Stories

Category: Learning strategy

  • Practicum

    Practicum

    Individually, team members continually learn in their respective area of work, by both formal and informal means. Most learning today happens by accretion, as a continual, networked (‘know-where’), and embedded process. However, occasions to share and reflect on best practice are rare, and may be felt to be interruptions or distractions from the ‘real work’ in one’s silo. Furthermore, online learning events (“webinars”) tend to be long (one hour is typical), require professionals to take “time out” from their work in order to learn, and do not provide the necessary linkage between knowledge acquired and its application to work (the “applicability problem”).

    To further continual learning, the practicum offers a 15-minute online presentation from a global thought leader on a topic directly relevant to the business. Participants are invited to watch the presentation together, and to stay together for face-to-face discussion (beyond 15 minutes) to determine practical ways in which the concepts and ideas may be applied (collaborative, collective, and creative) through facilitated discussion. This provides the opportunity to learn with respect to real challenges rather than from generic content and cases, reducing the tensions and tradeoffs felt when having to choose between attending a learning program and getting the work done. The recording of each presentation will be made available one week after the live event (captured and codified), adding incentive to participate in the live event.

    Presenters will share a short list of key resources and links so that participants may independently investigate the topic and its application to their context, encouraging needs-based learning (“acquisition”) and learning as cognition and reflection (“emergence”).

  • Mission performance

    Thanks to Karen E. Watkins (University of Georgia) and Maya Drobnjak (Australian Army).

  • #EveryoneMicrosoft

    #EveryoneMicrosoft

    Incoming CEO Satya Nadella places enhanced learning capability at the top of Microsoft’s priorities, right after its customers:

    Second [after customers], we know the changes above will bring on the need for new training, learning and experimentation. Over the next six months you will see new investments in our workforce, such as enhanced training and development and more opportunities to test new ideas and incubate new projects. I have also heard from many of you that changing jobs is challenging. We will change the process and mindset so you can more seamlessly move around the company to roles where you can have the most impact and personal growth. All of this, too, comes with accountability and the need to deliver great work for customers, but it is clear that investing in future learning and growth has great benefit for everyone.

    This statement reads to me like a subtle balance of power between HR-driven approaches (job mobility) and new ways of doing new things in a knowledge-driven company (never mind that the word ‘knowledge’ does not appear in the message). Some very savvy folks at Microsoft have already, for example, mainstreamed social learning as a way to advance engineers and engineering .

    Source: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/ceo/index.html

  • 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.

  • Performance

    Performance

    Few empirical studies have examined the relationship between learning organization dimensions and nonprofit performance. Susan McHargue’s study was conducted to understand this relationship and how it impacts nonprofit organizations’ ability to become nonprofit learning organizations. The results offer guidance to human resource developers and managers who desire to integrate learning organization concepts into nonprofit organizations.

    Conceptual and performance model
    Conceptual and performance model

    Source: McHargue, S.K., 2003. Learning for performance in nonprofit organizations. Advances in Developing Human Resources 5, 196–204.
    Photo: Corey Seeman/Flickr
  • Learn and change

    Learn and change

    A learning organization is an organization that has an enhanced capacity to learn and change.

    Watkins and Marsick dimensions of a learning organization
    Watkins and Marsick dimensions of a learning organization

     

    Source: Watkins, K.E., Milton, J., Kurz, D., 2009. Diagnosing the learning culture in public health agencies. International Journal of Continuing Education & Lifelong Learning 2.

  • Presentation for People In Aid: How scale can transform humanitarian education

  • 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.

  • Accreditation in higher education is based primarily on inputs rather than outcomes

    Accreditation in higher education is based primarily on inputs rather than outcomes

    Burck Smith describes how accreditation is based primarily on a higher education institution’s inputs rather than its outcomes, and creates an “iron triangle” to maintain high prices, keep out new entrants, and resist change.

    To be accredited, a college must meet a variety of criteria, but most of these deal with a college’s inputs rather than its outcomes [emphasis mine]. Furthermore, only providers of entire degree programs (rather than individual courses) can be accredited. And even though they are accredited by the same organizations, colleges have complete discretion over their “articulation” policies—the agreements that stipulate the credits that they will honor or deny when transferred from somewhere else. This inherent conflict of interest between the provision of courses and the certification of other’s courses is a powerful tool to keep competition out. Articulation agreements, like API’s for computer operating systems, are the standards that enable or deny integration. In short, by controlling the flow of funding, accreditation insures a number of things: All colleges look reasonably similar to each other, the college can’t easily be “disaggregated” into individual courses, and coursework provided by those outside of accreditation can’t easily be counted as credible.

    Lastly, to further tip the scales toward incumbent providers, accreditation bodies are funded by member colleges, and accreditation reviews are conducted by representatives from the colleges themselves. The “iron triangle” of input-focused accreditation, taxpayer subsidies tied to accreditation, and subjective course articulation ensures that almost all of the taxpayer funds set aside for higher education flows to providers that look the same. And by keeping innovations out, colleges can maintain their pricing structures [emphasis mine].

    This explains why most online courses are priced the same or higher than face-to-face courses despite massive cost efficiencies. Such enormous profit margins available to the delivery of accredited online learning explains the quick growth of for-profit colleges, nonprofit colleges offering online degree programs in conjunction with private-sector providers who share in tuition revenue, and colleges running separate online divisions that subsidize face-to-face operations.

    A more accurate characterization of today’s higher education is that individual colleges offer online learning as a “feature,” but use their regulatory clout as a group to resist disruption.

    Source: Young, J.R., McCormick, T., Smith, B. (Eds.), 2012. Disrupting College: Lessons from iTunes, in: Rebooting the Academy: 12 Tech Innovators Who Are Transforming Campuses. The Chronicle of Higher Education, Washington D.C.

    See also: Kaufmann Foundation report, College 2.0: An Entrepreneurial Approach to Reforming Higher Education and Burck Smith’s blog post similar to the quoted article.