The new learning organisation – the challenges and survival tips for L&D in the 21st Century (LSG webinar)

The second LSG webinar this week was unfortunately cut short by technical problems.  At the time I was trying to play devil’s advocate in arguing against some of the ideas being put forward.  This is unusual for me as I watch lots of webinars but tend to do just that, watch, on Thursday though I felt the need to rock the boat a bit.  Why?

Well, I worry sometimes when attending webinars that it all feels a bit like politics.  Everyone seems to want to grab an imaginary middle ground.  This ‘middle ground’ in the organizational environment being control/involvement in ‘the way forward’ – the current focus of which being around establishing more collaborative, communicative, organizations with silos broken down.  My problem is that multiple departments all seem to want to do this in ways based on their traditional areas of responsibility, including:

  • Learning and development,
  • Learning technology,
  • Library/information services,
  • Knowledge management,
  • Organizational development,
  • Corporate strategy,
  • Information technology,
  • Internal communications.

How broken down or isolated such departments are, of course, varies enormously by organization.  It is perhaps useful to remember that whilst many of these have emerged as specialisms we perhaps could move back toward a shared ideology, using the catch-all of ‘knowledge work’.

I totally agreed with the point made in the LSGwebinar presentation that learning needs to be embedded and recognized throughout an organization.  What I disagree with is the idea of Learning and Development professionals having to constantly change.  If the organization is well structured and recognizes learning across the 70/20/10 divide then there is, potentially depending on the organization’s needs, a use for traditional ‘courses’.  Indeed, combine in-house and external courses and you can lay the groundwork for a workforce’s knowledge and skills.  After all, there remain a lot of jobs where you would not want someone to simply go out and work in risky/dangerous environments without foundational courses, even if they need to incorporate, say, 3d simulations.  I’ve written before that if L&D are too quick to abandon the ‘training ghetto’ it might do an organization more harm than good whilst the use of ‘Corporate University’ models have given L&D a brand, albeit one based around courses.

One point someone raised with me on the call was that L&D should not just take ‘orders’ of courses but instead challenge the business on what is the appropriate learning solution, not being afraid to say a course is not what is needed.  I replied that I would not disagree, but, its also correct to say that a course might be the correct solution.  This said, I probably have quite a different take on what a course is compared to some people in L&D roles; I would never advocate, for example, a standalone SCORM course with no resources, reinforcement, reflection or JIT support.  Course-centrality can be a working model provided the organization is doing effective communication, knowledge sharing, etc.  If that is not happening then, obviously, L&D professionals can help resolve that problem.  However, yet if you have a good information service I would not expect the L&D department to go it alone doing lots of curation for learning, if you have good knowledge management systems you would not expect a social Learning Management System to replace it, etc.

Ultimately what I am trying to say is that if you work for a well organized institution you might find that L&D’s role is to manage a curriculum of appropriate interventions, i.e. courses.  The trick will be to ensure they are so good that they remain relevant, otherwise L&D may go the role of information services and other departments that have seen outsourcing and redundancies.  Yet is wrong to presume ‘the business’ does not do coaching, communication or other elements of the ‘way forward’ well without L&D involvement just because we ‘want in’.

The Value and Importance of Repositories

These are notes from the above CILIP in London evening meeting…I was asked to write the event up for the newsletter so thought I might as well post the longer version of my notes here.

Speaker: Nancy Pontika, Repository Manager, Royal Holloway College, University of London

Nancy gave us a taste of life working with scholarly communication repositories, including challenges within the current Open Access (OA) and copyright environment.

She began with a history of the OA movement, starting from the Budapest Open Access Initiative.  Whilst OA seems simple at first, being materials available at “no cost to the consumer”, the presentation focused on the complexity that exists in different OA journal models (‘gold’ OA) and the implications for institutional and subject repositories (‘green’ OA).

Much of the talk concentrated on the difficulties in populating repositories.  Repository owners are not in a position to perform quality reviews and are, therefore, reliant on the existing journal’s peer-review models.  What repository managers can do is ensure their systems correctly implement the available OA metadata harvesting protocols to ensure transparency to search engines and, therefore, avoid the creation of silos.

