Stories

Tag: pedagogy

  • What is a complex problem?

    What is a complex problem?

    What is a complex problem and what do we need to tackle it?

    Problems can be simple or complex.

    Simple problems have a clear first step, a known answer, and steps you can follow to get the answer.

    Complex problems do not have a single right answer.

    They have many possible answers or no answer at all.

    What makes complex problems really hard is that they can change over time.

    They have lots of different pieces that connect in unexpected ways.

    When you try to solve them, one piece changes another piece, which changes another piece.

    It is hard to see all the effects of your actions.

    When you do something to help, later on the problem might get worse anyway.

    You have to keep adapting your ideas.

    To solve really hard problems, you need to be able to:

    • Think about all the puzzle pieces and how they fit, even when you don’t know what they all are.
    • Come up with plans and change them when parts of the problem change.
    • Think back on your problem solving to get better for next time.

    The most important things are being flexible, watching how every change affects other things, and learning from experience.

    Image: The Geneva Learning Foundation Collection © 2024

    References

    Buchanan, R., 1992. Wicked problems in design thinking. Design issues 5–21.

    Camillus, J.C., 2008. Strategy as a wicked problem. Harvard business review 86, 98.

    Joksimovic, S., Ifenthaler, D., Marrone, R., De Laat, M., Siemens, G., 2023. Opportunities of artificial intelligence for supporting complex problem-solving: Findings from a scoping review. Computers and Education: Artificial Intelligence 4, 100138. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.caeai.2023.100138

    Rittel, H.W., Webber, M.M., 1973. Dilemmas in a general theory of planning. Policy sciences 4, 155–169.

  • Why answer Teach to Reach Questions?

    Why answer Teach to Reach Questions?

    Have you ever wished you could talk to another health worker who has faced the same challenges as you? Someone who found a way to keep helping people, even when things seemed impossible? That’s exactly the kind of active learning that Teach to Reach Questions make possible. They make peer learning easy for everyone who works for health.

    What are Teach to Reach Questions?

    Once you join Teach to Reach (what is it?), you’ll receive questions about real-world challenges that matter to health professionals.

    How does it work?

    1. You choose what to share: Answer only questions where you have actual experience. No need to respond to everything – focus on what matters to you.
    2. Share specific moments: Instead of general information, we ask about real situations you’ve faced. What exactly happened? What did you do? How did you know it worked?
    3. Learn from others: Within weeks, you’ll receive a collection of experiences shared by health workers from over 70 countries. See how others solved problems similar to yours.

    What’s different about these questions?

    Unlike typical surveys that just collect data, Teach to Reach Questions are active learning that:

    • Focus on your real-world experience.
    • Help you reflect on what worked (and what didn’t).
    • Connect you to solutions from other health workers.
    • Give back everything shared to help everyone learn.

    See what we give back to the community. Get the English-language collection of Experiences shared from Teach to Reach 10. The new compendium includes over 600 health worker experiences about immunisation, climate change, malaria, NTDs, and digital health. A second collection of more than 600 experiences shared by French-speaking participants is also available.

    What’s in it for you?

    Peer learning happens when we learn from each other. Your answers can help others – and their answers can help you.

    1. Get recognized: You’ll be honored as a Teach to Reach Contributor and receive certification.
    2. Learn practical solutions: See how other health workers tackle challenges like yours.
    3. Make connections: At Teach to Reach, you’ll meet others who have been sharing and learning about the same issues.
    4. Access support: Global partners will share how they can support solutions you and other health workers develop.

    A health worker’s experience

    Here is what on community health worker from Kenya said:

    “When flooding hit our area, I felt so alone trying to figure out how to keep helping people. Through Teach to Reach, I learned that a colleague in another country had faced the same problem. Their solution helped me prepare better for the next flood. Now I’m sharing my experience to help others.”

    Think about how peer learning could help you when more than 23,000 health professionals are asked to share their experience on a challenge that matters to you.

    Ready to start?

    1. Request your invitation to Teach to Reach now.
    2. Look for questions in your inbox.
    3. Share your experience on topics you know about.
    4. Receive the complete collection of shared experiences.
    5. Join us in December to meet others face-to-face.

