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Category: Events

  • Can analysis and critical thinking be taught online in the humanitarian context?

    Can analysis and critical thinking be taught online in the humanitarian context?

    This is my presentation at the First International Forum on Humanitarian Online Training (IFHOLT) organized by the University of Geneva on 12 June 2015.

    I describe some early findings from research and practice that aim to go beyond “click-through” e-learning that stops at knowledge transmission. Such transmissive approaches replicate traditional training methods prevalent in the humanitarian context, but are both ineffective and irrelevant when it comes to teaching and learning the critical thinking skills that are needed to operate in volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous environments faced by humanitarian teams. Nor can such approaches foster collaborative leadership and team work.

    Most people recognize this, but then invoke blended learning as the solution. Is it that – or is it just a cop-out to avoid deeper questioning and enquiry of our models for teaching and learning in the humanitarian (and development) space? If not, what is the alternative? This is what I explore in just under twenty minutes.

    This presentation was first made as a Pecha Kucha at the University of Geneva’s First International Forum on Online Humanitarian Training (IFHOLT), on 12 June 2015. Its content is based in part on LSi’s first white paper written by Katia Muck with support from Bill Cope to document the learning process and outcomes of Scholar for the humanitarian contest. 

    Photo: All the way down (Amancay Maahs/flickr.com)

  • 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.

  • 3 critical questions for the new Humanitarian Leadership Academy

    3 critical questions for the new Humanitarian Leadership Academy

    This morning, I’m looking forward to the London launch event for Save The Children’s Humanitarian Leadership Academy, touted by the Guardian as the “world’s first academy for humanitarian relief” that “may revolutionize” the sector. I ask the following three questions as a sympathetic observer: the Academy’s focus on the learning need for improved and scaled capacity in the face of growing humanitarian challenges is spot on. Now comes the execution.

    1. Is the Academy a platform or a hub? There are two possible roles for the Academy: as a connector, hub or platform for others and as a platform of its own (developing and delivering its own content). They certainly can overlap, but then how will the Academy both collaborate and compete for limited resources with already-established specialized training organizations? Is it a knowledge broker, catalyst, and connector – or an implementer? How will Save The Children – which has invested so much in the launch – step back to allow the multi-stakeholder governance model to succeed and recognize that the thought leadership this calls for may reside outside the confines of its established organizations and networks?
    2. What is the Academy’s learning strategy – and how is it different from failed attempts of the past to build capacity through training? What will be the relationship between those who know, those who do, and those who teach? What new learning models will foster cross-cutting leadership, collaboration, and analytical competencies needed – not just technical skills already taught elsewhere? How will it impact the trajectories of humanitarians at different stages of their professional lives? How will the Academy resolve the applicability problem? So far, the Academy’s approach appears to be based on formal learning through training. Can its organizational model foster the kind of informal and incidental learning that is responsible for much of getting things done in humanitarian work – as well as for innovation? Last but not least, how will educational technology be mobilized to help divest of the legacy of face-to-face training that is inefficient, ineffective, and cannot scale to meet the coming humanitarian challenges?
    3. Is it sustainable? DFID’s initial commitment covers 40% of the very ambitious business plan of £50m, and, more recently, the Academy’s touted partnerships with the private sector. This question, from my vantage point, is closely related to the learning strategy question. This can’t be only about more resources for training – even after rebranding as capacity-building – without first rethinking the why, who, and how and, second, reimagining learning beyond training. And that will require the Academy’s new governance to focus first and foremost on the “transformational” aspects of the project.

    Photo: Sunrise Over Cape Yamu Phuket Thailand Panorama (Kim Seng Suivre/flickr.com)

  • Webcasts, then and now

    Webcasts, then and now

    (No, this is not a post about the Apple keynote meltdown.)

    When I started organizing live webcast events for the first time in 2006, they required extensive technical preparation, specialized software and hardware, and – most important – a group of really smart people gifted with more than a little bit of luck to pull off each event. Even as recently as 2011, I remember a time in Budapest when my young cameraman (one of a team of four) announced to me that his fancy P2 broadcast-quality camera could not connect to his equally-fancy webcasting software. I ended up hacking our MacBook Pro’s webcam, piloted remotely from another laptop using VNC… It was exciting to transform what had been a local, 19th Century-style lecture series into a series of global participatory learning events, but so much energy had to be expended on the technical issues that many people missed the point about the amazing affordances of technology to fundamentally transform how we teach and learn.

    Participants in today’s blended learning event (a “15-Minute Global Health Practicum”) still experienced the technology mediation as interference. However, the blurry video and mediocre sound came from the crappy hotel wifi of our presenter, and nothing else. We were nevertheless able to focus on the substance (games for health) and the learning process  (a 5-minute Ignite presentation). I spent little more time testing and checking the Google Hangouts than I did visiting the meeting room where we gathered for the event in Geneva. Hence my effort went into reimagining how to solve some of the learning problems, not the technical ones.

    For future events, the lesson for me is that figuring out how much of a burden  technology is likely to be (as it remains across the Digital Divide, for example) should really be a first diagnostic step when planning such events. Then you can determine where to focus your efforts.