What repository managers are allowed to deposit depends on copyright.  This can be very complex as different publishers have different rules over issues such as the length of the embargo period between publication and deposit, versions of documents that can be deposited (very rarely the formatted PDF of final publication) and the copyright applied (normally publishers desire all rights reserved).

An interesting point from Nancy was that she thinks we need to talk about copyrights not copyright.  Such a shift in the language enables easier discussion over which rights a publisher or author seeks to keep.  OA advocates have pushed for this so that people can apply the Creative Commons (CC) licence they find appropriate, for example, not opening their work to commercial use.  It was argued that in many ways the most important element of CC licences is that, by being machine readable, they allow information to pass between systems including ensuring they comply with Google’s advanced search filters.  A template[1] allows researchers to easily set out what they want to maintain in terms of copyrights in digital distribution prior to seeking publication.

There has been hope in the OA community that research funders might help swing the arguments away from continuing subscription based journal models.  However, there was disappointment with RCUK who pushed out a gold OA/journal-centric OA policy that depressed the repositories community.  Problems with this include that there are not many big OA journals outside of medicine and that it does not give any encouragement to academics to change their practice as career progressions remain based on prestige and, in most subjects, this means subscription journals (including those who ‘double dip’ by also charging the author processing fees).  The RCUK providing funding to pay for processing charges but it was not enough to cover the costs.  Overall, it was argued that RCUK had left most sides in the process disappointed as this lack of funding is then forcing universities to go down the repositories route while publishers disliked their demands for the CC-BY licence to be applied.  HEFCE meanwhile are supporting an OA future for the Research Excellence Framework but with a focus on repositories over journals, complicating matters even further for those seeking funds from RCUK.

The Q&A session following the talk expanded the discussion to consider how repositories can be used beyond peer-reviewed journal articles.  There was discussion over the value of repositories hosting learning materials and under/postgraduate research papers, could they be used more as a storage backbone to Virtual Learning Environments with the VLE software adding the collaboration and assessment elements of a course?  There was also some discussion around the statistics available from repository platforms, and the resistance to expose these in case it makes repositories or particular academics look underused.  The challenges in managing data in place of, or in addition to, text based research papers were also outlined.

As for the future, the message was very much that things will continue to change and there remains scope for further experimentation.  Nancy’s personal take being that repository owners ideally need a balance of good OA and subscription journals, but the expense of the latter may not make this feasible.  Overall, the talk provided an extensive background to OA and repositories past, present and future.  This was timely as, later in the same week, Creative Commons called for further reform to copyright[2].  Slide basis of the presentation available at: http://www.slideshare.net/NancyPontika/cilip-27241430

#fote13 – Some remote observations (including on Open Access)

Today I have been following tweets from the Future of Technology in Education event (#fote13) which a lot of my Twitter contacts seem to have attended.  Interestingly, it included some content on Open Access, less encouraging is that according to this blog at least the only question emerging early on was “so what else is new?”.

This made me think back to my previous comment that (learning technology) conferences all too easily preach to the converted.  Contrast this to Noam Chomsky, who I have been catching up with a bit of late, who successfully seems to suggest a way forward at the end of speeches/Q&As.  Admittedly, those ways forward may be difficult, even unrealistic, but he does seem to do a good job of at least proposing something.

Open Access interests me partly as it was a fairly big topic when I did my MA but also in that it offers alternatives to very established business models, which at the very least makes it worthy of attention considering how entrenched some are. Pre and prior to the MA I have attended a number of sessions over the years where the feeling in the room has been academics/librarians vs publishers and its interesting that Open Access models still seem to revert to that or concerns around quality.  The alternative discourse then becomes publishers saying ‘well you don’t want Amazon to win do you?’ when it perhaps should be academics saying ‘okay so what about self publishing?’.  Even though the web has various platforms for self publishing the argument seems to be that take up doesn’t happen due to the RAE, or equivalents, or that Amazon is already the one-stop shop.  This is how I see it though…

Accenture’s offering to help publishers establish new digital business models is an interesting development but also surely too little too late for those who have not progressed already, especially considering that the publishing industry is itself dominated by a fairly small number of big players (and even more so at the delivery level with Amazon, Play and iTunes dominating digital distribution).