    Remember: Your experience, no matter how small it might seem to you, could be exactly what another health worker needs to hear.

    The sooner you join, the more you’ll learn from colleagues worldwide.

    Together, we can turn what each of us knows into knowledge that helps everyone.

    Listen to the Teach to Reach podcast:

    Is your organisation interested in learning from health workers? Learn more about becoming a Teach to Reach partner.

    Image: The Geneva Learning Foundation Collection © 2024

  • Why does cascade training fail?

    Why does cascade training fail?

    Cascade training remains widely used in global health.

    Cascade training can look great on paper: an expert trains a small group who, in turn, train others, thereby theoretically scaling the knowledge across an organization.

    It attempts to combine the advantages of expert coaching and peer learning by passing knowledge down a hierarchy.

    However, despite its promise and persistent use, cascade training is plagued by several factors that often lead to its failure.

    This is well-documented in the field of learning, but largely unknown (or ignored) in global health.

    What are the mechanics of this known inefficacy?

    Here are four factors that contribute to the failure of cascade training

    1. Information loss

    Consider a model where an expert holds a knowledge set K. In each subsequent layer of the cascade, α percentage of the knowledge is lost:

    $latex K_n = K \cdot \alpha^n&s=3$

    • Where $latex K_n$ is the knowledge at the nth level of the cascade. As n grows, $latex K_n$ exponentially decreases, leading to severe information loss.
    • Each layer in the cascade introduces a potential for misunderstanding the original information, leading to the training equivalent of the ‘telephone game’.

    2. Lack of feedback

    In a cascade model, only the first layer receives feedback from an actual expert.

    • Subsequent layers have to rely on their immediate ‘trainers,’ who might not have the expertise to correct nuanced mistakes.
    • The hierarchical relationship between trainer and trainee is different from peer learning, in which it is assumed that everyone has something to learn from others, and expertise is produced through collaborative learning.

    3. Skill variation

    • Not everyone is equipped to teach others.
    • The people who receive the training first are not necessarily the best at conveying it to the next layer, leading to unequal training quality.

    4. Dilution of responsibility

    • As the cascade flows down, the sense of responsibility for the quality and fidelity of the training dilutes.
    • The absence of feedback to drive a quality development process exacerbates this.

    Image: The Geneva Learning Foundation Collection © 2024

  • What learning science underpins peer learning for Global Health?

    What learning science underpins peer learning for Global Health?

    Watch Reda Sadki’s presentation about peer learning for global health at the Annual Meeting of the American Society for Tropical Medicine and Hygiene (ASTMH) Symposium on 19 October 2023

    Most significant learning that contributes to improved performance takes place outside of formal training.

    It occurs through informal and incidental forms of learning between peers.

    This is called peer learning or peer-to-peer learning.

    Effective use of peer learning requires realizing how much we can learn from each other (peer learning), experiencing the power of defying distance to solve problems together (remote learning), and feeling a growing sense of belonging to a community (social learning), emergent across country borders and health system levels (networked learning).

    At the ASTMH annual meeting Symposium organized by Julie Jacobson, two TGLF Alumnae, María Monzón from Argentina and Ruth Allotey from Ghana, will be sharing their analyses and reflections of how they turned peer learning into action, results, and impact.

    In his presentation, Reda Sadki, president of The Geneva Learning Foundation (TGLF), will explore:

    1. What do we need to understand about digital learning?
    2. Networked learning: rethinking learning architecture in the Digital Age
    3. Social learning: peer learning is about making human connections
    4. Practical examples of TGLF peer learning systems for WHO, Wellcome, UNICEF, and Bridges to Development that connect learning to change, results, and impact.
    5. Emergent peer learning systems driven by local practitioner and community needs and priorities.

    Join this #TropMed23 Peer Learning symposium on Day 2 of the Annual Meeting of the American Society for Tropical Medicine and Hygiene (ASTMH).

  • What is a “rubric” and why use rubrics in global health education?

    What is a “rubric” and why use rubrics in global health education?

