Stories

Category: Interviews

  • Learning-based complex work: how to reframe learning and development

    Learning-based complex work: how to reframe learning and development

    The following is excerpted from Watkins, K.E. and Marsick, V.J., 2023. Chapter 4. Learning informally at work: Reframing learning and development. In Rethinking Workplace Learning and Development. Edward Elgar Publishing.

    This chapter’s final example illustrates the way in which organically arising IIL (informal and incidental learning) is paired with opportunities to build knowledge through a combination of structured education and informal learning by peers working in frequently complex circumstances.

    Reda Sadki, president of The Geneva Learning Foundation (TGLF), rethought learning and development (L&D) for immunization workers in many roles in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs).

    Adapting to technology available to participants from the countries that joined this effort, Sadki designed a mix of experiences that broke out of the limits of “training” as it was often designed by conventional learning and development practitioners.

    He addressed, the inability to scale up to reach large audiences; difficulty to transfer what is learned; inability to accommodate different learners’ starting places; the need to teach learners to solve complex problems; and the inability to develop sufficient expertise in a timely way. (Marsick et al., 2021, p. 15)

    This led his organization, to invite front-line staff from all levels of immunization systems in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) to create and share new learning in response to the social and behavioral challenges they faced.

    Sadki designed learning and development for “in-depth engagement on priority topics,” insights into “the raw, unfiltered perspectives of frontline staff,” and peer dialogue that “gives a voice to front-line workers” (The Geneva Learning Foundation, 2022).

    Reda started with an e-learning course, which he supplemented by interactive, community building, and knowledge creation features offered by Scholar, a learning platform developed by Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis (Marsick et al., 2021, pp. 185-186).

    Scholar’s learning analytics enabled him to tailor learning to learner preferences and to continually check outcomes and adjust next steps.

    See Figure 4.3, which lays out the full learning cycle, a combination of interventions that Reda assembled over time to support peer learning-based work—“work that privileges learning in order to build individual and organizational capacity to better address emergent challenges or opportunities” (Marsick et al., 2021, p.177).

    Figure 4.3 The TGLF full learning cycle

    In his initiative, over a period of 12-18 months, participants develop and implement projects related to local immunization initiatives.

    To date, participants have come from 120 countries.

    In this vignette, Reda Sadki reflects on how this new model for learning and development evolved over time, and how L&D is transformed in a connected, networked learning environment.

    My reframe of learning and development started when I wrote to Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, respectively professor and dean of the University of Illinois College of Education, after I was appointed Senior Officer for Learning Systems at the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC). I shared my strategy for the organization of facilitation, learning, and sharing of knowledge. I thought my strategy was brilliant. (At the time, I was already thinking that this was about more than learning and development…)

    They replied that these were interesting ideas, but I was missing the point because this is not learning. What I shared focused on publishing knowledge in different ways, but not on creation of knowledge as key to the learning process.

    That was a shock to me.

    So, the first realization about the limits of current thinking about learning and development came from Bill and Mary challenging me by saying: “What are people actually getting to do? You know, that’s where the learning is likely to happen.”

    I could see they had a point, but I didn’t know what it meant.

    I reflected on recent work I had done for the IFRC, where I was responsible for a pipeline of 80 or so e-learning modules.

    These information transmission modules were extremely limited, had very little impact.

    But there is a paradox, which is that people across the Red Cross who we were trying to reach were really excited and enthusiastic about them.

    I had not designed these modules.

    It was 500 screens of information with quizzes at the end.

    It violated every principle of learning design.

    And yet people loved it and were really proud to have completed it.

    The second realization was that what made people excited using the most boring format and medium was that this was the first time in their life that they were connecting in a digital space with something that spoke to their IFRC experience.

    So, the driver was learning.

    People come to the Red Cross and Red Crescent because they want to learn first aid skills, to prepare for a disaster, or to recover from one.

    Previously, that was an entirely brick-and-mortar experience.

    You have Red Cross branches pretty much everywhere in the world.

    It’s a very powerful social peer learning experience.

    The trainer teaching you is likely to be someone like you from your community.

    You meet people with like-minded values.

    And so, however inadequate, the digital parallel to that existed, and it helped people connect with their Red Cross culture, but in a digital space.

    With that insight, the learning platform became the fastest-growing digital system in the entire Red Cross Red Crescent Movement.

    The third insight was reading what George Siemens was writing in 2006.

    That was the connection of learning and development to complexity and networks.

    I read Marsick and Watkins in the ’80s and ’90s. Informal and incidental learning mattered then. Its significance would explode with the digital transformation.

    In my mind , that is what Siemens tapped into in the 2000s, through the lenses of digital network, complexity, and systems theory.

    The Internet leads to a different kind of thinking and doing.

    His theory of learning, connectivism, grew out of that difference.

    January of 2011, Ivy League universities began to publish massive open online courses (MOOCs), three years after George Siemens and his Canadian colleagues had coined the term while implementing connectivism.

    Stanford professors had 150,000 people in their artificial intelligence MOOC, alongside 400 people who took the same course on the Stanford campus.

    I began experimenting with MOOCs at that time, turning a lecture series into a networked learning experience led by peers.

    Learning at scale is an important part of problem-solving complex challenges.

    It is also important for peer learning and innovation: the greater the scale, the greater the diversity of inputs that we can use to support each other’s learning.

    Nine years later, at the Geneva Learning Foundation, we had digital scaffolding or learning infrastructure already in place.

    That helped us to rapidly support learning and action by health workers facing the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic.

    I had been working, since 2016, with the World Health Organization, to help country-based immunization staff translate global guidelines, norms, and standards into practice.