For universities, the real value in MOOCs seems to be that it is bringing up old debates on improving the format of university courses and I would hope the outcome will be:

  1. A chance to reinvigorate the ‘university press’, with iBooks, Kindle and other formats bringing in funding.  If Korean secondary school teachers can make millions of dollars selling videos online surely UK academics could make a few quid via rethinking scholarly communication as mentioned above?
  2. Publicly funded research made available publicly.  Papers, yes, but also make academics disseminate via Wikipedia, etc.
  3. A better offering of varied course length/types for different audiences.  Foundation degrees were a start, but there is plenty of room for MOOCs to influence the pre and post degree skill/knowledge set (I’m presuming the degree already has plenty of online/blended elements – if it does not it more than likely should have had about 5 years ago).

All of the above would mean big changes for HE organizations and I suspect discussion will inevitably run and run, meaning plenty more conferences on such areas.  Ultimately they could find themselves in a more diversified industry but ultimately that makes sense – seeking revenue streams away from the traditional under/postgraduate teaching/research restraints.

India: The Empire(‘s education system) strikes back?

One lasting legacy of the Empire/Commonwealth has been interest, and demand for, ‘a British education’ from countries in the Caribbean, Africa and India.  Whilst Chinese investment in Africa continues to potentially change Europe’s relationship with that continent perhaps the more immediate changes are taking place in India.

I have seen a few pieces of late advocating for Indian education to improve across the board, a number of which called upon historical precedent of fine Indian institutions which existed long before the Raj.  This is, presumably, partly nationalist sentiment coming through but also indicates a growing confidence as the country flexes substantial economic muscle.

It was interesting then to see a call for improvement in Higher Education from the President of India coming in the same month as India’s long discussed opposition to foreign universities setting up bases there coming to an end.  This will be of huge interest, no doubt, to Western universities who have eyed India as a natural base of operations and, thanks to culture, language and other reasons is potentially an easier entry point to this kind of operation than universities have found in setting up campuses elsewhere, such as Nottingham’s Ningbo Campus.

The clause in India’s proposed changes that “a foreign university cannot repatriate money that it makes in India” also goes some way to avoid the criticism leveled within Britain that increased private money in education is simply seeing tax funds sent abroad to the various parent companies, software suppliers, investors, service providers, etc that have become involved in either owning or supporting educational institutions from Free Schools to Higher Education’s expanding private sector.

Sorry, but I will not endorse you (on LinkedIn anyway)

I’ve written previously about my belief in the value of professional profiles, such as those introduced by professional bodies like CILIP, CIPD and LPI.

It was of interest then to see this article on the success of LinkedIn’s current alternative, the ‘Skills & Expertise’ endorsement.  Whilst I would agree that the author is correct in identifying the viral success of endorsements I would not agree they add anything to the platform.

Problems with endorsements include:

  1. You can set your initial long list, and this list can frame the conversation.  I deliberately set lots of skills in my profile, this was basically because I find this kind of approach a little silly.  The advantage of traditional job descriptions is that they force you to concentrate your application on 10-12 areas.  Having your online profile cover lots of items may be more accurate of a skill set but also dilutes the value of any one item by listing all of those other areas.
  2. It is not “fun”, instead notifications of endorsement can become annoying and the implied suggestion that you should endorse back is somewhat, let us say, pushy.
  3. Short phrase categories are of little use.  My profile currently has ‘E-Learning’ as the highest ranked endorsement.  This comes with a few problems, firstly, at one point I had ‘e-Learning’, ‘E-Learning’ and possibly even ‘e-learning’.  I eventually contacted LinkedIn support about how to merge these just to tidy my profile from the endorsements of others.  Secondly, a skill/expertise such as e-Learning is vague beyond use, do I know theory (yes), do I know how to use some related technology (yes) could I build an e-Learning tool from scratch (no).  Even in combination with other fields it remains vague.

So, whilst I appreciate those of you who have taken the time to endorse me I wont be jumping into that never ending pool.