Month: January 2026

Intellectual cooperation

A few weeks back I had the joy of attending the book launch of Intellectual Cooperation at the League of Nations. It has been a while since I attended an event like this, I used to sneak into them quite often due to the volume of universities in London, so it was quite a nice change.

Linkedin post with more detail on the event.

Link here to a podcast recorded on the day of the event by the organizers with a couple of the contributors.

At the event, one interesting aspect of the research was mentioned – that part of the League’s work in the area of intellectual cooperation was investigating if common textbooks could be created for global use. In the post-WWI environment, this was an idea to help tackle global issues but the idea can clearly be seen today – for example in the desire to decolonialize curricula, provide global resources via OERs and related topics such as open access publishing. Whilst the LoN’s “Committee of textbook experts” had little success, more success was had in areas including student exchange, again, something in the 2025/2026 news given the UK’s possible reentrance to Erasmus.

Overall, worth a read (or at least a podcast listen) for anyone with an interest in the history of international organizations and/or education.

Thoughts on the Mindtools L&D Podcast’s “Navigating the fog of learning design”

Link to this recent podcast.

Dr Guieswende Rouamba’s reflections on the podcast, including why they have written “The Instructional Designer’s Guide to Project Management” were very interesting so I thought I would share some reflections:

  1. My MSc covered project management for instructional design in quite a lot of detail so I would say I have a different experience to that described as the norm.
  2. An approach of having two levels of PM (as described by Dr Rouamba) between instructional designer as project manager and a higher level person performing portfolio management is certainly similar to a lot of my organizational experience.
  3. The challenge and vagueness of “engaging” learning and the need for clear expectations. This resonates due to some recent experience in considering engagement vs outcomes vs brevity vs constraints.
  4. How can ID work best given the challenge of shifting priorities and SME availability challenges? This has certainly been my experience and, again, makes ID (in my opinion) unlike some other areas – for example, common business tools like RACI, KPIs and SMART goals can be tricky in ID.
  5. The importance of clarifying roles. I am increasingly viewing this as the major challenge in many projects (not just ID ones) as the professional profile and mentality of different people can be quite different to what you expect.