The work by Robert A. Bjork and his colleagues is very helpful to make sense of the limitations of learners’ perceptions. Here are 8 summary points from their paper about self-regulated learning.
Our complex and rapidly changing world increasingly requires self-initiated, self-managed, and self-regulated learning, not simply during the years associated with formal schooling, but across the lifespan.
Learning how to learn is, therefore, a critical survival tool, but research on learning, memory, and metacognitive processes has demonstrated that learners are prone to intuitions and beliefs about learning that can impair, rather than enhance, their effectiveness as learners.
Becoming sophisticated as a learner requires not only acquiring a basic understanding of the encoding and retrieval processes that characterize the storage and subsequent access to the to-be-learned knowledge and procedures, but also knowing what self-regulated learning activities and techniques support long-term retention and transfer.
Managing one’s ongoing learning effectively requires accurate monitoring of the degree to which learning has been achieved, coupled with appropriate selection and control of one’s learning activities in response to that monitoring.
Assessing whether learning has been achieved is difficult because conditions that enhance performance during learning can fail to support long-term retention and transfer, whereas other conditions that appear to create difficulties and slow the acquisition process can enhance long-term retention and transfer.
Learners’ judgments of their own degree of learning are also influenced by subjective indices, such as the sense of fluency in perceiving or recalling to-be-learned information, but such fluency can be a product of low-level priming and other factors that are unrelated to whether learning has been achieved.
Becoming maximally effective as a learner requires interpreting errors and mistakes as an essential component of effective learning rather than as a reflection of one’s inadequacies as a learner.
To be maximally effective also requires an appreciation of the incredible capacity humans have to learn and avoiding the mindset that one’s learning abilities are fixed.
“Some individuals are acknowledged as credible knowers within global health, while the knowledge held by others may be given less credibility.” – (Himani Bhakuni and Seye Abimbola in The Lancet, 2021)
In global health, personal experience is assumed to be anecdotal, the lowest form of evidence. We are learning, as one of many organizations contributing to Immunization Agenda 2030 (IA2030), to reconsider this assumption.
An ongoing ‘consultative engagement’ in which a group of global experts has been listening and learning with health professionals working in districts and facilities provides a practical example that changing how we know can lead to significant change in what we do – and what results and outcomes may come of it.
On 12 December 2022, the Geneva Learning Foundation (TGLF) hosted a special event with the Immunization Agenda 2030 Working Group on Immunization for Primary Healthcare and Universal Health Coverage, which includes representatives from leading global agencies that support immunization efforts worldwide.
Over 4,000 people participated. Most were health workers from districts and health facilities in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In the run-up to the event, they shared 139 context-specific experiences about their daily work – challenges, lessons learned, and successes – in integrating immunization as part of primary health care practices. The live event opened with such stories and then transitioned into a formal presentation of the framework. This helped everyone make sense of both the “why” and the “how” of the new framework.
However, this was not the first time that the global group was in listening mode. In fact, the new framework was the capstone in a year-long ‘consultative engagement’ that had begun at Teach to Reach 4 on 10 December 2021, attended by 5,906 health professionals who deliver vaccines in districts and facilities. (Teach to Reach is the Foundation’s networking event series, during which participants meet to share experience and global experts listen and learn. You can view the sessions on primary health care here and here.)
Global health organizations often issue new frameworks and guidance, sometimes accompanied by funding for capacity development. However, dissemination often relies upon conventional high-cost, low-volume approaches, such as face-to-face training or information transmission through digital channels, even though fairly definitive evidence suggests severe limitations to their effectiveness.
To address these challenges, the Geneva Learning Foundation and its partners are launching the IA2030 Movement Knowledge to Action Hub, a platform for sharing local expertise and experience across geographical and health system level boundaries. The goal is to research and implement new ways to convert this knowledge into action, results and, ultimately, impact.
The Double Loop, a monthly insights newsletter edited by Ian Steed and Charlotte Mbuh, is one component of this Hub. The newsletter asked questions to all 4,000 participants of the December 2022 event, 30 days and 90 days later, to gather feedback on the new framework.
Here are the questions we asked three months on:
Since you discovered the Framework for Action: Immunization for Primary Health Care, have you referred to this framework at least once? If you have not used it, can you tell us why? How could this Framework be improved to be more useful to you?
If you have referred to this Framework, tell us what did you do with the information in the Framework? How did your colleagues respond to the Framework?
How did this Framework make a difference in solving a real-world problem you are facing? How did things turn out? Explain what you are doing differently to integrate health services, empower people and communities, and lead multisectoral policy and action.
