent with the needs and challenges of our times.

    Image: skyscraperpage.com

  • 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).