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).

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.

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