    Rubrics are well-established, evidence-based tools in education, but largely unknown in global health.

    At the Geneva Learning Foundation (TGLF), the rubric is a key tool that we use – as part of a comprehensive package of interventions – to transform high-cost, low-volume training dependent on the limited availability of global experts into scalable peer learning to improve access, quality, and outcomes.

    The more prosaic definition of the rubric – reduced from any pedagogical questioning – is “a type of scoring guide that assesses and articulates specific components and expectations for an assignment” (Source).

    The rubric is a practical solution to a number of complex issues that prevent effective teaching and learning in global health.

    Developing a rubric provides a practical method for turning complex content and expertise into a learning process in which learners will learn primarily from each other.

    Hence, making sense of a rubric requires recognizing and appreciating the value of peer learning.

    This may be difficult to understand for those working in global health, due to a legacy of scientifically and morally wrong norms for learning and teaching primarily through face-to-face training.

    The first norm is that global experts teach staff in countries who are presumed to not know.

    The second is that the expert who knows (their subject) also necessarily knows how to teach, discounting or dismissing the science of pedagogy.

    Experts consistently believe that they can just “wing it” because they have the requisite technical knowledge.

    This ingrained belief also rests on the third mistaken assumption: that teaching is the job of transmitting information to those who lack it.

    (Paradoxically, the proliferation of online information modules and webinars has strengthened this norm, rather than weakened it).

    Indeed, although almost everyone agrees in principle that peer learning is “great”, there remains deep skepticism about its value.

    Unfortunately, learner preferences do not correlate with outcomes.

    Given the choice, learners prefer sitting passively to listen to a great lecture from a globally-renowned figure, rather than the drudgery of working in a group of peers whose level of expertise is unknown and who may or may not be engaged in the activities.

    (Yet, when assessed formally, the group that works together will out-perform the group that was lectured.) For subject matter experts, there can even be an existential question: if peers can learn without me, the expert, then am I still needed? What is my value to learners? What is my role?

    Developing a rubric provides a way to resolve such tensions and augment rather than diminish the significance of expertise.

    This requires, for the subject matter expert, a willingness to rethink and reframe their role from sage on the stage to guide on the side.

    Rubric development requires:

    1. expert input and review to think through what set of instructions and considerations will guide learners in developing useful knowledge they can use; and
    2. expertise to select the specific resources (such as guidance documents, case studies, etc.) that will help the learner as they develop this new knowledge.

    In this approach, an information module, a webinar, a guidance document, or any other piece of knowledge becomes a potential resource for learning that can be referenced into a rubric, with specific indications to when and how it may be used to support learning.

    In a peer learning context, a rubric is also a tool for reflection, stirring metacognition (thinking about thinking) that helps build critical thinking “muscles”.

    Our rubrics combine didactic instructions (“do this, do that”), reflective and exploratory questions, and as many considerations as necessary to guide the development of high-quality knowledge.

    These instructions are organized into versatile, specific criterion that can be as simple as “Calculate sample size” (where there will be only one correct answer), focus on practicalities (“Formulate your three top recommendations to your national manager”), or allow for exploration (“Reflect on the strategic value of your vaccination coverage survey for your country’s national immunization programme”).

    Yes, we use a scoring guide on a 0-4 scale, where the 4 out of 4 for each criterion summarizes what excellent work looks like.

    This often initially confuses both learners and subject matter experts, who assume that peers (whose prior expertise has not been evaluated) are being asked to grade each other.

    It turns out that, with a well-designed rubric, a neophyte can provide useful, constructive feedback to a seasoned expert – and vice versa.

    Both are using the same quality standard, so they are not sharing their personal opinion but applying that standard by using their critical thinking capabilities to do so.

    Before using the rubric to review the work of peers, each learner has had to use it to develop their own work.

    This ensures a kind of parity between peers: whatever the differences in experience and expertise, countries, or specializations, everyone has first practiced using the rubric for their own needs.

    In such a context, the key is not the rating, but the explanation that the peer reviewer will provide to explain it, with the requirements that she provides constructive, practical suggestions for how the author can improve their work.

