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Reflections on trying to map the l(earning)ms landscape

A couple of webinars, that I have attended recently, have included some commentary on approaches to tackling learning technology, including via quadrant based approaches to analyzing the Learning Management System marketplace:

1. TrainingIndustry.com – Ten Secrets For Selecting the Right Technology

2. Understanding the European Learning Technologies market with the Elearnity 9-Grid™

I think mapping/quadrant approaches are a useful one for the debate and, as Elearnity pointed out, helps direct procurement decisions rather than directly making any. Of course, as always, context is the key piece which such generic guides cannot cover. Whilst this guide is more UK/EMA friendly than the often US-dominated landscape there still lacks a certain amount of objectivity here. For example, an LMS to launch bits of learning is very different to one which houses full curricula and the associated social tools. However, it’s perfectly justifiable for an organization to want different things depending on what else they have in place to support users in terms of HR systems, portals, etc. etc. It is also difficult to fully support the idea that big corporate vendors necessarily hold potential/performance than open source solutions. For example Moodle’s extensive plugin library means you can add in support, for example, for Tin Can or you can choose not to. Here context comes in again, in that a corporate customer may prefer a corporate relationship whereas many Higher Education LMS users prefer an Open Source mentality.

So how might you bracket Learning Management Systems? Well, here’s a very basic mockup of an alternative from me with ‘Potential’ (which would partly be based on track record but also future gazing where, for example, there is a big VC financial backing) vs. a ‘Course > Collaboration’ judgment on the basis of a system’s cope from launching SCORM and resources as opposed to something which could actually act as your social enterprise hub. I would argue this offers a different paradigm to ‘performance’ which would help identify what type of system you are looking at.

Acting as such a hub might not be that ‘bleeding edge’ for many orgs but I still like to think that most people would, ideally, be looking to push the barriers of what’s possible so that’s a reasonable title to assign to it. It might just be that their ‘bleeding edge’ learning tech is scaled back by what is already in place internally as appropriate.

I might revisit this if I go through an RFP or other process at some point…

Are we all information professionals now?

The ongoing arguments about CILIP’s name change, to “Information & Library Professionals UK”, include the negative impact of the proposed name shifting “Chartered” to the tagline (the one thing I said in my survey response should not happen).

For me, this raises the questions of if all “knowledge economy” workers can consider themselves “knowledge professionals” and thus engage with CILIP.

The fuzziness of who is an information professional (in the ‘knowledge professions’ as ILPUK would put it) is one of CILIP’s greatest challenges. Once members could be identified by working in a library – how do professionals such as myself now associate themselves? There have been valid arguments made that CILIP would be better scaling back to ‘Library Association’ focus in ensuring a defined purpose.

Of course libraries are changing too, from paperless public libraries to supporting free online resources in academia. Both Sage and Taylor Francis have recently tried to argue libraries can continue to curate in a non purchasing world:

– Sage report: http://www.uk.sagepub.com/repository/binaries/pdf/Library-OAReport.pdf

– T&F report: http://www.tandf.co.uk/libsite/pdf/TF-whitepaper-free-resources.pdf

Perhaps the point here is to scare librarians into thinking, actually the paid for content is what is keeping us going? Certainly I have been to at least one presentation by publishers where the message seems to be, to librarians and researchers, ‘let Amazon win and we all lose’.

One issue is that traditional Library Management Systems do not always serve web resources very easily, thus it is increasingly of use for others to curate themselves. I have mentioned before the increasing discussion within L&D circles that curation is now an L&D role, for example:

http://www.brightwave.co.uk/practical-guides/curation-white-paper

Perhaps the future of the information professionals (UK or not) is in hybrid roles acting as the ILP for their team in a wider circle – just as RSS opened up current awareness (a service offered by many information teams) to the individual, perhaps bagtheweb, scoop.it, etc may now do the same for personal ‘libraries’.

I am the 83 percent

http://www.perforce.com/product/commons/i-am-83-percent

It may well just be me, but there seems to be more and more going on online about the issues caused by poor working practices around collaboration, in particular around documents.

This is interesting as it follows a presumption a few years back that, with Google Apps and new versions of Office, these problems were set to disappear. As always, technology implementation without good change management has led to problems for some and what seems to have instead emerged are a complicated picture where:

Some companies have failed to adopt new technology. The imminent death of XP may drive laggards into reviewing practices and supporting improvements through tech. For now, people are continuing to face challenges and wasting time due to inefficient IT.
Some have adopted office solutions, badly. I am increasingly of the belief that what is needed is ‘possibilities’ training in the tech sphere. There is no point throwing people in to hours of, say, Excel saying training when what they actually need is for someone to look at what they do and offer possibilities for improvements. For example, I wonder what percentage of the world’s population uses Excel everyday but do not know Macros even exist, never mind how to author them. Sitting down with someone to spot where efficiencies can be made and identify the small differences in application understanding can, ultimately, add up to big efficiency savings. This works across the board, for example I often sat down with people to show them how to do something with learning management systems only to end up asking ‘why do you do that?’ about how people operate in Office and other software.
Some feel the need to look further afield. I guess the outstanding question is if Office, Google and other major players are actually what you need. The video above is a nice example of the problems identified by a company looking at alternatives whilst the likes of Huddle offer what can be seen as simpler but more effective solutions.