    The COVID-19 Scholar Peer Hub became a digital network hosted by The Geneva Learning Foundation (TGLF) and developed with over 600 health worker alumni from all over the world.

    We began to understand not only learning at scale, but also design at scale.

    The Peer Hub launched in July 2020 and connected over 6,000 health professionals from 86 countries to contribute to strengthening skills and supporting implementation of country COVID-19 plans of action for vaccination, and to recover from the damage wrought by the pandemic.

    Our network, platform, and community tripled in size, in less than six months.

    Using social network analysis (SNA), Sasha Poquet explored the value of such a learning environment, one that builds a community of learning professionals, and that has ongoing activities to maintain the community both short- and long term, where you educate through various initiatives rather than create individual communities for each independent offering.

    It’s a holistic system of systems, in which everything is connected to everything, and every component is like a fractal embedded in the other components.

    This is not an abstract concept. We have found ways to actually implement this, in practical ways, with startling outcomes.

    That’s where we have moved in rethinking learning and development.

    You help people learn by connecting to each other, and by understanding the informal, incidental nature of learning.

    Figure 4.1 Marsick and Watkins' informal and incidental learning model

    A colleague commented that in today’s world, you’re better of talking about digital networks than you are about communities of practice.

    Yet these are two competing frameworks that collide, contradict, and are superimposed on top of each other.

    Both are helpful at specific times.

    In general, you can recognize the tensions and say: “Well, let’s put each one in front of the problem. Let’s see what we gain by applying each. Let’s reconcile in situ what the contradictory things are that we learn through these different lenses and then make decisions and figure out what the design elements look like.”

    What does it give to hold these notions of community and network in creative tension with one another?

    It depends on the context.

    It’s kind of like a fruit salad where you mix all these fruits together and the juice you get at the bottom of the bowl tends to be really delicious. That’s the best case.

    The flip side can be confusion.

    Some categories of learners just feel completely overwhelmed by being presented with multiple ways of doing something, having to make their own decisions in ways they’re simply not used to, being given too many choices or being put in contexts that are too ambiguous for there to be an easy resolution.

    But if you think about the skills we need in a digital age—for navigating the unknown, accepting uncertainty, making decisions, that ability to look around the corner—we try to convey the message to people who are uncomfortable that if they don’t figure out how to overcome their discomfort, they’re probably going to struggle and not be ready to function in the age in which we live.

    Evolution of a new model for learning and development

    Looking back to early 2020, Reda described important insights from an early pre-course symposium offering lived experiences shared by course applicants combined with video archives drawn from prior conferences sponsored by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

    Reda packaged selected recorded talks in a daily sequence, and interspersed it with networking discussions and sharing of experiences of immunization training by field-based practitioners.

    For many, it was the first time they could go online and discover the experience of a peer, who could be from anywhere in the world.

    It was a process of discovery – realizing you can literally and figuratively connect across distance with people who are like yourself.

    We were able to create a conference-like experience, a metaphor that’s familiar to many—the combination of presentation and conversation and shared experience – by basically Scotch-taping together some older videos and editing a few stories from the real world.

    Now, it was part of an overall process over several years that got us to that point—where we had formed a community, a digital community that was mature enough, that was sophisticated enough, to overcome the barriers they were facing and participate.

    But still, it showed it could be done.

    We began to try out our new ideas and practices.

    In the first Teach to Reach Conference in January 2021, we designed with an organizing committee composed of over 500 alumni, we set up opportunities for people to pair of and talk to one another about their field experiences with vaccination.

    Peer learning mattered more than ever, because participants were immunization staff getting ready to introduce new COVID-19 vaccines in developing countries.

    There were no established norms and standards for how to do this.

    The conference offered some 56 workshops and other formal sessions, plenaries, and interviews.

    However, we discovered that the most meaningful learning was through some 14,000 networking meetings, where you pressed a button and you were randomly matched with someone else at the conference.

    That gave birth to a quarterly event dedicated entirely to such networking, which has continued to grow and thrive since.

    People now join group sessions where you listen to peers sharing their insights and experiences of vaccine hesitancy or other topics, and then you go off and network in one-to-one, private meetings and share your own experience, nourished by what happened in that group session; and also continue your learning in that very intimate way that you get through individual conversation that you don’t get in the anonymization of the Zoom rectangles.

    Dialogue is great, but we are most interested in action that leads to results.

    In every formal course, learners design a project around a real problem that they face, and use multiple learning resources to support learning in the context of that project.

    An evaluation showed that people were already implementing projects and doing things with what they had learned.

    How could we scaffold not just learning but actual project implementation?

    In order to catalyze action, we added a number of components in a sequence, a deliberate pedagogical pattern designed on the basis of evidence from learning science combined with empirical evidence from our practice.

    First, the Ideas Engine, where people share ideas and practices, and give and receive feedback on them.

    That’s followed by situation analysis really getting to the root cause of the problem they’re facing. We just ask learners to ask “why” fives times. Half of learners found a root cause different from the one they had initially diagnosed.

    And third, then, is action planning to clarify: What’s your goal? What are three corrective actions you’re going to take? How will you know that you have achieved your goal?

    These are classic, conventional action planning questions.

    The difference is the networked, peer learning model. It’s described by some learners as a “superpower”. Defying distance and many other boundaries, each person can tap into collective intelligence to accelerate their progress.

    It has taken years to bring together the right components, in the right sequence, to encourage reflective practice, develop analytical competencies, higher-order learning… but in ways that link every step of thinking to doing, and where the end game is about improved health outcomes, not just learning outcomes.