    In some cases, learners are surprised to receive contradictory feedback: two reviewers give opposite ratings – one very high, and the other very low – together with conflicting explanations for these ratings.

    In such cases, it is an opportunity for learners to review the rubric, again, while critically examining the feedbacks received, in order to adjudicate between them.

    Ultimately, rubric-based feedback allows for significantly more learner agency in making the determination of what to do with the feedback received – as the next task is to translate this feedback into practical revisions to improve their work.

    This is, in and of itself, conducive to significant learning.

    Learn more about rubrics as part of effective teaching and learning from Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, two education pioneers who taught me to use them.

    Image: Mondrian’s classroom. The Geneva Learning Foundation Collection © 2024

  • Rethinking the “Webinar”: Sage on Screen, Guide on Side, or Both?

    Rethinking the “Webinar”: Sage on Screen, Guide on Side, or Both?

    By Donna Murdoch, Ed. D. for The Geneva Learning Foundation

    A search for the keyword “webinar” on Google reveals over 85 million hits. How do we develop webinars, how do we hold webinars, and how do we engage people during webinars?  The same questions could be asked of lectures, because in most contexts, webinars are a lecture seen and heard through the glass of a screen instead of a cavernous lecture hall.  The literature suggests that lectures do not provide the support and activity learners need to stay engaged.  “Sage on Stage” has been replaced by “Guide on the Side” (King, 1993) in most face to face contexts, or at least the effort is made.  Is the same effort made when there is a screen between the webinar participant and the “sage”?

    The paragraph below is an excerpt from a 2018 article published by J. Ubah in Advances in Social Science Research. Spaces have been left purposefully blank. How should they be filled?

    Boredom is a negative experience common among learners. Their attention needs to be captivated for a reasonable length of time during a ______ to grasp information being transmitted. Causes of boredom are many. Many ideas and activities have been suggested to overcome the boredom. These include among others; reduction in the number of power point slides or interacting with participants one on one. The goal of this study was to identify the causes of boredom during a ______ in a group of healthcare workers. Short span of attention and consuming large meals before a ______ were not considered significant causes. The responses were similar in both sexes. Different causes of boredom have been identified. A _______ should be conversant with these causes and introduce means to eliminate or reduce them to the barest minimum.

    All of the blanks should be filled in with the same word. Should the blanks be filled in with: a) Lecture b) Webinar or c) Both of the above? C would be the likely answer based on research and learning attention studies.

    The broad consensus of pedagogical research regards the lecture as a relic of the past. French (2017) called lectures “a boring, passive, ineffective teaching method that will soon be obsolete”. If a lecture is held virtually and viewed on a screen, the paragraph above applies to both face to face and virtual presentations.

    While subject matter experts may consider the proliferation of webinars to be an opportune modality with which to share what they know with dozens, hundreds, or thousands of individuals globally – something that would have been impossible without the screen between – the effort and learning outcomes have no difference. Many of us receive a growing number of invitations to attend these events, yet we attend far less often than we register. Only 30 – 40% of people who register for free webinars actually attend. (Molay, 2010)  If we sign in to participate, competing engagement is right at our fingertips. Email that has been piling up, a You Tube video shared by a colleague – it is difficult it is to maintain our focus for more than a few minutes as we sit in front of a screen with many competing, possibly more enticing options. Engaging people staring at a computer screen is, in general, extremely difficult.

    So why does the proliferation of webinars seem unstoppable? What is their value for teaching, learning, and capacity-building? 

    Listening to a webinar presentation reproduces the lecture format, with opportunities for interaction that are cumbersome both to the presenter and the participants. Asking questions or responding to a poll is likely to happen in the background of other more engaging activities on a computer screen.  It is much easier to “disappear” in a large virtual lecture, as faces often cannot be seen. 

    “Sage on stage” has long been replaced, at least in theory, by the recognition that learning is more likely to happen with a “guide on the side”, action learning, and peer support (Mazur, 2009). This shift is taking place alongside new technological affordances that enable us to teach and learn in new ways. The use of educational technology allows us to reach more learners with a new economy of effort. Nevertheless, whether hundreds or thousands of people watch a lecture in person, as part of a large face to face audience with a slide presentation, or on the screen of a computer or mobile device, there is no cognitive difference. It is all passive consumption – if it is consumed at all.

