Stories

Tag: The Geneva Learning Foundation

  • How local practitioners use the Geneva Learning Foundation’s approach to accelerate progress to impact

    In the final stage of a comprehensive TGLF learning programme, alumni implement action plans they have developed together.

    We compared the implementation progress after six months between those who joined this final stage and a control group that also developed action plans, but did not join.

    To learn more about the Geneva Learning Foundation (TGLF), download our brochure, listen to our podcast, view our latest livestreams, subscribe to our insights, and follow us on Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Or introduce yourself to our Partnerships team.

  • How the Geneva Learning Foundation uses learning science to drive change

    As developed by our founders, the TGLF learning-to-impact pathway draws on the best available evidence and our own practice in the learning sciences and multiple other disciplines. 

    TGLF’s diagnostic instruments rapidly identify the most effective strategies to develop people, teams, and networks to drive change and performance. 

    Working with our network of founders and advisors, our approaches are continually honed and improved to ensure their effectiveness. 

    For example, TGLF co-founder Karen E. Watkins, working with Victoria Marsick, developed the framework proving the strong correlation between learning culture and organizational performance. This evidence-based framework is central to the Foundation’s learning-to-impact pathway. 

    Marsick, V.J., Watkins, K.E., 2003. Demonstrating the Value of an Organization’s Learning Culture: The Dimensions of the Learning Organization Questionnaire. Advances in Developing Human Resources 5, 132–151. https://doi.org/10.1177/1523422303005002002

    To learn more about the Geneva Learning Foundation (TGLF), download our brochure, listen to our podcast, view our latest livestreams, subscribe to our insights, and follow us on Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Or introduce yourself to our Partnerships team.

  • Digital challenge-based learning in the COVID-19 Peer Hub

    A digital human knowledge and action network of health workers: Challenging established notions of learning in global health

    When Prof Rupert Wegerif introduced DEFI in his blog post, he argued that recent technologies will transform the notions and practice of education. The Geneva Learning Foundation (TGLF) is demonstrating this concept in the field of global health, specifically immunization, through the ongoing engagement of thousands of health workers in digital peer learning.

    As images of ambulance queues across Europe filled TV screens in 2020, another discussion was starting: how would COVID-19 affect countries with weaker health systems but more experience in facing epidemic outbreaks?

    In the global immunization community, there were early signs that ongoing efforts to protect children from vaccine preventable diseases – measles, polio, diphtheria – would suffer. On the ground, there were early reports of health workers being afraid to work, being excluded by communities, or having key supplies disrupted. The TGLF quickly realised it had a role to play in ensuring that routine immunization would carry on in the Global South during the pandemic and then to prepare for COVID-19 vaccine introduction.

    Peer learning vs hierarchical, transmissive learning models

    Since 2016, TGLF had been slowly gaining traction in the world of immunization learning, with its digital peer learning programmes for immunization staff. These programmes reached around 15,000 people in their first four years, before the pandemic, about 70% of whom were from West and Central Africa, and about 50% of whom work at the lowest levels of health systems: health facilities and districts.

    The TGLF peer learning programmes were developed as an alternative to hierarchical, transmissive learning models, in which knowledge is developed centrally, translated into guidance by global experts, which is then disseminated through cascade training.

    In the hierarchical model, health workers are merely consumers at the periphery of the process. COVID-19 brought the inadequacies of this approach into sharper focus, as health workers dealt with challenges that had not been foreseen or processed through existing guidance.

    No technical guidance could address every scenario health workers faced, such as reaching the most marginalised communities or engaging terrified parents at a time when science had few reassuring answers. They needed to be creative and empowered to find their own solutions. Health professionals learned to rely on each other as peers, learning from each other how to negotiate many unknowns, without waiting for the answers provided by formal science.

    The TGLF approach quickly demonstrated its usefulness in connecting peers during the pandemic. In 2020, the number of platform users doubled to 30,000 in just six months (compared to four years to gain the first 15,000 users) and has now trebled to 45,000.

    Adoption doubled from 15,000 pre-pandemic users to 30,000 users in the first six months of the pandemic. It now stands at 45,000 in 2022. 