    That led us ultimately to the Impact Accelerator—that doesn’t have an end point.

    It starts with four weeks of goal setting, focused on continuous quality improvement.

    People initially declare very ambitious goals like, “By the end of the month I will have improved immunization coverage.” This is too broad to be useful, and seldom can be achieved within a month.

    We help them set specific goals. For example: “By the end of the month, I will have presented the project to my boss and secured some funding”— and even that may be quite ambitious.

    We help people figure out for themselves what they can actually do within the constraints they have.

    Unlike “Grand Challenges” or other innovation tournaments, you don’t have a competitive element, you don’t have a financial incentive, and it still works.

    The heart and soul of it is intrinsic motivation.

    After these steps there’s ongoing longitudinal reporting.

    Peer learning provides a new kind of accountability, as colleagues challenge each other to do better – and also to present credible results.

    Basically, we’ll call you back and ask, what happened to that project you were doing? Did you finish it? Did you get stuck? if so, why? What evidence do you have that it’s made a difference? You share that with us and if you have good news to share, we’ll probably invite you to an inspirational event for the next cycle.

    Challenges in inventing a new learning model

    If you look at this from the point of view of the learner, the first point of contact is social.

    It’s somebody they know who’s going to share with them on WhatsApp the invitation to join the program.

    Second are steps that test motivation and commitment because they could be seen as barriers to entry, for example, a long questionnaire for the current full learning cycle.

    To join the cycle, 6,185 people in the first two weeks took the time to answer 95 questions, generating over half a million data points and insights.

    About 40% of people who start the questionnaire finish it, and then start receiving instructions in a flow of emails, to prepare for the next steps.

    We could have reduced the number of questions, lowering the barrier to entry.

    But then entry would be far less meaningful.

    Learning needs to mean something.

    Universities substitute meaning through assessment, credentialing, and accreditation.

    We start with didactic steps, combined with some inspirational messages, e.g., asking them to reflect on why they are committed to the program, or how they are going to organize their time.

    We don’t know what the program design will look like until we’ve collected the applications and analyzed what people share about their biggest challenges because it’s all challenge-based.

    For example, we may think there is a problem due to vaccine hesitancy. We may be right: vaccine hesitancy is frequently given as a significant challenge. But there may be some things that surprise us.

    And so, we adapt every part of the design, and we keep doing that every day throughout the program, so there’s no disconnect between the design and the implementation.

    The design is the content.

    The first thing may be an inspirational event to connect with their intrinsic motivation, which we then tap into throughout the cycle.

    In June 2022, for example, we had an event for the network that completed the first part of the full learning cycle.

    We challenged people to share photos, showing them in the field, doing their daily work during World Immunization Week.

    We received over 1,000 photos in about two weeks.

    We organized a community event. It was a slide show: showing photos with music, reading the names of those who had contributed, inviting them to comment each other’s photos.

    A big chunk of what we do addresses the affective domain of learning that is critical to complex problem-solving and usually incredibly hard to get to.

    And what we saw were people in the room having those moments of coming to consciousness, realizing their problems are shared, and feeling stronger because of it.

    It was online, but you could feel the emotion. Something very powerful that we do not quite know how to describe, measure, or evaluate.

    People love peer learning in principle but still are wary.

    They might wonder how they can trust what their peer says: What’s the proof I can rely on them? What happens if they let me down? How do I feel if I don’t own up to the expectations? What if I’m peer-reviewing the work of somebody who’s far more experienced than I am, or conversely, if I read somebody’s work and judge they didn’t have the time or make the effort to do something good?

    We use didactic constraints to scaffold spaces of possibility: If your project is due by Friday, we announce that there will be no extension. By contrast, the choice of project is yours.

    We’re not going to tell you what your challenge is in your remote village, so you define it. We will challenge you to put yourself to the test, to demonstrate that this is actually your toughest challenge.

    Or to demonstrate that what you think is the cause is the actual root cause.

    And then we’ll have a support system that has about 20 different ways in which people can not only receive support, but also give it to others.

    For the technical support sessions, for example, we’ll say there are two reasons for joining. Either you have a technical issue you want to solve; or you’re doing so well, you have a little bit of time to give to help your colleagues. 

    This is just one example of how we encourage connections between peers.

    It took us years to find the right way to formulate the dialectic between those who are doing well, and those who are not. Are they really peers?

    Over time, we gained confidence in peer learning after we adopted it.

    We had a particularly challenging course that led to a breakthrough.

    We had prior experiences with learners who wanted an expert to tell them if their assignment was good or not.

    Getting people to trust peer learning forced us to think through how we articulate the value of peer learning.

    How do we help people understand that the limitations are there, but that they do not limit the learning?

    An assumption in global health is that, in order to teach, you need technical expertise.

    So if you are a technical expert, it is assumed that you can teach what you know.

    We consider subject matter expertise, but if you are an expert and come to our event, you’re actually asked to listen, as a guide on the side rather than a sage on the stage.

    You do not get to make a presentation, at least not until learners have experienced the power of peer leraning.

    You listen to what people are sharing about their experiences.

    Then, you have a really important role, that is to respond to what you’ve heard and demonstrate that your expertise is relevant and helpful to people who are facing these challenges.

    That has sometimes led to opposition when experts realize to what extent we flipped the prevailing model around.

    Some people really embrace it.

    Others get really scared.

    One of the most recent shifts we have made is that we stopped talking about courses.

    Courses are a very useful metaphor, but we are now talking about a movement for immunization.

    In the past, we observed that people who dropped out felt shame and stopped participating.

    Even if you are not actively participating, you’re still a member of the immunization movement.