    How do we engage large groups, where dialogue, if it takes place at all, can only include a small proportion of those in attendance, and feel confident they will learn from a lecture on a screen?  In fact, we cannot feel confident…just as we cannot feel confident in a lecture hall.

    In a brick-and-mortar class room, it is more difficult to escape the confines of a lecture. You are in the room, and others can observe your attention – manifesting boredom, inattention, or leaving the room are noticed. The institutional infrastructure has resulted in your attendance, as well as your own effort, probably involving travel to be in the classroom. This may explain the persistence of lectures in education and training.  In webinars, the barriers to entry are usually far lower, and attendees have many ways to escape, and their absence, boredom, inattention, or multi-tasking may be impossible to detect for the presenter.

    In fact, the number of active viewers of a webinar presentation at the 10-minute point is on the average 16% of the original audience. The biggest fall off is after 3.5 minutes. While the synchronous (live) character of webinars may help engagement in theory, the typical duration of such events (an hour) is ten times as long as what research has shown is the attention span of most humans for viewing videos (six minutes) (Guo, 2014).

    What, then, may explain the perceived value of webinars and their growing proliferation? If webinars are ineffective, what then are the alternatives?

    Can webinar technology be used for purposes other than lecture?

    Web meeting tools are not always a bad experience. There are great benefits, especially for groups working or learning remotely, in using remote technology to meet. When small groups of people are immersed in conversation via the same software used for webinar, it can be a wonder. In this author’s experience, web conferencing can work, as an integral part of a bigger, richer learning experience. In her classes, students attend a live conference that and is considered “icing on the cake”. Learning results from mostly asynchronous activities, the learning community being built through the social relationships established between learners in these activities, the shared and individual experiences, insights, reflections (metacognition) that they may be having as they work toward completing them, and the new tools they are learning to integrate into their own instruction. They may watch a video clip or have a short discussion about a topic while in their live meeting, then they go into groups of four into virtual “break out rooms” to discuss in small teams. The author, who is teacher and facilitator, can visit any group, popping in and out, if support is needed. Then they return to the bigger group of 25 and share what they have discussed. There are other methods of engagement as well, but they do not involve lectures. This is a way to get to know each other via a different modality. Although the technology used may be the same, it is not a webinar.  This involves planning and much more work for the presenter, as does an interactive face to face class.  It is much easier to talk at an audience for those who have been lecturing for many years.  To plan an interactive course session filled with action learning takes time and experimentation, peer learning opportunities, and reflections whether it occurs online or face to face.

    Using webinar technology to lecture clearly requires far less effort than building a robust, interactive, digital course. Lecturing online satisfies the craving to share what one knows, and it offers convenience and affordability. Unfortunately, such affordances come with the sacrifice of meaningful learning outcomes. The alternative requires specialized learning expertise, facilitation competencies, and an investment in the design of effective learning and a support system to scaffold this experience. Supporting effective learning becomes even more difficult as the size of group grows. Resources and competencies needed may be unknown, unavailable, or too costly for subject matter experts, whereas the basic technology to organize an online event is free and readily available, and experts may be ignorant of the evidence about its limited outcomes, may lack the means of measuring such outcomes, or may in fact be pursuing other goals such as communication.

    Image: Mindjourney art based on sage on the stage and lecture keywords.

    About the author

    Donna Murdoch, Ed. D. is a global learning leader with over twenty years of experience driving innovative programs that support complex business transformation, change, and capacity building programs with impact. In the workplace and in academia, Donna leads the design, development, and execution of best in class strategies that develop a culture of continuous learning, always with a “people first” focus. Donna is a Professor of Adult Learning and Leadership at Columbia University Teachers College, and a Wharton Global Talent Management Fellow. She has worked with organizations such as Philips, S & P Global, UNICEF, the United Nations, Apollo Group, and others to shape Learning Strategy around new and emerging technology.

