00000157-9511-da36-a1df-95d1543b0000-authorID

kate-graham.jpg

Kate Graham

Dovetailing neatly with the crowd sourced learning trend discussed in last week’s post, The Wisdom of the Crowd, is the concept of massive open online courses (MOOCs). Again, this was a huge trend in 2012, but if you’re not aware of them, MOOCs are a type of online course aimed at large scale participation and open access via the Internet.The roots of MOOCs lie in distance learning, and they initially took hold in further education. Again, the United States has seen commercial models emerge from the likes of Coursera and Udacity. Meanwhile the concept has spread to the UK. For example, JISC has funded the Open Learning Design Studio’s MOOC (OLDS MOOC) on “Learning Design for a 21st Century Curriculum,” which began in early January 2013. Collaboration is keyThe open nature of these courses means there are likely to be large numbers of learners and subject matter experts involved. This affects the instructional design. Everyone on this type of course needs to be able to connect and collaborate with each other to make it work. Crowd-sourced interactions, peer reviews, and group discussion all suddenly become more than a nice to have—they are now of fundamental importance to the structure of the course and the learning experience.Indeed, collaboration is a major key for success, whether that’s in terms of feedback and debate between learners, or in the development of the course material itself. In this scenario, learners will need to become more connected and collaborative than ever before.Don Taylor, chairman of the Learning and Performance Institute, recently wrote about the relevance of MOOCs to those of us involved in workplace learning and development: “MOOCs are a symptom of something larger—the seismic shifts that are taking place in our profession. In a few years’ time you may be asked to justify your training course against one provided by Harvard, by a local college in Hyderabad and by an online training company in Singapore. You’d bet start preparing your answer now.”Different types of MOOCsNew variations of MOOCs are now even starting to appear. A blog post by Martin Lugton describes the differences this way: xMOOCs include discussion forums, and allow people to bounce ideas around and discuss learning together, but the centre of the course is still the instructor-guided lesson. cMOOCs, on the other hand, are based on a connectivist approach in which learners set their own learning goals and types of engagement.But it is the cost of MOOCs and the crowd sourcing of content that can provide corporate organizations with the means to create enough cost-effective, regular material to truly democratise learning. The combination of a collaborative ethos and easy-to-use technology for authoring and publishing content can be realised in the model that my business partner, Martin Belton, has termed a mini-MOOC.  This might sound like an oxymoron, but in practice could really work as it’s not its size that matters.A mini-MOOC can be executed primarily in two different ways. The first is organisations within a particular industry work together to create an online course on an area that is currently affecting their industry. If several training managers, for example, can collaborate to create relevant content in the first place and share it via a single platform, it taps into a collective wisdom that can then be shared across an entire industry. This leverages a broader bank of knowledge than individual organisations would normally have access to—not to mention the potential cost savings.Internal MOOCs: where L&D steps inThe flip side of this is an internal model. This comes back to breaking down those corporate silos and getting the best information out of your best people, then using it to help others. . For example, if there is a need to improve sales training, the L&D team work with the high flying sales people internally and get them to contribute to the development of a mini-MOOC. Their contributions could be in the form of recorded interviews, or input into forums and learner feedback that can be used to form part of an online sales course that can also include e-learning and assessments.This not only taps into tacit knowledge that might otherwise never leave those sales people’s heads, but helps create genuinely valuable learning resources and a single course that becomes the de facto standard for sales across that organisation. The L&D team is at the heart of this process, facilitating the collaboration, supporting the creation of user generated content, managing the inputs, and distributing the outputs.