    People have participated as health professionals, as government workers, as members of civil society, in various kinds of movements since decolonization.

    So the “movement” metaphor has a different resonance than that of “courses”.

    We used to call the Monday weekly meeting a discussion group.

    We’re now calling it a weekly assembly.

    It is a term that speaks to the religiosity of many learners, as well as to those with social commitments in their local communities.

    About ten years ago, I began to think of my goal for these discussion groups like the musician, the artist that you most appreciate, who really moves your soul, moves you, your every fiber and your body and your soul and your mind.

    I remember in 1989 I went to a Pink Floyd concert.

    When we left the concert, we were drenched in sweat.

    I was exhausted and just had an exhilarating experience.

    That’s what I would like people who participate in our events to feel.

    I believe that’s key to fostering the dynamics that will lead to effective teaching and learning and change as an outcome.

    We’re still light years away from that.

    A global health researcher told me that when she joins our events, she feels like she is in church in her home country of Nigeria.

    So, light years away, but making some progress.

    Reference

    Watkins, K.E. and Marsick, V.J., 2023. Chapter 4. Learning informally at work: Reframing learning and development. In Rethinking Workplace Learning and Development. Edward Elgar Publishing. https://www.e-elgar.com/shop/gbp/rethinking-workplace-learning-and-development-9781802203769.html

  • Tech Change

    Tech Change

    The Institute for Technology and Social Change is a private company based in Washington, D.C. Its web site offers a course catalogue focused on technological innovation. Timo Luege is a communication specialist who has spent the last seven years working for the humanitarian and development sector, a period during which large-scale disasters intersected with the rapid rise in mobile communication. Starting on Monday, he will be delivering TechChange’s course on technology tools and skills for emergency management for the third time.

    In this interview he answers the following questions:

    1. What will I be able to do after taking the course that I couldn’t do before?
    2. Why should my manager pay for this, or at least support me?
    3. Why should my staff development or HR people support me to take this course?
    4. How will this help me to deliver for my organization – or to find my next job or mission?
    5. Humanitarian training focuses on technical skills, yet everyone recognizes the need for critical thinking and analytical skills. Do you think that your course can help with these and if so how?
    6. Is TechChange accredited and, if not, why not deliver this course through a traditional university?
    7. How does a communication specialist become an online instructor?
    8. What is your experience of teaching online?

    Timo assisted in teaching the first iteration of the course before taking the helm, and dedicates two full weeks to preparation for the course. This is especially important as he covers fast-changing topics. A number of guests are invited to deliver online presentation and contribute to discussions. Although there is no group work, there are many opportunities for interaction. The learning environment is a custom-built job on top of WordPress. The cohorts are typically between 20 and 30 learners, with a broad diversity of people and countries represented.

    The fees for the course are US$445, but if you are interested, ping me (or Timo) on Twitter (or use the contact form on this blog) and I will share a code you can use to get a US$100 discount.

    From my vantage point, I connected with Timo to chat about this course which I found profoundly interesting for reasons that should not surprise regular readers of this blog:

    • It aims to offer most-current knowledge in an area of innovation where the “half-life” of knowledge is short (and in fact Timo mentions that he finds it necessary to thoroughly update his content each time he runs the course).
    • It has been developed outside of in-service training and of traditional universities, with knowledge based on practitioner expertise acquired through experience
    • It is offered by a private company, leveraging relationships to the technology, humanitarian and development sectors.

    On the other hand:

    • It is neither open (free) nor massive (and doesn’t try to be), and therefore difficult to scale up.
    • The pedagogical model appears to contain some elements of constructivist and experiential learning, but still appears very focused on information transmission.
    • The value of the credential remains to be demonstrated with respect to applicability to work, performance outcomes, and recognition by HR departments and managers.
    • It is unclear if or how learners interact during and after the course to form a knowledge community.
    • The cost structure and business model are difficult to determine without first chatting with the TechChange team.

    Please note that I have never taken a TechChange course and have not (yet) met their team, so these are only my first impressions, from the outside, looking in.

     

     

     

     

  • Games for health: 14 trick questions for Ben Sawyer

    Games for health: 14 trick questions for Ben Sawyer

    Ben Sawyer is the co-founder of both the Serious Games Initiative (2002) and the Games for Health Project (2004). He is one of the leading experts on the use of game technologies, talent, and design techniques for purposes beyond entertainment. He answered 14 questions by e-mail ahead of his presentation to the IFRC Global Health Team.

    1. What is your favorite game?

    I used to reference an old RPG (role playing game) called Ultima IV. But, in reality, it’s Minecraft. Just such a great achievement and fun to play.

    2. What is the worst “serious game” you have ever played?

    Most of them.

    3. What is a game, anyway?

    A game by definition is a system, defined by rules, where people engage in defined competition to achieve a quantifiable outcome either against an opponent or the system itself. There are many dictionary-style definitions. In reality, a game is a mediated experience. Whether something is a game is based on the perception of the user and their reaction to interacting with the game. Increasingly such perceptions are defined by people’s experience and expectations of the games they play or have played in life. Thus it’s possible to have many things that are, by definition, a game, but by perception of players are not worthy of that phrase.

    4. What is the difference between games and gamification?

    The former is about creating a fully cognitive experience with a more encompassing model of engagement and interaction, and the other is about trying to short circuit the experience and use just a few things in hopes that creating a “game” or an experience that instills some of the core ideas of what a game is by definition will generate a bump in engagement. They’re not the same thing. Often, gamification devolves to just creating competitive experiences based on some sort of point-scoring model that is at-best glorified industrial psychology and not necessarily a great, giant outcome of innovation or game design.