Within days, we received hundreds of answers:
Some health professionals apologized, often citing field work, emergency response, and other pressing priorities. This can help better understand the strengths and weaknesses of learning culture (the capacity for change), which the Foundation’s Insights Unit has been researching in the field of immunization since 2020.
Others praised the framework in generic terms (“It’s a great framework”), but did not share any specific examples of actual review, use, or application. Some speak to sometimes peculiar practices of accountability in immunization, where top-down hierarchies remain the norm and provide incentive to always provide positive accounts and responses, whatever the reality may be.
A few respondents candidly explained that the Framework does not fit their local needs, as it was primarily designed for national planners. This begs the question of how such local adaptation and tailoring might happen.
Finally, we discovered credible, specific narratives of actual use, including adaptation at the local levels. These provide fascinating examples of how a global guidance, developed through a year-long consultative engagement, is actually being translated into practice.
Our Insights Unit is analyzing these narratives, as this exercise is helping us learn how to scale the IA2030 Movement Knowledge to Action Hub to involve the more than 10,000 health professionals who joined the Movement in its first year.
On 31 March 2023, our team will meet with the IA2030 Working Group to share and discuss the insights gathered through this process.
The Working Group has also changed through this process. In January 2023, it invited its first sub-national member, Dr. María Monzón from Argentina, who brings her own professional experience and expertise from running a primary health care center. She will also serve as the voice of over 10,000 Movement Leaders, immunization staff from 99 countries and all levels of the health system, who met and have been intensively collaborating for over a year in the Foundation’s IA2030 programme.
Surprisingly, one global immunization technical expert shared his concern that thousands of professionals learning from each other to strengthen their resolve and action might amount to “just a bunch of hot air”. This will only be the case if the global immunization community fails to respond and support, even as it proclaims a genuine willingness to recognize local voices as credible knowers. In another blog post, I’ll share some thoughts on what it might take to rise together.
Excerpted from: Victoria J. Marsick, Rachel Fichter, Karen E. Watkins, 2022. From Work-based Learning to Learning-based Work: Exploring the Changing Relationship between Learning and Work, in: The SAGE Handbook of Learning and Work. SAGE Publications.
Reda Sadki of The Geneva Learning Foundation (TGLF), working with Jhilmil Bahl from the World Health Organization (WHO) and funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, developed an extraordinary approach to blending work and learning. The program started as a series of digitally offered courses for immunization personnel working in various countries, connecting in-country central planners, frontline workers, and global actors. The program was designed to address five common problems in training (Sadki, 2018): the inability to scale up to reach large audiences; the difficulty in transferring what is learned; the 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 to ensure learning is greater than the rate of change (Revans, 1984).
The approach grew out of work with Scholar, an innovative learning platform, developed at the University of Illinois by Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis. As the technology implementation of their ‘new learning’ theory, Scholar emphasized seven affordances of learning in a digital age that look at how new technologies change the way knowledge is created and how people connect and socialize (Cope & Kalantzis, 2016). The elements of the Scholar approach include: community-building functions and resources, such as dialogue area surveys and social media; and knowledge creation functions, including a collaborative publishing and critiquing space and tools such as language checkers, annotation functions, and a number of analytics including grade-level writing scores (see Figure 11.3).
Figure 11.3. Scholar pedagogy framework Source: Cope, Bill and Mary Kalantzis, “Assessment and Pedagogy in the Era of Machine-Mediated Learning,” pp. 350–74 in Education as Social Construction: Contributions to Theory, Research, and Practice, edited by Thalia Dragonas, Kenneth J. Gergen, Sheila McNamee and Eleftheria Tseliou, Chagrin Falls OH: Worldshare Books, 2015.
Learning in this digital milieu is very different, not because it is new (given decades of experience with the internet), but because of the rapid rate of change compared to traditional courses that rely on a fixed understanding of how we learn when we share physical space. Published work is often generated by the learners themselves either from their existing libraries or what they produce within the course – which may also become available to other courses; from internet searches, source documents within their work, etc. Project-based learning is not new either, but the scale, the speed, and the meaning of such connections (i.e., how they are experienced) are. Learning contributions of this kind reduce the need for subject matter experts and are both convincing and situated in real-life contexts. Complex cases demonstrate the problems at the center of the course. Group dialogue and the development of proposals to solve real problems build a shared knowledge base. Participants develop action plans of how they will address the problems that are in their workplace. Finally, peer critiquing and support enable everyone to improve their plans from whatever starting place.