    Addressing Covid-19 impacts through challenge-based learning

    The foundation of the TGLF approach was the COVID-19 Peer Hub, an 8-month project based on challenge-based learning, which challenged individuals to give and receive feedback as they collaborated to:

    • Identify a real challenge that they were expected to address in their everyday work
    • Carry out situation analysis, and
    • Develop action plans that are peer-reviewed and improved.

    The Peer Hub was inspired by the works of several of academics who helped create the Foundation: Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, and their technological implementation of “New Learning;” George Siemens’ learning theory of connectivism; and Karen E. Watkins and Victoria Marsick’s insights into the significance of incidental and informal learning.

    The Peer Hub demonstrated the creation of a “human knowledge and action network” formed through both formal and informal peer learning combined with ongoing informal social learning between participants. The network was built on the principle that participants were themselves experts in their own contexts, and creators, rather than consumers, of knowledge. Front-line health workers suddenly had the legitimacy and ability to share experiences with their peers and experts from around the globe.

    Screenshot showing ten user-generated posts displayed as two rows of colourful tiles

    In the first ten days, COVID-19 Peer Hub participants shared 1224 ideas and practices through the Ideas Engine, an online innovation management tool.

    Results of peer-led, challenge-based learning interventions

    More than 6,000 health workers joined the TGLF COVID-19 Peer Hub, where they:

    Assessing the value of peer-led learning in a global vaccine education programme

    The next challenge for TGLF was how to document and capture the value of this? Most of what was shared between peers was not new or innovative at a global level – but this did not make it less useful to the individual practitioner who had not encountered it before. How to account for the sense of identity, community and solidarity arising from peer learning that gives health workers the confidence and motivation to try new things? How to make a link between investment in peer learning, and children immunized?

    “Participation in the Peer Hub has motivated me to organize my district to implement actions developed. It has also encouraged me to invite many Immunization Officers to learn the experiences from other countries to improve country immunization sessions” 

    Peer Hub participant

    Global map with lines connecting countries where participants interacted

    Tracking movement of practices and ideas shared through the Ideas Engine between countries

    Because while health workers responded positively to opportunities to connect, learn and lead with one another, TGLF is very much a new entrant in a well-established institutional learning environment for global health. Here are some questions we’ve developed as TGLF challenges established norms and ways of working:

    • How would you feel as a global expert if you were asked to give up your role as ‘sage on the stage’ to be a ‘guide on the side’ to thousands of health workers?
    • Can self-reported data from thousands of health workers evaluated by peers be trusted more or less than a peer-reviewed study?
    • What does ubiquitous digital access mean for training programmes that have previously incentivised learner participation in face-to-face events through payment?

    “I can actually broaden my vision and be more imaginative, creative towards new ideas that have come up to improve overall immunization coverage.” – Peer Hub participant

    Working with DEFI and other similar institutions, TGLF looks forward to:

    ­We look forward to fruitful dialogues!

    Ian Steed, Associate, Hughes Hall
    Ian works as a consultant in the international humanitarian and development sector, focusing on the policy and practice of ‘localising’ international aid. In addition to his work with TGLF, Ian is involved with financial sustainability in the Red Cross Red Crescent Movement and is founder and board member of the Cambridge Humanitarian Centre (now the Centre for Global Equality). He studied German and Dutch at Jesus College, Cambridge, and has lived and worked in Germany and Switzerland.

  • Learning for Knowledge Creation: The WHO Scholar Program

    Learning for Knowledge Creation: The WHO Scholar Program

    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

  • Listening for leadership

    Listening for leadership

    On 30 May 2021, Convenors Karen Watkins and Reda Sadki were joined by eight Key Contributors: Nancy Dixon, Bryan Hopkins, Barbara Moser-Mercer, Renee Rogers, Catherine Russ, Esther Wojcicki, Laura Bierema, and Emanuele Capobianco.

    This was the third Dialogue convened by The Geneva Learning Foundation for learning, leadership, and impact.

    Each Key Contributor has a fascinating, singular leadership journey. This trajectory may have a collective dimension, of movements, of belonging, or of affiliation that have and continue to shape it. Even when this is so, it is also profoundly personal and individual. It is also a process of accretion – although we tend to recall quantum leaps in significant learning. For some, there may be discomfort with calling oneself a ‘leader’, given the conflation between leadership and authority, leadership and management, leadership and perceived value in society.

    Then, there is the moment of coming to consciousness, about the significance of leadership.