    5. Why use games for serious health work?

    There are a variety of reasons, but the biggest is that games hold strong promise to instantiate behavior change through a variety of media, simulation, and cognitive effects.

    6. If you don’t play games, can you still design one?

    Everyone can design games, some people do it pretty well, but ideally it’s professionals working with vision holders and experts that generate great games.

    7. Can games motivate learners to change behavior?

    Yes, and we have proof of that in research. That said, it’s a lot of work, and there are different approaches, and ideally they need to be part of more comprehensive programs.

    8. Can you prove that serious games can affect health outcomes? What does the evidence say?

    The evidence so far says that games which are carefully constructed by good teams, using clear theory, and building a clear model of what drives behavior change have a chance to do it. That means most things don’t, because they don’t follow the careful approaches needed to ensure the best chance for success.

    9. What do you need to understand to successfully launch a game that improves health?

    First, you need to understand what’s possible to do, and what might be worth risking to do. In terms of launching, the biggest issue is understanding how you’re going to reach and support your users such that they see the utility of what they’ll do such that it is an equal attractor alongside their enjoyment of the game itself.

    10. What are the most common myths and misconceptions about “serious games”?

    That games have to be “fun” to be effective, that games have to be more fun than the best entertainment only games, and that just because something is a game by definition it inherently provides the best outcomes we associate with our favorite games. And that this is only and predominantly about engagement and motivation versus any other factors.

    11. Who funds health games and why?

    So far, it has been government and foundation funds looking to find new breakthroughs in health and healthcare, so mostly research into the art of the possible. Beyond that, it has been private groups seeking to create new products, or new engagement models, something that generates new paths to new services.

    12. HTML5 or app? iOS or Android? Should health folks care about the choice of technology?

    They should care about having a strategy that makes them able to run on all the leading platforms for the least amount of work possible. That can mean many different approaches, but in general it should not be a process that locks you in. There are at least three great ways to achieve cross platform responsive design – and they each have pros and cons.

    13. What is the best game studio for serious games?

    The best studio is situational. The best approach is to have game designers and producers who are agnostic as to what to make, how, and for how much, help you define your game without any conflict of interest in who or how it’s precisely built. And then, based on the qualified idea of what you want and should make, to find the best available and affordable developer that fits your culture, needs, and especially the specifics of what you should make. Hire an architect before you hire the person to build your house – games are no different.

    14. What’s the best way to demonstrate the power of a game for health?

    Build one, test it, push it to the field, rinse and repeat.

  • Convergence and cross-fertilisation between publishing and learning: an interview with Toby Green and Reda Sadki

    Convergence and cross-fertilisation between publishing and learning: an interview with Toby Green and Reda Sadki

    By John Helmer

    We’re in a world where people don’t really understand what they want until you put it in front of them,’ says Toby Green Head of Publishing at OECD. He’s talking about the challenge of creating new digital products in a technology landscape that is changing very quickly (with no end to the ‘technology treadmill’ in sight) and where market research is of limited value; where what happened in the past in educational publishing is a poor guide to what will happen in the future.

    This reflection comes from looking at OECD’s markets, which span both higher education and the workplace, and a remit that embraces not only information dissemination but, to a degree, instruction. We’re talking convergence.

    Toby Green will chair the plenary session on ‘Cross-fertilisation’ at the ALPSP International Conference. The convergence of the education and workplace learning markets is likely to be a theme for this session, so we took the opportunity to convene a three-way discussion involving Reda Sadki, a learning innovation strategist who is working with OECD on precisely this area.

    We discussed drivers for convergence, some of its effects, and also opportunities and threats for publishers.

    Moving beyond a dissemination mindset

    Reda’s vantage point on this phenomenon of convergence is informed by his time at the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (the IFRC), where he pivoted from managing publishing to ‘learning systems’. The IFRC, he says, was an organization that published massive amounts of information (750 information products, 12 million printed pages in 2009), with “little measurable impact”. ‘Ultimately I came to the realisation that the value in what was being published by the world’s largest humanitarian network could be found in the instructional and training materials, with a global audience of 17 million Red Cross and Red Crescent volunteers. Where you could find impact was in the publications that teach people in a humanitarian emergency how to do very basic things such as putting up a tent and providing first aid care.’

    He characterises the transition this realisation prompted as being from a concern over maximising dissemination – counting eyeballs and downloads – to looking at a deeper kind of impact in terms of what was happening behind the eyeballs. It is a shift that he implies publishers need to make themselves if they are to capitalise on the opportunities offered by this convergence.

    Drivers of convergence

    Reda sees two fundamental shifts driving convergence.

    One is about changes in the economy of effort to do certain things. Publishing starts with dissemination and under the traditional model would tend to stop at that. It doesn’t necessary look at look at what people are doing with what it disseminates – largely because, pre-internet, it would have been uneconomic to do so. Technology has lowered the cost of, for instance, collecting rich data about what people are doing with a particular piece of knowledge.

    The other is about the changing nature of knowledge itself. The book gave us a ‘container’ view of knowledge, where now – with knowledge flows getting faster all the time – it looks more like a process than a product. Attempts to capture and compartmentalise knowledge are doomed to fail, in his view, as they do not provide the answers that we need to be able to provide it in any useful way. Being an expert today is much more about knowing where and knowing how than it is about the individual accumulating large amounts of knowledge.