Deliberate efforts are made to create a learning community using tools that are already embedded in daily practice (keeping in mind that these tools are constantly changing) and structured activities like randomized coffee trials (Soto, 2016) through which learners meet outside of class to get to know one another socially (i.e., ‘to be human together’). Learning is scaffolded by a human knowledge network (Watkins & Kim, 2018) with peer review, staff support, expert resources, and a unique Scholar alumni cadre of former students who volunteer as ‘accompanists’ to support new learners in navigating the technology and whatever else creates a barrier for novices. Peer review is based on an expert rubric and facilitated by the Scholar team. This approach is scalable, with more than 800 learners in each cohort and 400 alumni volunteering to serve as accompanists. A small project team manages multiple cohorts at a time, with a duration of six to 17 weeks, depending on the course.
Recently, the Scholar team developed the Impact Accelerator, an extension to the courses that supports the implementation of course projects and encourages participants to develop new initiatives through collaboration. The Accelerator combines weekly webinars and assemblies, regular check-ins on implementation status, and support for developing in-country teams. Participants share best practices and challenging problems, for which peers provide help, responding as a culture without requiring prompting or intervention to do so. Initial findings from an evaluation of the Accelerator indicated faster implementation of action plans and improved collaboration among participants.
Over 20 country groups formed. In a short time, alumni documented that, as a result of what they learned and implemented, immunization coverage in their region improved. Learning involves a unique blend of a traditional format – an e-learning delivery platform – and consistent and deliberate use of actual work challenges and plans to generate improved workplace performance through a combination of peer support, healthy peer competition, and mentoring and coaching.
Sadki’s approach has been called ‘magic’. He disagrees. He says: ‘Learners are transmuted into teachers, leaders, and facilitators. In some countries, learners are self-organizing to take on issues that matter to them, evolving course projects into a potentially transformative agenda.’ He says success comes ‘from modestly intersecting the science of learning with real, lived learning culture and from reframing education as philosophy for change in the Digital Age. That, and a lot of elbow grease’ (Sadki, 2019). Sadki believes that impact is possible – even tangible – when educators connect the dots among the course, the individuals, and their context. His approach combines informal and incidental learning with conscious restructuring of context. The goal of his courses is knowledge creation focused on creating change in the workplace. The approach has gained sufficient momentum that ‘Scholar’ is more a movement than a learning approach. Sadki, a lifelong social entrepreneur and activist, has invented a new approach to learning and changing individuals and organizations. Table 11.2 summarizes features of the initiative map against the framework of learning in terms of separation, coterminous, seamlessly integrated or learning based work.
Cope, B., Kalantzis, M., 2016. Conceptualizing e-Learning. Common Ground Publishing, Chicago.
Revans, R. (1984). The origins and growth of action learning. London, England: Chartwell- Bratt.
Sadki, R. (2018). Peer learning support capacity building with Scholar. Poster presented at the Teach to Reach Conference, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.
Sadki, R. (2019). Magic. Retrieved from: https://stories.learning.foundation/2019/03/25/magic/
Siemens, G. (2007). Connectivism: Creating a learning ecology in distributed environments. In Hug, T. (Ed.). Didactics of micro- learning. Concepts, discourses and examples (pp. 53–68). Munster, Germany: Waxmann verlag GmbH.
Soto, M. (2016). A simple tool to help M&A integration: Randomized coffee trials. Retrieved from: https://blogs.harvard.edu/ msoto/2016/01/26/a-simple-tool-to-help-ma-integration-randomised-coffee-trials/
Watkins, K. & Kim, K. (2018). Current status and promising directions for research on the learning organization. Human Resource Development Quarterly, 29(1), 15–29. doi:10.1002/hrdq.21293
We are both consumers and producers of publications, whether in print or online.
Publications are static containers for knowledge from the pre-Internet era. Even if they are now mostly digital, the ways in which we think about them remains tied to the past. Nevertheless, at their best, they provide a useful reference point, baseline, or benchmark to establish a high-quality standard that is easy, cheap and effective to disseminate. In the worst, they take so much time to prepare that they are out of date even before they are ready for circulation, reflect consensus that is so watered-down as to be unusable, and are expensive – especially when printed copies are needed – to produce, disseminate, stock and revise.
With respect to the knowledge we consume, some of us may heretically scorn formal guidelines and other publications. Reading as an activity “remains a challenge”. Others manage to set aside time to pore over new guidelines and other reference content, journals, or online sources. Yet others cannot justify such time because they prioritize their own knowledge production rather than its consumption.
