Category: Professional Certification

So my Open Badges are gone then?

I am presumably very late on to this problem but I was just checking links on my LinkedIn profile and realised both of my public badge account links were broken.

My Credly link was relatively easily fixed, by going in to my account I could get a new link to show my profile with 1 badge (from the LPI).

My older Mozilla Backpack that had a variety of random badges attached, however, seems to have gone. The help page is, well, not very helpful:

I didn’t get an email notification from Mozilla. What should I do?

Do you have more than one email address that the zipped file could have been sent to?

Have you checked your spam folder for the email?

Unfortunately, we’re sorry to say, there is no way to resend the Mozilla email containing your badges. If not, you may wish to contact the original issuer(s) of the badge(s) that were in your backpack, to see if they can provide you with a copy of the badge or re-award it to you.

Badgr support

I knew Badgr was taking over from Mozilla (actually quite a while ago, in 2019, looking at their website) but had not realised that my badges would be basically gone. The link I had saved no longer displaying anything useful. Now I know, as I used bit.ly, only three people have actually followed the link from LinkedIn but even still, it will have looked a bit bad that I had broken links on my LinkedIn profile without realising. More care needed in keeping an eye on my profile I guess!

I have been an advocate for Open Badges but this really seems a shoddy situation and one that reminds us yet again about the risks of relying on online services (as opposed to having offline records such as CVs, certificates, etc for such achievements).

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:

Not all innovation is created equal

A few things lately have got me thinking, once again, about what innovation means, particularly in the area of online learning.

The Covid crisis has brought a lot of this to the fore, for example the list below are just two things which have been day-to-day activities for me (and many others) for over a decade (or more) but are genuinely new for others:

  • Training companies and education institutions moving their operations to online (be it virtual classroom, webinar, async, LMS/VLE, etc.)
  • Primary collaboration between colleagues taking place online, rather than face-to-face, via VOIP, Teams, ESNs, etc.

These changes will be seen as transformational for some organisations, and not for others. This will have the knock-on effects that digital transformation has, for a while, promised – unfortunately including job losses. Leading to a spate of memes on that theme:

https://www.ringli.media/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/digital_transformation_meme.jpg
Just one example playing on the theme/meme.

The recent MoodleMoot global conference helped highlight this to me – here we had a tool (Moodle) that critics (myself included in the past) would describe as struggling to move past its c.2003 functionality and user interface. However, many presenters were focused on their personal success of switching to online (I personally really find the “pivot” phrase odd/annoying) or offering tips for ‘newbies’ in this area. This brings to mind the often used quote:

The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.

William Gibson

The challenge here is not just that digital transformation will naturally mean different things to different people also that a “webinar” will mean different things depending on the organising body, presenter, purpose, etc.

This confuses the picture, as picked up recently by Jane Hart in a tweet poll over what “e-learning” may (or may not) mean today:

https://twitter.com/iangardnergb/status/1290283668632514561

Personally, I would say eLearning has become synonymous with “click next” slide-style content. The result being that “online” learning became the norm and then “digital” to capture changes for learning via mobile, VR, etc. However, whilst the differences remain, and old conversations (e.g. what is e-learning? is the VLE dead? etc.) continue, it is increasingly difficult to see where real innovation in the learning sector is given many orgs are now having “transformational pivots”.

Why I ticked the “share with network” button on my new LinkedIn job

2020 has been pretty tough so far on many people – I have been very lucky. Therefore, I was hesitant about alerting my LinkedIn colleagues on my new role – would it be bragging in the current economic and political climate?

I decided that actually sharing some good news, something I have been working on for around two years (and in some ways for fifteen throughout my career), was a nice thing to do to break the bad news cycle.

So, sorry, if it was seen as a humblebrag or other faux pas but I hope it made a few people happy as we prepare for global recessions and a ‘new normal’. Obviously we have differing degrees of LinkedIn contacts in terms of level of relationship but here’s hoping more of my contacts found this interesting/useful that didn’t. And here’s hoping the majority can share good news stories over the rest of the year.

Most recent role doth not maketh the person(?)

Imagine meeting people – at a conference, party, in the pub or at a dinner party.  How do you introduce yourself?  What do you talk about?

Unfortunately it feels like too often we steer to current job as the primary focus of who we are, for example my favorite dating column always mentions age and occupation before anything else.  Even LinkedIn encourages this with its “headline” prompts to encourage you to use your current role rather than something that describes YOU. 

This plays into some of the problems in society too, for example paternal leave as still being seen as odd by some or those who have had time out to care for loved ones struggling to get back into the labour market. We have messy lives and current role will rarely be a perfect description of what you are about – even full histories on LinkedIn and CVs struggle to do this.

Now in some areas it may be correct that you are judged on your latest role, for example you would hope the Thomas Cook management team will be judged on that company’s failure and any past success is not used to self promote into other top paying jobs (thus ignoring their role in a brand’s collapse).  However, as we’ve seen from most of the senior figures involved in the 2008 crash, mud often does not stick to those at the top.

I’ve recently just finished the back catalogue of the L&D Podcast.  The first episode, an interview between the host (David James) and Nigel Paine resonated a lot with me.  There were elements of Learning Reducer concepts at play here but on a personal level Nigel’s explanation that he “knows a lot on many things” [possibly sic] feels largely where I am.  I have been keen to develop skills and experience in a broad way, in fields where I feel once you have done something once or twice you have done that and you can move on and learn other things. 

As Nigel mentions, he could have specialized and so could most of us, especially in the learning industry. 

I could, at different parts of my career, specialized by spending more hours on things from delivering information skills (which I’ve actually picked back up just recently), developing eLearning modules (which I’ve picked up a bit recently too), LMS management, LCMS management, classroom facilitation, virtual classroom facilitation, etc. etc.  I fully recognise that there are instructional designers, eLearning developers, etc who will be super specialist in such areas or a particular tool (say the Articulate Suite) where I would say I a am ‘competent’.  However, I can assist organisations via a broad range of learning (or Learning and Development) related areas.

Overall I feel I have a good spread of skills when one considers things such as the LPI Capability Map, as well as leveraging my background in libraries and information to tend to come at learning issues from a different perspective.  To simplify, my default position is often for social collaborative learning, built around curated resources.  However, I am also aware that what the social within this means will change and increasingly be driven by AI.  Or in other words, my default position is not for anything that resembles a sage-on-stage ‘classroom’.  I would rather see people discussing this mentality piece in learning rather than saying we need a “developer”, “facilitator” or other narrow skill set.

There is also a related point that I’ve complained about before, that you can register for webinars for your own personal development but can not access them with a personal email (such as outlook.com, Gmail, Yahoo, etc).  Here vendors are being short sighted for their current sales pipeline rather than long(er) term branding and customer development.  Indeed free webinars may well be a good recruitment tool for them – for example, I would happily say I would love a job at Mercer, Brightwave and many others companies due to the quality of their work that comes out at free conferences and webinars.

So, when I introduce myself at an event or in the pub what do I describe myself as?  Good question.  I struggle and I’d happily accept suggestions from readers!  One fact would be that it would not be restricted to any of my previous jobs – we are more than a sum of our parts.  Overall, let’s not pigeon hole people and let’s not forget the power of experience and the “whole person”.