    Echoing Reda’s first point, but framing it in a perhaps broader context, Toby sees the appearance of new possibilities for action with the advent of digital as the decisive factor. ‘If you think of the offline world, on both the publishing side and the education/training side, there were some natural constraints to what you could do …’

    The book (or textbook, or journal) was bound. It had a finite number of pages and could be shipped to only so many people. The classroom could only have a finite number of people in it, and was very difficult to scale without massive expense in both infrastructure and people (i.e. teachers). Online removes a lot of those scaling constraints; so a class that could previously only reach 30 people can now reach hundreds of thousands.

    Online has also massively lowered the cost of updating published information. A new print edition of a textbook, for example, is a major undertaking. In the offline world updates to knowledge would happen in batches, because it wasn’t feasible to do it in any other way. Online allows you to have a rolling update – giving us the concept of a living book – or, equally, a course that is constantly being tweaked and kept up to date.

    These changes allow new ways of thinking. There are significant changes to the old paradigms – but they are changes that a lot of people are still trying to get used to, both on the education side and on the publishing side.

    One area that publishing has been very successful in, Toby feels is integrating technology with content, and he gave several examples of workflow tools such as Mendeley that bear this out, and the work of other players in the wider information industry such as Bloomberg and Reuters.

    However going beyond these essentially resource-based models and becoming more instrumental in the process of learning is another matter, and considering this led us to look at the different cultures these converging (or colliding) industries have.

    Culture and authority

    One of the most beautiful things about publishing, in Reda’s view, is the way in which culture, in both the specific and the wider senses of that word, is embedded in its fabric. This gives a different feel for the value of the content, and its importance in terms of the emotional relationship we have with works of the mind and aspects such as cultural diversity in what is published. While e-learning taps into a rich history of learning theories and education, it still has something to learn, he feels, from the culture of publishing in this respect.

    Knowledge management, by contrast – which he feels to have failed – seems obsessed with putting pieces of data into pigeonholes, without proper regards to the more important activity of building a culture to make sense of the vast amounts of information and data that organisations receive and generate.

    From the publishing side, Toby observed that the linkage of education and training has always been weak. Textbook sales were seen as by-product of publishing activity, where existing titles were picked up on by educators – or else the preserve of a highly specialised branch of publishing that knew how to do them.

    Now, with the collapse of barriers that limited thinking in the offline world, and with digital reducing costs and lowering barriers to entry, the idea of publishers working with partners to adapt their content to create courses is far more achievable. And here is a further cultural change: the idea of working with partners. ‘Before, companies did everything themselves; they didn’t really use networks of freelancers and partners in the way we do now’.

    My own reflection on the different cultures, having worked in e-learning and digital publishing, is that there is less concern about provenance of knowledge on the training side of the fence. Academic publishing has a culture of sources, citation and reference that is currently in the process of automating in a characteristically rigorous way (CrossRef, ORCID, etc.). In e-learning, on the other hand, where content is often produced using an organisation’s internal SME knowledge, individual authorship tends to be more submerged, and it is often possible to wonder: where is this point of view coming from; who is telling me this?

    As somebody who works for a ‘who’ (the OECD) Toby can’t help but believe that at the point of convergence, this difference offers an opportunity for organisations like his own whose content carries the stamp of accepted and established authority in their particular field. This could also apply to the learned societies, but doesn’t necessarily hold true for larger, more generalist commercial publishers.

    Effects of convergence, chilling and otherwise

    Given the way that internet power laws operate in any online space – tending to favour one or a very few brands and condemn everyone else to place on the ‘long tail’, these questions of identity and authority are critical online. Certainly their effects have been seen in the case of MOOCs.

    Arguably, it is the presence of educational ‘super-brands’ such as Harvard and Stanford that has allowed online education to break through to public consciousness in the way it now has, under the banner of MOOCs. Interestingly however, other HE institutions in this rarified upper strata that have chosen not to participate in this gold-rush so far – notably Oxford and Cambridge in the UK – don’t seem to be especially troubled by the phenomenon.

    It is the ‘squeezed middle’ of second tier universities who see MOOCs as a threat to their livelihood, and the opinion of many is that solution in future will be for institutions to find or build specialisms in particular unique areas. Get ‘niche’.

    Reda locates a particular opportunity here in the troubled issue of ‘the fit in today’s world of the capacity of universities to prepare people for the workforce or for the demands of society’. Sub-degree, competency-based qualifications represent, in his view, ‘a huge gaping hole’ that knowledge-producing institutions are in a privileged position to address.

    He cites a client he worked with who had seen an Oxford University course on the area they worked in, but believed they could themselves build one ‘a hundred times better’. This sparked for him the idea that an organisation that has the practice – that actually does the job – could now, through the affordances of technology, build an educational offering of high quality.

    An organisation that in addition starts with a strong publishing function is particularly well placed since they will already have the quality development processes that will make it much easier to build educational experiences around that content.

    Playing the long game

    Of course, underlying all this talk of opportunities is the necessity for publishers to make their digital investments pay, and while moving into creating educational experiences around content might represent an opportunity for some organisations, there usually has to be some threat element in play to compel action.

    Reda pointed to the scrabble for data around MOOCs, which as early as 2013 prompted publishers to offer access to their textbooks within MOOCs in return for the user data. In a data-driven world, he would consider not having some such access to this type of data as a risk.

    This has to be see in the context of attempts by publishers to use digital to bring textbooks to life, not all of which have proved wildly successful with users, and the idea, argued by some, that MOOCs themselves are textbooks: that, ‘MOOCs perhaps represent the first form of digital textbook to reach a mass audience’.

    Given factors like these, organisations can’t afford to not experiment and try new things if their businesses are to grow and survive.