The development of guidelines, training manuals, and other standards- and evidence-based approaches remains an accepted formal process of knowledge development that also embeds many of the benefits of informal learning, at least for its participants. When peers gather to think and work together, to figure out what should be put into the publication-as-container and why, this is often a dynamic learning process. Dialogue as real-time peer review mixes with more formal review, editing, and revision. Serendipity and creativity are not just possible, but more likely in those spaces, especially when there is one or more layer of social interaction.
So the challenge for learning strategy is to figure out how to capture not just the knowledge artefact of such a process, but also the community, affective, and other social dimensions that help build trust and relationships, to then keep this knowledge current and put it to work – for both the immediate participants and those learners who, in the past, were mere recipients or readers.
Webinars reproduce the structure and format of the formal training workshop in an online space. The sole positive distinction for participants is that they may now participate from anywhere. However, to ask questions or otherwise contribute requires one to be present at a specific time (synchronously). Recordings of webinars are usually made available, so in theory we may catch up after the event but lose the ability to connect to others… and seldom actually do. If there wasn’t time (or justification) when it happened, that is unlikely to change later.
Like the face-to-face workshops they emulate, webinars require us to stop work in order to learn, which we can seldom afford or justify. They are mostly transmissive, as the available tools (Webex, for example) do not facilitate conversation. By default, most facilitators will mute everyone in a conference to avoid an unintelligible cacophony of multiple squawking voices.
Despite the existence of a chat feature (a “back channel”) that could be used for dialogue, most of us bring online the etiquette of face-to-face events, where chatting during a presentation is frowned upon.
Yet, despite such limitations, two affordances of webinars represent a dramatic improvement over other learning technologies. First, they help to reduce the need for mission travel. Second, they allow us to display a slide deck, share a screen (making them a visual medium), or show participants (using their webcams).
Where, initially, teams tend to use webinars for one-way knowledge transmission, as they gain experience they may begin to use the same technology for less formal communication, such as rapid feedback and evaluation from the field or between stakeholders who cannot gather in the same place.
Where phone and Skype remain the gold standard for one-to-one communication (and learning), many of us find value in conference calls, irrespective of the technology (phone, Skype, Webex, Hangouts…) used.
Conference calls may seem as unimpressive or mundane as that other piece of paradigm-changing learning technology, the whiteboard – but that’s the point. They are learning technology that is already embedded into the fabric of work, and directly contribute to informal and incidental learning across time and geography.
The pedagogical affordances of conference calls include structure, transparency, dialogue, and accountability.
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[accordion_item title=”Structure”]
“Structured agenda”
“Used as a to-do list”
“Ensures that I’m focusing on kind of priority one-two-three”
“A very good way to stay organized when you have people traveling”
Of the myriad technologies in use, we may find it useful to focus our attention on those that (1) are now widely used, to examine their benefits and the process for their acceptance; (2) continue to be used, despite the existence of better alternatives; or (3) are new and in use only by early adopters.
We may also classify technologies depending on whether they are synchronous (need to be connected at the same time) or asynchronous (anytime, anywhere), networked (for group communication) or individual (self-initiated or self-guided).
In this next series of posts, I’ll look at the relevance and limitations for learning of conference calls and webinars, as well as the place of print-centric publications in our learning (work) lives.
Photo: Ici on consulte le bottin, panneau à la Closerie des Lilas, Paris (Hotels-HPRG/flickr.com)
Online technologies have afforded us many ways in which we can now learn even when we are not in the same location. Yet, some of us remain skeptical about the impact of new technologies, and in particular about new ways of learning that rely on technology. We prefer to do things the way we have done them in the past. New approaches to learning may be seen as too complicated in our task-oriented learning culture. Furthermore, we question whether experience can be taught or transferred.
With some members in the network, access to the Internet may be limited either due to resources, policies, or culture, deepening the Digital Divide even for simple tools that many of us take for granted.
And, of course, we remain attached to the face-to-face culture that has been our primary source of learning, enabling us to form our networks of trust, to directly experience and observe multiple contexts of work. How could poor connections of garbled or squeaky sound we strain to hear and fuzzy talking heads whose expressions we strain to read possibly substitute for the experience of actually being there?
Such skepticism is understandable. The technologies (e-mail, newsletters, webinars, learning platforms, publications, mailing lists, and phone/Skype) we have to connect to each other and to network members remain mostly transmissive, from the center (headquarters) to the periphery (field), and often require us to initiate communication (command-and-control, top-down).