    References

    French, S. (08/2017). Reassessing the value of university lectures Taylor & Francis. doi:10.1080/13562517.2016.1273213

    Guo, P. J., Kim, J., & Rubin, R. (2014, March). How video production affects student engagement: An empirical study of MOOC videos. In Proceedings of the first ACM conference on Learning@ scale conference (pp. 41-50). ACM.

    King, A. (1993). From sage on the stage to guide on the side. College teaching, 41(1), 30-35.

    Mazur, E. (2009). Farewell, lecture? Science, 323(5910), 50-51.

    Molay, K. (2010). Best Practices for Webinars. Increasing attendance, engaging your audience, and successfully advancing your business goals.

    Ubah, J. N. (2018). Predictors of boredom at lectures: Medical Students’ experience. Advances in Social Sciences Research Journal, 5(1).

  • Online learning 101: Criteria to distinguish approaches

    Online learning 101: Criteria to distinguish approaches

    The table below summarizes criteria that you should consider to identify the appropriate approach for your online learning needs. At the top is the pedagogy and specific learning architecture. The key question is to ask: What does the learner get to do? Key decisions include the choice between self-guided learning (which scales up easily as it does not require synchronous interaction with other learners) and cohorts (which enable synchronous peer-to-peer relationships between learners).

    Criteria to distinguish approaches
    Criteria to distinguish approaches

    For a long time, a ferocious debate was waged between advocates of face-to-face learning who fetichized the value of IRL (“in the real world” interaction and advocates of online or distance learning. The evidence fairly definitively demonstrates that distance learning delivers slightly better learning outcomes, and that there is no learning efficacy benefit when you blend. However, your professional network is how you find your next job. It is also how you learn from others. Face-to-face contact is necessary for cultural reasons, at least for the current generation of humanitarians over 30. The bottom line is that in the humanitarian context, social relationships are so important that they provide the sole justification for a blended approach. Distance technology (read: Skype) can help scaffold, grow, and sustain these relationships and their value for learning, as can a well-designed online knowledge community.

    Next in the table are outcomes. The industry standard is Kirkpatrick. It really is that simple – and comprehensive. What is staggering is the dearth of learning evaluation in the sector. Training is assumed to be inherently good. This is no longer good enough, hence the necessity of not only reactive evaluation (the “happy sheet”) but the impact of learning on performance at both individual and organizational levels.

    When considering costs, one needs to distinguish development costs from the expenses associated with delivery and evaluation, as well as ongoing quality development. Often, an organization will budget for development without considering what training will cost to deliver.

    Last but not least, and I’ve written and presented on this extensively elsewhere, is scaling up. Self-guided learning scales up at low cost and cohorts do not (very easily). This intersects with the question of pedagogy.

    This post is excerpted from a comprehensive (65 minutes) talk originally presented to the Assessment Capacities Project (ACAPS) on 22 September 2014. Its content is largely based on my experience in managing a 1.7 million CHF pipeline of online course development.

  • Scaling corporate learning

    Scaling corporate learning

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

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

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

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

  • Quality in humanitarian education

    Quality in humanitarian education

    Humanitarian education is a huge undertaking. Each year, for example, 17 million trainees learn first-aid skills through face-to-face (FTF) training programmes run by the 189 National Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies worldwide. People of varied educational backgrounds join their local Red Cross or Red Crescent branch because they want to learn how to do first aid, how to prepare for or recover from disaster, or how to make their community more resilient. They also join to meet other like-minded people, building social ties and using the power of peer education to learn by doing.

    FTF training has been efficient in terms of preparing volunteers to perform the tasks assigned to them, and social, peer-education training has also been an important component of the identity of volunteers and their sense of belonging to the organization. However, this formal way of teaching reproduces a one-way, didactic transmission of information, in which volunteers are given the knowledge they need to perform pecific tasks. Recent progress in massive open online courses challenge this model, although ques- tions remain about how effective and sustainable such learning approaches are (Daniel, 2012). This trend generates important questions for the IFRC concerning the use of educational technology while maintaining the purpose and quality of humanitarian education (Stracke, 2012).