    In Toby’s view, publishers still largely think they’re in the business of selling content. He sees very few examples of textbook publishers migrating online in a way that works. ‘Part of the challenge is that since individuals are so reluctant to spend any money for content online – and bearing in mind that the offline textbook market was largely an individual-purchase model – it is very hard to see how a textbook publisher is going to get a return if they simply put their textbook online’.

    Data driven-models mean that money is made elsewhere than in the same transaction, so the challenge is to look at your publishing business in the round. A publisher such as Wiley, whose acquisitions in the learning space follow a strategy around the lifetime value of a customer – from education through to their professional life – might (notionally) balance losses in one part of the business by larger gains in another. This would involve looking at the value of the individual rather than the value of the training.

    ‘That’s what makes the web so hard, but at the same time so interesting: you have to consider where the value is, and the lifetime value could be very long … it’s very difficult to look individually at each particular piece: you have to look at it holistically.’

  • 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.

     

  • The Robot (Education) Lady

    With my eight-year-old son, we are planning to build and program a Lego Mindstorms EV3 this Summer. They are robots that look cool and for which you can code tasks and decisions. So, at Google’s Course Builder workshop, when I heard Jennifer Kay, a computer science professor, explain that she has been using robots (including the Lego ones) for education for years, I couldn’t help but ask for an interview.

    I’ve been reading The Second Machine Age, which is all about the accelerating pace of technological change and one of its implications, that robots will (sooner than we think) be taking on many tasks that previously required humans to do them, hence my questions around this. However, Jennifer’s work is really focused on using simple robots to teach coding skills to kids now, not think about what the future might look like.

    You can check out Jennifer’s Educational Robots for Absolute Beginners MOOC to learn the basics of robot programming and, yes, learn to code.

  • 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.

  • Meet Barbara Moser-Mercer, the lady who did MOOCs in a refugee camp

    Meet Barbara Moser-Mercer, the lady who did MOOCs in a refugee camp

    I first heard her described as the “lady who did MOOCs in a refugee camp”. It was completely ambiguous what that meant, but certainly sparked my curiosity. Barbara Moser-Mercer is a professor at the University of Geneva and a  cognitive psychologist who has practiced and researched education in emergencies.

    I finally caught up with her at the Second European MOOC Summit.

     

  • LSi.io interviews Plan B’s Donald Clark: Universities and humanitarian organizations in the Age of Disruption

    LSi.io interviews Plan B’s Donald Clark: Universities and humanitarian organizations in the Age of Disruption

    Donald Clark is an education innovator with no institutional ties to refrain him from telling it like it is. He answers three questions from LSi.io‘s Reda Sadki:

    • Zach Sims at Davos referred to university brick-and-mortar structures as the “detritus” of a bygone area. Agree or disagree?
    • We all remember Sebastian Thrun’s predictions about the impending concentration of higher education. Why does it feel like it’s just not happening?
    • A key insight about MOOCs is the significance of suddenly connecting millions of adult learners to faculty previously bunkered down at the top of their ivory towers. Can you tell us more about your analysis on the significance of MOOCs?
    • The humanitarian sector faces growing challenges, yet we continue to train like it’s 1899. How would you approach such a ‘wicked’ learning problem?

    Interview recorded at the Second European MOOC Summit at EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland on 11 February 2014.

  • ASTD Learning Executive Briefing: Reda Sadki

    ASTD Learning Executive Briefing: Reda Sadki

    This article was first published by the ASTD’s Learning Executive Briefing.

    By Ruth Palombo Weiss

    Reda Sadki is the Senior Officer for Learning Systems at the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC)

    Q: Why do you think the Red Cross Movement has a deeply rooted culture of face-to-face training for its 13.6 million volunteers?

    A: There is a deeply rooted culture of face-to-face training at the Red Cross because of our unique brick and mortar network of hundreds of thousands of branch offices all over the world. What drives people to the branches is that they want to learn a skill, such as first aid, disaster risk reduction, and we’re really good at teaching those things.

    In the future, educational technology might enable us to connect branches to each other. Imagine what the person in Muskogee, Oklahoma, can learn from the Pakistani Red Crescent volunteer who lived through the Karachi, Pakistan flood in 2010, and who participated in the recovery efforts afterward. That sharing of knowledge and skills would be an enriching and valuable experience. Technology will enable us to put such connections at the heart of the volunteer experience.

    Q: What are the challenges in connecting the 187 national Red Cross/Red Crescent societies and using social, peer-based learning to link them to each other in a vast, global knowledge community?

    A: In the 21st Century, such connections may prove indispensable for anyone working for change at the community level, most obviously on global issues with local impact and consequences, such as climate change. We need to improve lateral connections by bringing technology into the branches. We also need to find ways to reassure the headquarters of each of these national societies that local, community-based, volunteer networks are a good thing and not threatening to existing hierarchies. Currently, our web-conferencing still feels like a sub-par experience compared to getting volunteers together.

    We’re waiting for web-conferencing to create a presence similar to the power of face-to-face training. Google engineers have been trying to recreate the fireside chat with Google Hangouts. What makes the branch experience so powerful is you get to know people and spend time with them after the training is over. Some of the challenges are parallel to those of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) and on-line education. Part of what’s at stake is can we recreate not only the knowledge transfer, but improve on the advantages of face-to-face encounters.

    Q: Tell our readers about the online courses for specialized disaster response teams, how they are formatted, and how effective they have been.

    A: The recruitment and preparation of IFRC’s specialized disaster response teams have ramped up their use of educational technology in the last three years by developing online courses. In 2009, we launched our first online CD-rom course: The World of Red Cross/Red Crescent. The intent was to show that eLearning was a serious thing. It’s a very information-heavy course in which there is little for the learner to do except try to retain enough information to pass the quiz.