To MOOC or Not to MOOC, That Is the Question

 Constructivists have long argued for a more learner-centred approach to learning and development. And although many would argue that workplace learning still focuses on command and control from the powers that be in an organisation, there is evidence that we are becoming more learner-centric. According to Towards Maturity Benchmark 2012: Bridging the Gap, there is now greater user-experience design in e-learning, more focus on the usability of learning tools and technologies, and 91 percent of L&D managers seeking to improve staff engagement to aid retention and motivation.This comes at a time when the wider world has become decentralised. The Internet has given people more choice and opportunity than ever before for connecting with others, many of whom would previously have remained unknown or out of reach. What’s more, the Internet has given people access to information and knowledge that was hitherto more difficult—or more expensive—to acquire.And so we find ourselves in a period of transition. In our personal lives, we have become accustomed to accessing information and connections within nano-seconds, and barriers to communication and information continue to tumble thanks to technology. But organisational structures and working practices are still lagging behind and internal silos abound, despite some progress towards a more learner-centric approach.  The 2012 Towards Maturity Benchmark study revealed that 90 percent of learning and development professionals are looking to integrate learning into their company’s different functions, such as sales, customer service, and operations.  And it’s little wonder, given the speed of innovation and change that organisations now have to contend with.  In today’s world, information transfer, teaching new skills, and left hands talking to right hands can be the difference between success and failure. In short, we need to collaborate.A collaborative approach"It is the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed." - Charles DarwinAt a basic level, collaborative learning is a situation in which two or more people learn or attempt to learn something together. Increasing opportunities to work and learn collaboratively is one of the key ways we can help meet the many challenges we now face. Not just within L&D, but more broadly—in terms of our own performance and that of our organisation. Internally, it starts to break down silos and enables us to share knowledge and good practice too. So how does this work in reality?The democratisation of learningFor too long we’ve relied on formal training, or a ”push” rather than ”pull” approach. But times are changing, and  the move towards learning online and access to more informal resources is already well underway. However, much of what exists to support online learning has its roots in the sluggish corporate models we’ve already discussed.Enterprise learning management systems are designed specifically to handle the scale of data and information within large organisations. This is great if you’re a large organisation. But more often, the experience is not so great for all those learners within those organisations. Even less great for the tens of thousands of small and medium-sized businesses out there with little hope of accessing this type of solution.Social learningOn the flip side of the enterprise coin, there is already a wealth of learning available online, much of it free. But the reality is that most social media sites are designed for just that—social interaction —chatting, sharing views, and so forth. It’s all those great things we love to do, but it’s not learning.Actually finding what you need to learn online, can be difficult. An IDC whitepaper on the hidden costs of work, suggests the average employee spends around nine hours each week just searching for information they need to do their job. That is hardly productive. And even if they can find what they need, it can be difficult to establish the authority and provenance of that information.Crowd sourcingBut in 2012, a blend of technology and a collaborative approach began to really change the face of learning. Crowd sourced learning projects were the flavour of 2012, particularly in the United States, with around $70 million committed by venture capitalists to just nine start-up projects, aimed at varying social and business sectors. These online sites, like Udemy and Skillshare, and U.K.-based mylearningworx, take the wisdom of the crowd, validate it, and share it with everyone in one easy to use place. There is real belief in the value of opening up the process of both learning and educating.Other big names have also joined the fight. At the launch of Articulate’s Storyline, its community VP Tom Kuhlmann said he hoped the software ”would encourage the democratisation of e-learning.” He went on to explain: ”In the same way that anyone can now make videos and put them onto sites such as YouTube, anyone can now create elearning content using a tool like Storyline and make it available to others.” And these new crowd sourced learning sites are using cloud-based technology and simple authoring tools to put the production and broadcast of powerful online learning into the hands of the subject matter experts.This takes the existing learner-centric approach and moves it up a level. The focus becomes not just about communities of learners, but expands to include communities of experts. This is actually quite an exciting idea–not least because learner communities so often turn out to be communities of those who know nothing and waste time following up their own red herrings. But now there will be groups of authors and subject matter experts creating huge amounts of better, cheaper content for every learning eventuality.>It is interesting to think how this change of focus and new democracy will affect our current view of the battle. Consider, for instance, the 70/20/10 theory which suggests that learning typically takes place in a mix of approximately 70 percent on-the-job experience, 20 percent from feedback, and about 10 percent from formal learning. Even though there is not much evidence to back this concept up, it feels intuitively right to many practitioners.Based on this theory, it would seem reasonable to move the focus away from formal instruction and learning in favour of freewheeling ideas, forums, and practice. However, converted democratic learning professionals would point out that the low 10 percent figure is probably  a result of the following sort of circumstances:Most corporate online learning solutions are still not good or extensive enough, nor updated regularly enough, because we are collectively rubbish at enabling people to share their valuable knowledge, andThe cost of creating useful online learning is still much too high for most companies, which still see training as a cost centre, not a profit-making service.But putting the means of the production of learning into the collective hands of the of subject matter experts changes all this. And it is a process happening now. For example, code designers now have codeacademy.com another U.S.-based democratic-style learning start-up that is bringing information to the masses. One of its initiatives called Code Year had 100,000 users sign up in 48 hours. And that number continues to grow at a rapid pace.Breaking down barriersTo be sure, today’s technology is breaking down the barriers to creating online learning. There is a growing acceptance that production values no longer have to be Hollywood movie standard. Some uncut video captured in minutes on a smart phone is likely to be of as much use to learner as an overproduced film that takes days or weeks in the making.Indeed, quick and dirty is becoming acceptable – the results and impact on performance are now more important than finesse and polish. This freer approach combined with tools such as the new Mozilla Popcorn Maker to create content, and crowd sourced platforms to publish it, means everyone can begin to unleash their author and share their expertise on any subject.Vive la revolution! Let’s change learning together.