    In 2009, the IFRC published its first online course – World of the Red Cross and Red Crescent – to support the training of its international personnel. Experts developed courses on global health, security and other thematic areas. These courses were delivered through a single ‘Learning Platform’ which became part of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Learning and Knowledge Sharing Network in 2010. The network initially emphasized accredited learning, thus acknowledging that such learning remains the only valid currency in the professional world, even though Red Cross Red Crescent workers have acquired skills and knowledge in the field that deserve recognition.

    By May 2013, less than 1 per cent of the world’s 13 million Red Cross Red Crescent volunteers had accessed the Learning Platform. The cost of internet access and the digital divide remain major obstacles. But the number of learners on the Learning Platform doubled in 2012 and its growth rate is accelerating. Users have completed nearly 60,000 online courses since the platform’s launch in October 2009, with more than 5,000 course registrations every month. At almost 50 per cent, the completion rate is a major success compared to the 20 per cent that is considered an acceptable rate in e-learning. Eleven National Societies already have more than 1,000 learners on the platform, with the Canadian, French and Swedish Red Cross among the early adopters. In November 2012, the Australian Red Cross, which had never used online learning in training, became the first National Society to adopt the Learning Platform for training all of its 3,300 staff members. It organized a nationwide roll-out and integrated online education into its workforce development strategy, with research already scheduled to document impact on performance.

    For the first time, the Learning Platform enables volunteers to tap into a global knowledge community with no intermediaries prescribing or circumscribing what they should learn. By connecting to the platform, volunteers discover learning opportunities that relate to an essential aspect of their engage- ment: their thirst for learning as the means to changing their reality.

    In 2012, following the Learning Platform’s success, the IFRC offered a ‘new learning’ programme using dialogue between learners and peer review to promote open, active learning. In its pilot phase at the Global Youth Conference, 775 people from more than 70 National Societies – four times more than the number of conference attendees – participated in learning ‘missions’ and ‘live learning moments’. Fifty-eight per cent of participants worked consistently on the learning activities, producing more than 140 pages of content. The same percentage said the programme improved their ability to think critically, analyse, evaluate and apply what they had learned about youth issues.

    Questions arose about the learning effectiveness and impact of the IFRC’s online courses. Perhaps prompted by the legitimate demand that a new medium demonstrate its value, these questions also reveal an attachment to and assumptions about the comparative advantage of traditional learning modalities. However, researchers completed two comprehensive comparative meta-analyses in 2010. Their conclusions were definitive: since 1991, distance learning has delivered equal or better learning outcomes than traditional FTF programmes (Shachar and Neumann, 2010), while ‘blended learning’ (supplementing FTF instruction with online instruction) has not enhanced learning results (US Department of Education, 2010).

    These studies demonstrated that quality is not determined by the means of delivery; however, they did not determine or assess the quality of the pedagogies used, whatever medium or technology. Many online learning technologies of the recent past, including the IFRC’s first online courses, were modelled on top- down, legacy training systems – somewhat like early film-making, which started by recording live theatre. As Bill Cope at the University of Illinois explains: “In their basic approach and use in practice, these are heavily weighted to the transmission of centralized knowledge from the center to the periphery.” They are “frequently not effective” as the transmitted knowledge is “often abstract and de-contextualized”, while “the value of existing local knowledge, practices and understanding” is “not recognized or incorporated into the learning experience” (Cope and Keitges, 2013).

    The IFRC is exploring how innovation in learning connects back to National Societies’ rich history and culture, how technology might support learning from the local knowledge of National Society volunteers to strengthen cross-cutting knowledge, skill and competency development, and how collaborative learning communities might be developed across language and other barriers for National Society volunteers. More than 50 online courses destined for the Learning Platform are now in the pipeline, with clearly established, open standards for technology, content and pedagogy, aligned to the ISO 19796-1 quality standard for learning, education and training. Every course is now required to have an evaluation framework in place, to collect data that will be used in an annual review process.