    We’re now doing scenario-based online courses where people have to problem-solve, make choices, and see the consequences of those choices.  We have moved to a technology that uses HTML 5 and responsive design, a technology that enables a course to reformat and resize, so it can be used on a tablet, smart phone, or desktop screen. The pedagogy is based on things that connect to our learning culture. The technology is based on the reality that people in emerging countries, if they have access to the Internet at all, are accessing it through a mobile device. For example, in Egypt, 80 percent of people have Internet access only though their cell phones.

    Q: How has this pioneering use of online education as didactic prerequisites to lessen the information load during face-to-face training led to a broader conversation about the purpose of training and questions about the quality of current learning systems?

    A: In 2010, the IFRC spent almost $24 million dollars at the Secretariat in Geneva on workshops and training, almost all of which were face-to-face. Initially, people questioned the legitimacy and efficacy of online learning. Then we realized we had never evaluated our face-to-face training. A big part of our efforts involved comparing online and blended learning to face-to-face learning. We referred to two meta-analysis studies published in 2010 comparing online with blended learning. These studies found that online learning gets a slightly better outcome, and showed no benefits from blended learning. Such evidence helped us shift the debate. There are many more complex and interesting issues we can explore, but the argument of which modality is better has been settled.

    Now we can focus on when there is value to moving bodies and materials at high cost: what materials do we move, and what do these bodies do once they’re there? Our emergency health public coordinator has explained that when volunteers are in training, they hang out, get to know each other, and become friends. In the heat of an operation, when one volunteer has to tell someone that he is doing something wrong, that is likely to be accepted because of the friendship. So the question is how do we build such connections using educational technology.

    Q: How has the Red Cross Learning Network stimulated new thinking in the humanitarian and development field and increased the magnitude, quality, and impact of humanitarian service delivery?

    A:  To start, it has enabled volunteers to tap into a global knowledge community with no intermediaries prescribing or circumscribing what they should learn. We have found there are increasing numbers of people on our learning platform and those numbers are growing every month. There is a dynamic through which national staff and volunteers all over the world discover the learning platform on their own, and they see value in it for themselves. We have a completion rate of over 50 percent for the information transmission modules.

    The learning platform tries to do two things. One is to encourage those who are eager to learn, to manage their own learning. That is at the heart of social learning. At the same time, we’re looking at helping learning and development managers to be able to use these tools. The message I give when I go to the various Red Cross headquarters is your staff and volunteers are already completing courses: would you like to know which courses they’re taking and how well they’re doing?  Would you then like to be able to prescribe a learning focus for teams that have performance gaps? We need both a structured and managed approach to learning as well as a people-driven approach.

    Q: Are your new eLearning platforms cost-effective and how well do they work?

    A: To deliver one-hour of training online through the learning platform costs a licensing fee of $0.50. Delivering one hour of face- to-face training is roughly $50 USD. Clearly, it’s 100 times cheaper to deliver learning online. This is the argument which gets senior management’s attention. It’s cheaper, but can it possibly be as good?  Because we haven’t in the past evaluated the face-to-face training, there is no secretariat-wide effort to evaluate training for all 187 headquarters. Comparing online to face-to-face is tough, and we are currently building an evaluation framework for both kinds of learning, where all new courses are required to include a follow-up evaluation.

    The cost effectiveness is complicated, because the development of an online course is more expensive than that for face-to-face. With face-to-face, someone develops a power point, we give him a plane ticket, and he gives the lecture. You can have multiple branches funding that kind of training, and it can be spread out over time, so any time a national society has a budget, they organize a new training module. However, over time the cost really adds up.

    On the other hand, if you want to design a new online course, you have to think through the pedagogy, the technology, the content, and that’s all front-loaded work. Finding the money for that work on the promise of effectiveness has turned out to be challenging. We want to keep all of the good things about the face-to-face culture, but we also need to make sure every dollar is used to maximize the services to vulnerable people, which is the heart of our mission.

    Q:  How might a collaborative learning community be developed for volunteers across language and other barriers?

    A:  Crowd sourcing is the easy answer. We already have virtual volunteers doing amazing things, such as crisis mapping, entirely online.  An example is the Haiti earthquake. There were thousands of people online (such as rescue teams) who voluntarily collected and analyzed data. There is a lot of debate in the humanitarian world as how to use that, and one of the problems is that we need to be massively multi-lingual. Our learning platform is being translated into 38 different languages, and we’re using a needs-driven approach. When a Red Cross unit says they need a course in the local language, then we’ll mobilize resources to provide the content.

    Q: What were the results of the pilot “new learning” program, based on research on open learning and MOOCs, to promote global, open, active learning (GOAL)? 

    A:  The Global Youth Conference brought together in Vienna, Austria, 155 youth leaders from all over the world. We had 775 people from over 70 countries working together online – four times as many learning online as gathered for the conference events. The Vienna event lasted three days, whereas online, people worked together for six weeks on the same four thematic areas. We asked people to self-assess how much they learned, and 58 percent reported working consistently on the open learning activities. We had more than 40 percent who spent at least one hour each week on the learning activities, and 58 percent reported they had learned a lot. Many of those people have kept the connections they’ve established during the program. We are now seeing young people organizing their own learning activities on issues such as nuclear disarmament, using the tools they discovered in the GOAL program.

    Reda Sadki is the Senior Learning Systems Officer in the Learning and Research Department of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC).

    Source: http://www.astd.org/Publications/Newsletters/LX-Briefing/LXB-Archives/2013/08/View-from-the-Learning-Executive