Yet, slowly but surely, technology that affords us the ability to work (learn) from a distance seeps into all the realms of our work (learning). We already live in a blended world, a “mix of all of these things because it’s one of the effective ways of doing things, but certain things really you can’t achieve [online].” We no longer reflect on the pros and cons of conferencing software or Skype, at least not when they work the way we need them to. And the same process is likely to recur with other technologies as turnover and succession in the team bring digital natives to the workplace.
“Continuous learning at the individual level is necessary but not sufficient to influence perceived changes in [performance]. […] Learning must be captured and embedded in ongoing systems, practices, and structures so that it can be shared and regularly used to intentionally improve changes in [performance]” (Marsick and Watkins 2003:134).
“I still can’t find it. And I still need to work on it. It’s a mess.”
“That’s a struggle. I don’t have a good system on that.”
In the last five years, we have mainstreamed the use of electronic media for communication and, to a lesser extent, for formal learning.
The tools we use in learning (whether formal or informal) may change, based on need and context. We know that constant and rapid advances in technology and their costs make it difficult for headquarters (center) and field (periphery) alike to afford or use the latest, cutting-edge tools. Tools that are officially sanctioned or supported may seem hopelessly out of date, too difficult to use, or both. We look for the pragmatic, lowest common denominator that “just works”. Often, we end up using a mash-up of products, some of which have become nearly as ubiquitous as e-mail, such as Dropbox, Webex, Skype or Excel.
Our tools are dated, yet – no matter how clunky or inefficient – their familiarity is reassuring.
Anchoring (focus, ignoring distractions) and filtering (extracting knowledge we need) require either better tools or improved competencies in using the ones we do have. Still, we lose precious time trying to retrieve information we need.
E-mail is the de facto lowest common denominator, but we expend time, energy, and skills to avoid drowning in it. Even though the promise of e-mail is that of a ubiquitous, low-bandwidth, ultra-fast knowledge and conversation medium to connect us, many of us experience it as a “complete anchor”. Because we treat it as formal communication (not conversation), it is not conducive to the informal learning and sharing that build trust in our working relationships.
Is there really an alternative to the time lost on repetitive tasks made necessary only due to their inadequacies? Doesn’t trying a new, untested tool not (yet) supported by the organization add a series of unknowns and risks?
The platforms we have to work with may feel broken, and attempts in the past to build better platforms failed.
We still look for the one best tool – silver bullet or Holy Grail – and continue to wish for the centralized platform that will single-handedly solve our knowledge problems, despite the repeated failure of previous attempts toward such solutions.
New tools are still conceptualized with the intent to manage, control, and direct activities or outcomes – even though we may intuitively feel that this is not what we need most.
Yet, we have learned that the real value of a new tool is not the tool itself, but what the tool enables.
Most of the technologies we use to enable, accelerate or support our work (and, therefore, our learning) are now online. Finding our way through the constantly-changing jungle of new and old technologies online requires constant effort.
We often start by duplicating the functioning of physical activities in an online space. For example, this shift first happened when Skype increasingly replaced the phone, eventually attaining such a monopoly that it will be difficult for better solutions to displace or replace it. It is ongoing with Webex and other conferencing software (free like Hangouts or enterprise solutions purchased by the organization).
We question traditional approaches and actively seek new methods and tools that can empower people in the network to connect to our global community of knowledge.
We strive to adapt to a changing world in which new electronic tools come into widespread use in some places, when they remain unavailable in others.
“I knew them very well. That’s why it worked. Because we do work together.”
We take responsibility for our own learning, yet keenly aware of the value for learning of engaging with others. It is when we find ourselves alone or isolated that we may best perceive the value of connecting with others for learning.
One of the justifications for working in a silo is a very high level of specialization that requires being fully-focused on one’s own area of work – to the exclusion of others.
We form networks of informal learning and collaboration in our team, with other departments in the headquarters, with the field, and with people and organizations outside the organization.
Asking people is often faster than sifting through information.
Technology facilitates building and sustaining small networks of trusted colleagues, large formal working groups, and more anonymous forms (mailing lists, discussion forums, etc.) that keep us connected.
In our volatile working environment, what we know (usually thought of as content-based knowledge) is replaced with how we are connected to others. That is how we stay current and informed.
Networks are a powerful problem-solving resource that people naturally turn to when they need help. We rely on small, trusted networks to accelerate problem-solving (learning).
Photo: Door at base of silo (Astrid Westvang/flickr.com)