    But for humanitarian education to truly be transformed, further pedagogical innovation is needed. For example, online educational resources should also be accessible from mobile devices, notes IFRC’s new guidelines. This opens up new pedagogical possibilities: non-traditional contexts for learning, reaching remote constituencies and allowing interaction both between teacher and learner, and between learners. New courses, like the public health in emergencies modules, use mobile-first responsive technology to deliver an immersive learning experience to any device (mobile, tablet or desktop) with a modern browser. These courses are grounded in the field experience of IFRC experts and the evidence base. The peda- gogical patterns emphasize application of knowledge, analytical skills and the ability to discover, analyse and interpret from a multiplicity of data sources through teamwork.

    The ability to recollect information still matters, but developing the skills and competencies that will enable the learner to perform in the face of the unknown takes precedence.

    Written by Reda Sadki. First published in the World Disasters Report 2013: Focus on technology and the future of humanitarian action.

  • The significance of technology for humanitarian education

    The significance of technology for humanitarian education

    First published in the World Disasters Report 2013: Focus on technology and the future of humanitarian action. 

    Since the rise of the internet in the early 1990s, the most obvious benefit offered by educational technology has been its potential ubiquity or the ability to learn anywhere, anytime. In development contexts, sceptics have asserted that the ‘digital divide’ restricts this benefit to the privileged few, as only 40 per cent of the world’s population is online. But such analysis neglects the rapid pace of change in extending mobile (and mobile, 3G-based broadband networks) access in low- and middle-income countries.

    In many nations, the majority of web users use only mobile phones; the countries with the highest rates include Egypt (70 per cent) and India (59 per cent). In Africa, 85 per cent of the mobile-only web users access the internet with a ‘feature phone’, a device offering some but not all of the features of a smartphone. In high-income nations, a large minority of mobile web users are mobile-only, including the United States (25 per cent). Where, in many low- and middle-income nations, the mobile-only tend to be aged under 25, in high-income countries, particularly the United States, many mobile-only users are older people and many come from lower-income households (ITU, 2013). These statistics imply that for educational technology to be deployed effectively in the contexts of low-, middle- and high-income countries, a mobile-first strategy building on open, low-cost standards and tools is needed.

    Education researchers Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis (2012) have described the ways in which technology transforms the economy of effort in education, enabling us to afford (both literally and figuratively) not only to make learning available anywhere, anytime, but also to provide learners with formative assessment and recursive feedback as they work. In this economy of ‘new learning’ (see figure), learners use technology actively to construct knowledge, designing meanings using multiple media at their disposal. By working together collaboratively, every learner is also a peer and teacher contributing to collective knowledge and intelligence that can be used to further thinking and action as well as encouraging ‘metacognition’ (thinking about thinking). Unlike education in the industrial age, which levelled ‘one-size-fits-all’ assumptions, new learning can afford to differentiate based on pre-existing knowledge, competencies and skills.

    Figure 1 principles of online learning

    In a new learning system, learners create together, giving each other feedback (and even feedback on feedback), sharing their inspirations and discoveries. Within their knowledge communities, they are connected and can work at their own pace, according to their own interests and capabilities. They are inspired to create through embedding sound, image and video within their texts for digital storytelling, situation reports, operational plans and more. This collaborative, flexible, motivating, participatory and supportive approach is not simply a nicer, kinder and gentler form of learning. Its pedagogical patterns closely emulate the core competencies of 21st century humanitarian workers, who are expected to be able to manage complex, overlapping knowledge flows, to work in networked configurations (rather than command-and-control structures) and to use participatory methodologies to partner with affected populations. If the ways humanitarians teach and learn do not explicitly develop these competencies, then formal education efforts will become increasingly ineffective. The amazing economy of effort afforded by educational technology is the only sustainable way to transform learning systems to meet the challenges of today’s volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world.

    Written by Reda Sadki. First published in the World Disasters Report 2013: Focus on technology and the future of humanitarian action. Photo: Buddhist monks on a slow boat at the Mekong River near the border of Laos-Cambodia, during a workshop to increase awareness regarding dolphin and fish conservation. There are only 12 dolphins left in this area and a few more further down stream. The temples of Laos were once seen as “universities” for monks. Lao monks are highly respected and revered in Lao communities. Photography © Ben Thé Man/Flickr.com.