Author: iangardnergb

My name is Ian Gardner and I am interested in various topics that can be seen as related to learning, technology and information. To see what I am reading elsewhere, follow me on The Old Reader (I.gardner.gb) or LinkedIn.

10 years on: the end of the Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA) in England (and “Creative” approaches to the job market)

This post is a little early, as applications were no longer available from Jan 2011 but we are now basically at the 10 year point for the EMA closing in England.

It is still available elsewhere in the UK.

First the bad, I worked in Further Education (16 year olds +) when the EMA existed and it created problems. The college I worked at had a very “them and us” divide within the student body between students who wanted to be there to learn and students who were (at least seen by their peers) only there to claim the (small) allowance. The insinuation was that some of these “just turning up” people had other sources of income (for example drugs) or simply were attending for something to do, a small amount of cash and/or to keep their parents happy (to the point where there were accusations that tutors were intimidated to report attendance even when learners were late or absent).

@TheIFS report from 2010 reviewed the impact of the EMA and if closure was a good move: https://www.ifs.org.uk/publications/5370

Even with my concerns over the previous experiment (see above) where might an EMA style system fit in the future? I would argue that an EMA would be more effective in the 18+ age range as a form of Universal Basic Income. As a guaranteed income, it could allow adults of all ages to continue their personal development and formal accreditation whilst potentially not having to take as huge a pay cut to try a new career route via apprenticeships, etc. In such a scenario we would ideally “top up” salaries to some previous level, meaning mortgages remain affordable whilst people take time to “reset” their income generation, or at least can sell a house with slightly less pressure that what redundancy or other enforced change of career normally brings. This “top up” would be similar to how some unemployment schemes work worldwide, i.e. you do not just baseline everyone to a minimal level of income, and encourage more mid-career reskilling and moves to sectors needing people.

Yes, this would be hugely expensive but given that state finances have gone out of the window in 2020 (even more than in 2008-2019) perhaps not in a bad way. This is of course timely given the current state of the job market and the need to think of “creative” solutions for the future:

Taking a look at Articulate Rise 360’s “Course templates”

If, like me, you usually use Rise to build courses from scratch, or by copying a house template course, you may never have looked at the option to build new courses from the Rise 360 “Course templates”.

What are the templates? Well as one describes itself:

  • “This template was designed to give you a head start on creating training. It contains lessons you might want to cover in a … course. It includes relevant headings, images, and writing prompts to guide you and is largely populated with placeholder text. You can easily replace this content with your own text and media.”

Last week I spent a little bit of time reviewing these templates so you don’t have to.  Here are some thoughts:

  • These are really rapid authoring taken to another level: not just are you using a simple to use tool but on topics familiar to many (customer service, cultural awareness, etc) there now predefined structures.
  • Nothing revolutionary in the design within these templates (that I can see) but it is perhaps worth reflecting on the fact that any level of eLearning used to cost 100s of £/$s and from a cost perspective, if nothing else, we have come a fair way.
  • As well as having the lessons/units within the course pre-structured there is a mix of hold text (usually the Latin bumf as you would get when adding new paragraphs yourself), text prompts to add specific content and some actual content.
  • The actual predefined/recommended content includes a common trait of Rise courses (or at least something I have seen used a lot): the quote as a discussion/activity lead.
  • Annoyingly the quotes that are included are just used out of context so you have to Google who the person being quoted is, there is no hyperlinking to a source (bad practice from a learning, discoverability and copyright perspective).
  • Even when you do search for the original author you realise some odd inconsistencies in the course formats, for example, “Unconscious Bias Training” includes a couple of quotes early in the piece with one source given in the format of “first-name surname” and another “surname first-name”.
  • One criticism I would have is that they are encouraging a silo approach to the topic with the package/course not making use of hyperlinking, that said I did see one example of a link out to a HBR article so that’s not universally true.
  • Unconscious bias, and a lot of the other topics covered out-of-the-box, fall into the mandatory training type category where you suspect they would need deep customization to really mean anything to your specific audience. Therefore, it feels like these are probably encouraging the lazier organisations out there to just “tick the box” on these topics.
  • However, the flip of that argument would be that I could see these as covering the fundamentals for someone being asked to put something together at short notice. We know some of these topics do not really work as one-off knowledge pieces so they could be useful as part of wider programmes.
  • The imagery used, like much in the Rise Image Library, is all very nice and bright. Predictably it is very obviously PC in clearly trying to insinuate a diversity of representation, for example a few inclusions for “wackier” pics to suggest inclusivity (including, unfortunately, men not wearing socks – something that remains a trend I simply can not get on board with). Clearly this is better than stale, pale and male but not necessarily suitable in all circumstances and, as is often the case, would be better replaced by your own offices and teams imagery where possible.