    Having said that, note to self: Crappy hotel wifi may be a rich people problem, but it really sucks. Sorry, Ben.

  • Scaling up critical thinking against extreme poverty

    Scaling up critical thinking against extreme poverty

    In three years, the World Bank’s e-Institute enrolled 50,000 learners through small, tutor-led online courses and webinars. Its first MOOC, run on Coursera’s platform for four weeks, reached 19,500. More MOOCs are in preparation, with the next one, based on the flagship World Development Report, launching on June 30th (details here). However, the need for scale is only one consideration in a comprehensive strategic vision of how learning innovation in all its forms can be harnessed to foster new kinds of leadership and accelerate development.

    In this candid conversation recorded at the Scaling corporate learning online symposium, I asked Abha Joshi-Ghani, the World Bank’s Director for Knowledge Exchange and Learning, to present some early data points from the Bank’s first MOOC, situating it within a broader history of engagement in distance and online learning. Joshi-Ghani describes the partnership, business and production models for its pilot MOOC. She also shares some early insights about the learner experience, completion rates (40%), and demographics (40% from developing countries).

    Listen to the conversation with Abha Joshi-Ghani

     

    As the Bank engages in what the Washington Post has called its “first massive reorganization in nearly two decades” to focus on ending extreme poverty by 2030,  the role of knowledge in such a process should be a strategic question. In the past, the reorganization of knowledge production was a key process in creating “new possibilities of power” to determine “what could be said, thought, imagined”, defining a “perceptual domain, the space of development” (Escobar 1992:24). Harnessing knowledge flows in a VUCA world requires an open, agile approach that recognizes the changing nature of knowledge: its diminishing half-life and corollary acceleration, its location in the network. This is what I found most compelling about Abha Joshi-Ghani’s brief presentation of the new Open Learning Campus, which opens a path for the World Bank to become the first international organization to organize its learning strategy around knowledge as a networked, complex process (Siemens 2006:34) . To do so is the twenty-first century way to support critical or analytical thinking that “lies at the heart of any transformative process”, aligned closely with Paulo Freire’s ‘conscientisation’ (Foley 2008:775).

    Photo: City view of Beirut, Lebanon on June 1, 2014 (Dominic Chavez/World Bank).

    Foley, C., 2008. Developing critical thinking in NGO field staff. Development in Practice 18, 774–778. https://doi.org/10.1080/09614520802386827

    Escobar, A., 1992. Imagining a post-development era. Social Text, Third World and Post-Colonial Issues 20–56.

    Siemens, G., 2006. Knowing knowledge.

     

  • Complexity and scale in learning: a quantum leap to sustainability

    This is my presentation on 19 June 2014 at the Scaling corporate learning online symposium organized by George Siemens and hosted by Corp U.

  • Catch up on Scaling corporate learning event

    On this page I will add links to the video and audio recordings of the Scaling corporate learning online symposium. You can still join the event to participate in both ongoing discussions and live sessions (schedule).

    19 June 2014

    Complexity and scale in learning: a quantum leap to sustainability (Reda Sadki)

    The World Bank’s Open Learning Campus (Abha Joshi-Ghani)

    World Bank Open Campus
    (more…)

  • Scaling corporate learning

    Scaling corporate learning

    If you are interested in the strategic significance of educational technology for workplace learning, make sure that you do not miss the open, online symposium happening 18-19 June 2014.

    The event is organized by George Siemens and hosted by Corp U. I will be facilitating sessions with the World Bank and OECD, as well as presenting on partnerships between corporate and non-profit learning leaders to scale up humanitarian education.

    You’ll find more information on George Siemens’s post about the event and (later this week) on this blog.

    Photo: Estádio Nacional de Brasilia. Imagery courtesy of Castro Mello Arquitetos.

  • Quick Q&A with George Siemens on corporate MOOCs

    Quick Q&A with George Siemens on corporate MOOCs

    Here is an unedited chat with George Siemens about corporate MOOCs. He is preparing an open, online symposium on scaling up corporate learning, to be announced soon. The World Bank and OECD are two international organizations that will be contributing to the conversation. Here are some of the questions we briefly discussed:

    • What is a “corporate MOOC” and why should organizations outside higher education care?
    • By Big Data or Big Corporate standards, hundreds of thousands of learners (or customers) is not massive. Corporate spending on training is massive and growing. Why is this “ground zero” for scaling up corporate learning?
    • How does educational technology change the learning function in organizations? What opportunities are being created?
    • University engagement in MOOCs has led to public debate, taking place on the web, recorded by the Chronicle of Higher Education, and spilling over into the New York Times. So where is the debate on corporate MOOCs going to take place?

    For those with MOOCish six-minute attention spans, you may watch this in two sittings. Apologies to George for the slow frame rate, which is why it looks like he is lip-syncing.

  • Making learning strategic in development and humanitarian organizations

    This is the third in a three-part presentation about learning strategy for development and humanitarian organizations. It was first presented to the People In Aid Learning & Development Network in London on 27 February 2014.