The Wisdom of the Crowd

(from leadingeffectively.com)—Leaders shape our nation, communities, and organizations. We are in need of good leaders to help guide us and make the essential large-scale decisions that keep the world moving. Our society is always quick to identify a bad leader, but can most people identify a good one?   What would most people say makes a good leader?In our infographic below, I wanted to tackle (as best I could) a complex and often controversial question: What are the characteristics of a good leader? This question kept appearing in my initial investigation into a potential topic for the infographic. In this preliminary research, I wanted to cover up-to-date topics surrounding the field of leadership in the US that correlate with the subject matter of Norwich University’s Master of Science in Leadership Program.After examining the resources available across the web, I settled on a handful of informative articles from sites such as The Harvard Business Review and Forbes. With the help of these key publications, along with assistance from university staff, we determined that we should spearhead one of the hardest questions to answer: what makes an effective leader?  Not only that, but how do you become an effective leader?  Our goal with this infographic was provide a resource that compiles these questions into one place so that current and future leaders will find it both interesting and educational.While there are many forms of leadership that each come with a slew of personality traits, we determined, through research and university feedback, a list of ten consistent traits that great leaders leverage. These include:honestyability to delegatecommunicationsense of humorconfidencecommitmentpositive attitudecreativityability to inspireintuitionWe must keep in mind that there are many powerful and successful leaders that have not exhibited all of these character traits and that the definition of a good leader is quite ambiguous.   It can be determined, however, that most good leaders do leverage most of these characteristics.  Take someone you view as a great leader – how many of these characteristics do they express?If the characteristics of a good leader above do not describe you, there are ways for you to improve upon your leadership capabilities.  Many say leaders are born not made, but we feel that is far from the truth.  They are molded through experience, continued study, and adaptation.   Andrew Graham, CEO of Forum Corp, notes “If you do not see these signs in yourself, fear not – It is all about getting yourself in a better frame of mind and looking at the bigger picture to get your over the neurological hurdles that hold you back from being a great leader.”Like any craft, you must learn from your mistakes and continually work at strengthening areas in which you’re weak.  My advice: seek out a mentor that you admire as a leader.  Jot down the characteristics that you feel makes them a great leader – how do you compare?  Chances are they weren’t always a great leader, so it’s your job to determine what they did along the way to be the leader they are today.Read More

Kate Graham

About