It is then of interest to see iCloud finally step up to the plate and potentially try to fill the enterprise-sized gaps in Apple’s offerings.

CILIP rebrand part two – aka for the love of ‘qualifications’

I had not intended to follow up my previous post with another but the disaster* that has been the CILIP corporate rebranding exercise has perhaps allowed for just as big an issue to go seemingly unnoticed.

This elephant in the room is what is happening to CILIP Qualifications. Firstly, I will admit it’s not all bad but this just seems to make it even more disconcerting, the PKSB is good (as I’ve already suggested) and the simplifications in process make sense. So what’s bad then? Well…

Fixed time (20 hours) for CPD – many members will know the problems this causes in their industries. Lawyers, accountants, teachers and many more have professions backed by timesheet driven box ticking – no focus on learning outcomes or application of learning in the workplace or other professional activity. Building a portfolio of evidence can be a pain but if we genuinely want reflective practitioners, working from a strong research basis, then portfolios are far better than saying ‘yep I’ve attended a course for two hours’. This time driven approach is also difficult in light of 70/20/10 and other models which recognize the fuzziness of informal learning. Again a portfolio, which for many people will be based on a blog they are maintaining anyway, allows for better recognition, articulation and reflection of and on learning. I presume this is a change to encourage members to re-validate chartered status rather than doing it once and then letting it lapse, I fear it will simply water down the status of the ‘chartered’ role. Of course a name change, from CILIP, within the rebrand may do this anyway.
“Registration” – from primary school to Ellis Island this implies, to me, something you have to do. Something you are forced into to make sure a greater power is aware you exist. This is not how I envision my professionalism. It is a tricky one, granted, but why not ‘career path’, ‘development path’, etc? Perhaps the logic is that new professionals can be told to ensure they are ‘professionally registered’. However, it again implies something you are doing for the good of CILIP rather than yourself.

* I’m taking “disaster” as the correct term on the basis that:

it has split the membership (the General Meeting vote being roughly 50/50) and undoubtedly alienated many people (the c.90% of members who did not vote).
correctly singled out on JISCmail lists and elsewhere as how not to perform change or communication management.
seemingly led to CILIP HQ being on the defensive and even less representative of the members than normal; the decision to call on branches and groups to support the rebrand seemed particularly odd as branches should be the conduit for membership concerns, not the other way around.
it even led to a horribly tabloid piece in The Times.

What does this all mean – well it encourages me to become even more withdrawn from the organization. Indeed I may well fall into the ‘paying my dues and revalidating for the sake of it’ group I hint at above. Amazing that a group I had such enthusiasm for six or so years ago can sap it away from you quite so impressively.

Did the Corporate University kill the Learning and Development department?

A lot of interesting stuff in the LPI’s report on the first results from L&D professionals mapping their skills to their new capability profiles.

For me, the big question which emerges seems to be if the trend for ‘corporate universities’ (CU)/’academies’/’business schools’/etc. have ultimately restricted L&D down a path they will struggle to come out of. Yes, the CU focus can be argued as having created rigor in course development and deployment, often decreasing the reliance on third party training providers or off-the-shelf content, but they have in places restricted L&D to a fairly narrow subset of the the parent organization’s focus. The LPI summary suggesting the results show L&D professionals “lack the breadth of skill required”.

Where L&D is disparate from other support functions (including HR, IT and KM functions) there is immediately a risk of disconnect when it comes to actually building an overall framework for employee development and increased work efficiency.

Of course this isn’t necessarily a problem, yes you might need a wakeup call but, in some organizations delivering/developing trainings might be just what is needed. It might be that the organization needs what LPI results would suggest, at least historically, the respondents can supply.

The challenge from the LPI and other benchmarking would be for these professionals to reflect and consider if their team really offers what their organization needs and, perhaps more importantly if they do not, is another department at least filling the gaps. As an L&D professional you might want a role that we can see as the “21st Century profession” but other professionals are similarly looking at expanding responsibilities so I slightly question if the “Training Ghetto” is inevitably a bad thing.

Just as an academic university is only as good as its student support (including libraries, IT and facilities) perhaps the challenge now for corporate universities is recognizing how to create the collegiate atmosphere around courses (social learning) and user generated content management (library services). That information architecture and developing communities/collaborative learning are identified as weaknesses in the LPI results then it would seem to be an area L&D departments need to improve in or at least leverage other teams in their organizations.