This all said, I would be tempted to use these. For example, if I was to be asked to build something as a part of a campaign on staff development then the “Developing Your Employees” template actually covers a lot of the basics for a manager to be aware of. It is always easier to knock instructional design than build something great, this is part of the reason why the learning industry is so navel-gazing, critical of itself and self-referential. If anything I would just want to cut these down even more (but that might be the Learning Reducer in me). Fundamentally my desire to cull would be based on a lot of the suggested lessons/topics being very basic – again adjustment to your actual audience would be ideal as we also know that some audiences might find the fuller content useful.

Valid learning eXperiences

Following on from my designing “valid learning experiences” being instructional design, and vice versa, summary in the below post:

https://whoseeducationisitanyway.me/2020/05/27/8-years-on-reflecting-on-my-msc-dissertation/

It was interesting to read through Learning Pool’s eXperience white paper:

eXperience Whitepaper

First things first, it is probably worth saying that there is a lot in this paper.

Also, it is written somewhat differently to many white papers. It is quite conversational in terms of style and that is, in part, due to the fact it has been influenced by the author’s podcast and other research, with some of the podcast commentators mentioned on the title page as sources. Leonard Houx being one of those:

So, as mentioned, there is a lot to think about in the paper. Not least discussion around the idea of event, programme or organization level experiences. Personally I am on the critic/cynic side of this thinking it is nothing new – rather that we have a long history of different types of learning event/type, taking different periods of time and at different levels of focus (individual/team/organisation). This three level approach to a typology feels lacking.

Necessary difficulties (Bjork, etc) gets a mention and is in part where I was coming from with my “tell people it is going to be hard” line of thought:

https://whoseeducationisitanyway.me/2020/08/19/more-on-the-instructional-text-tweet/

On content curation, which I have worried about as a form of redundancy cul-de-sac in the past:

https://whoseeducationisitanyway.me/2013/11/30/more-on-content-curation-for-learning/

we get a three-step checklist which is, I guess, kind of helpful:

  1. Re-use
  2. Revamp/reframe
  3. Create

All in all I feel the paper is somewhat searching for an answer to a situation not needing an answer. What courses/events/experiences will mean to a professional is more likely influenced by their industry, sector, etc. The need for agreeing a panacea for those working in learning roles feels like the learning industry and vendors seeking to push ideas/products rather than learning. For some, the idea of shifting from a face-to-face course still feels revolutionary, for others (like me) the type of resource-based learning identified in the guide is nothing new. That “resources not courses” is brought in to the argument a few times is something of a busted flush – yes, L&D focus may have been on courses in the past but resource based learning is nothing new. The combination into one platform (the Learning Pool LXP) of various types of experience feels somewhat like what has always been possible in an LMS – just with better tracking of, say, coaching outcomes thanks to xAPI.

Thus in many ways I feel more on the side of the fence with Craig Weiss, slightly oddly described as making a “slightly bad-tempered assault” (bold in the original whitepaper not mine), than that this is something particularly “new”.

What can L&D learn from gaming’s open dev approach

I have recently registered to participate in pre-alpha testing of the new Humankind historical strategy game. This is a very interesting experience with many parallels to when we (aka “learning pros”) try and get L&D and other learning products tested in advance.

Humankind makes content available to test via the Steam platform but news, community sharing and more are via https://www.games2gether.com/ – thus there is a split between delivery and communication.  In some ways this is similar to L&D’s traditional split from marketing/communications and the LMS split from ESN or other coms tools.

Of course the risk is that, particularly a new franchise like, Humankind risks putting potential users/buyers off from the final product. Personally the game looks good and certainly has some nice ideas, even if the combat systems (which seemed to be the main focus of the test so far) seems slow and difficult (to me at least).

Ultimately treating those invited to the prelaunch access as “special” is a great way that L&D can gain traction with the intended audience and develop champions within the organisation. The advantage is in gaining an audience prelaunch, positive word of mouth and more.

More on the “instructional text” tweet

So a bit of explanation on what I was going on about here:

Basically I was looking to discuss this topic as I have been seeing a lot of content publicly available (branded as eLearning of some type) which can be difficult to use as its unclear what to do from a learning perspective.  Whilst as learning designers we have tended to move away from boring instructions and learning objectives it feels like there is still work to be done.

I guess that I am ultimately thinking is we need to move from:

“This eLearning is made up of x modules and take xx minutes to complete”

type stuff to better prompts for action, something like:

“This activity is designed with moments for you to reflect throughout, therefore you need to pay attention and potentially take notes to help with your recollection”.

Why? Well we hear a lot about difficulties around concentration and focus.  Personally I fall into the trap of treating “learning content” online like I would treat other material.  Am I alone in feeling a need to be actively prompted to pay attention? Would we just ignore such advice if it did exist?

When looking for any formal research on this I did stumble across the below article which is quite good on instructional design more generally but I could not find anything too specific on the topic my tweet introduced…

Instructional Design and eLearning: A Discussion of
Pedagogical Content Knowledge as a Missing Construct

Click to access EJ846720.pdf