    So we started there, by asking:

    • How do you define the notion of leadership in this Digital Age? How is it different from notions of leadership in the past?
    • When and how did you realize the significance of the leadership question in your work and life? Who or what helped you come to consciousness?
    • What difference did it make to have this new consciousness about the importance of leadership?
      What is your own leadership practice now?
    • How do you define your leadership in relationship to learning? Are you a ‘learning leader’ and, if so, what does that mean?

    We are privileged to have a number of Key Contributors who have dedicated their life’s work to the study of leadership and learning. We are interested in their leadership journeys, of course, but we will also turn to them to ask:

    • What do you hear, as you listen to these stories?
    • What can you share from your work on leadership to better understand the journeys being shared?

    And, really, we want to know: How do you listen to people sharing their experience of leadership? What should we be listening for in order to unravel what goes into – and can come out of – leadership?

    You can listen to the Dialogue here.

  • Now is not everything

    Now is not everything

    “Everything is now. Knowledge flows in real time. Global conversations are no longer restricted by physical space. The world has become immediate.” – George Siemens in Knowing Knowledge (2006)

    Twenty Key Contributors have now joined the Geneva Learning Foundation’s monthly Dialogue on learning, leadership, and impact. They include: Laura Bierema, Emanuele Copabianco, Nancy Dixon, Katiuscia Fara, Bill Gardner, Keith Hampson, Bryan Hopkins, Iris Isip-Tan, Barbara Moser-Mercer, Aliki Nicolaides, Renee Rogers, Alan Todd, Bill Wiggenhorn, Esther Wojcicki, and Chizoba Wonodi. If you are curious, a few quick Google searches should make obvious two points: First, each one is a singular thinker and leader. Second, with a few exceptions, they might otherwise never meet.

    Why do we need such a dialogue? Who is it for? And what do we aim to accomplish?

    By learning, we mean the process by which humans come to know, organized into the discipline of education. The science of education, Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis have asserted, “develops knowledge about the processes of coming to know”, making education “privileged to be the science of sciences.”

    Our mission at the Foundation is to discover new ways to tackle the threats to our societies. Our conviction is that education as a philosophy for change provides uniquely fertile ground in the Digital Age for exploration, once disciplinary guardrails and institutional blinders are removed.

    “What if”, ponders Aliki Nicolaides, whose work explores learning-within-ambiguity, “learning was the way of an ethical life where the interdependence between individual and societal evolution was embraced and structures reflected an ethic of mutual care, human, non-human, and nature?”

    It is easy to get lost in our complex world. The immediacy of the world only heightens the need for reflective practice.

    For Renee Rogers, whose coaching practice seeks to “create positive change around challenging issues”, we need a dialogue on “healing collective trauma” to “foster human evolution”.

    This dialogue does not have to be abstract, convoluted, or complicated. As Esther Wojcicki, a remarkable Silicon Valley high school teacher, journalist, and author of both Moonshots in Education and How to Raise Successful People, says “simple lessons” can lead to “radical results.”

    Why does the Foundation consider leadership to be central in relation to learning?

    Leadership is about sense-making to navigate both the known and the unknown. “Leadership is as much of an art”, argued Robert G. Lord and Jessica E. Dinh in 2014, “as it is a role that has significant impact on individuals, groups, organizations, and societies.”

    I realized the significance of leadership through engagement with the profound research and writing of Catherine Russ on humanitarian leadership and the professionalization of humanitarian work. This coming to consciousness about the significance of leadership is, in my view, indispensable to transforming theories of change into effective practice.

    Can we answer the question of “how to lead” – the prevailing obsession of thousands of business books – before we comprehend how we know what we know about leadership? (Of course, if we do not yet recognize the significance of leadership or reduce it to a “soft skill”, we do not even realize how much both of these questions matter.)

    In our inaugural Dialogue on 28 March 2021, my co-founder Karen E. Watkins explained her “belief that, if you create a certain openness in an organizational culture, people are much more likely to see themselves as leaders”. That belief is grounded in a lifetime of visionary dedication to the study of learning culture, leadership, and change.

    Alan Todd is a pioneer of digital learning for multinational corporations. There, “change” means, at the very least, a restructuring every seven months. Eight years ago, he wrote that “as leadership talent – and talent in general – become the predominant asset of business, value shifts to the firm’s know-how.”

    By impact, we are primarily interested in the creation of value in global development, health, and humanitarian response. It could be said to be shorthand for radical results. (Value and results may mean different things in profit-driven industries – but they all depend on the peculiar industry dedicated to ensuring that there remains a world where we can buy and sell things.)

    Against the present and future threats that loom over our societies, we start with those of concern to the Dialogue’s known circle conveners and contributors. Then – and this is where we positively deviate from the norm of expert panels – we intersect these concerns with the challenges, insights, and successes shared by participants who may, initially, be complete strangers to us and to each other.

    Our focus on impact saves the Dialogue from descending into the rabbit hole of purely abstract discussion. 

    For example, education as social structure has proven incredibly resistant to change. This is a significant threat, as the gap grows between the needs of our societies and what schools and universities are able to provide. Our exploration will certainly be both broad and deep here, spanning from new economic models for education to new ways of thinking and doing for learning practitioners. 

    Higher education analyst Keith Hampson has submitted this question for the Dialogue: “To what extent will alternative education providers (i.e. not colleges and universities) establish legitimacy? Will the soft monopoly held by colleges and universities inhibit the development of new forms of digital education and new digital education providers?”

    Bill Gardner, a seasoned executive leadership coach, wonders: “How do we as learning facilitators speed up time-to-capability without sacrificing quality and effectiveness?”

    What if you do not fit into any of the historical categories of teacher, professor, coach, trainer, or instructional designer? Key to the Dialogue is the recognition that the lens of education needs to expand to include other professions that increasingly recognize the centrality of how we come to know.

    Image: Detail of a sculpture found in the H.R. Giger Museum in Gruyère, Switzerland. Personal collection.

  • Think and do

    Think and do

    The assumption that countries have the capacity to take on recommendations from the best available knowledge, achieve understanding, and turn them into effective policy and action, leaves unanswered the mechanisms through which a publication, a series of meetings, or a policy comparison may lead to change.

    Technology has already transformed the ability of international organizations to move from knowledge production and diplomacy to new forms of scalable, networked action needed to tackle complex global challenges. This has created a significant opportunity for leaders to deliver on their mission.

    Some organizations are already offering high-quality, multi-lingual learning. Many are using digital technologies to scale, often at the cost of quality, helping large numbers of learners develop competencies. On their own, these are no longer innovative – much less transformative – goals. Several international organizations have built corporate universities and other types of learning functions that remain confined to the margins of the business and under threat from the next restructuring. None of these initiatives have moved the needle of impact.

    At the Geneva Learning Foundation, we have developed a low-cost, scalable package of interventions for international organizations to leverage digital transformation to: (1) bridge the gap between thinking and doing at country level; and (2) foster the emergence of country leadership for positive change.

    In our first three years, we have worked with partners across several thematic areas, developing this package to translate global guidelines into effective local action, to support capability development from competency to implementation, and to perform multi-country peer review at scale.

    This package can complement or replace existing low-volume, high-cost face-to-face workshops and conferences that are difficult to scale and measure.

    It is entirely digital (motivating participants without offering travel, hotel, or per diem) and embedded into work (participants do not need to stop work), significantly reducing both expenditure and opportunity cost, while improving efficacy.

    It has fostered the emergence of informal, self-led and motivated groupings of professionals operating across agencies that may provide a different kind of lever for systemic change than traditional top-down approaches to addressing challenges and can replaced failed, conventional training-of-trainer and “cascade” models.

    Recognizing the value of such emergent dynamics creates authentic opportunities to accelerate the transformation for impact.

    Fostering such emergence is the hard part.

    Last but not least, our business modelling demonstrates that, if the organization has healthy relationships with its stakeholders, financial sustainability (cost recovery) can be achieved within three years, so this is not one more mechanism dependent on donor good will.

    As we have seen existing partnerships leads to promising results – above and beyond our own expectations – we are slowly growing in confidence about the strengths and sustainability of what began as a series of small-scale pilot projects and experiments.

    Along the way, we have also learned how difficult it is to find the right mix of ingredients to move from ideas to successful execution to develop such a programme if it is to contribute to systemic change.

    Image: Labyrinth in Trigonos, by Reda Sadki.