Whose Education Is It Anyway?

5 Trends for L&D in 2013 (#6TrendsLD) Webinar…Could a corporate library service be the answer?

Donald Taylor yesterday went through five trends for Learning and Development that acted as a nice lead in to the upcoming Learning Technologies Exhibition I blogged about last time.

Don’s 5 themes were the below:

Globalization & big picture changes
Integration
Data
The role of L&D
Performance

It was point four which perhaps interested me most. The suggestion was that the LPI Capability Map and survey results are suggesting a skills gap in the areas where L&D focus can be seen as moving towards (and away from course delivery)…

Curate (find/filter/interpret/share)
Community management
Performance consulting
Research
Networking and influencing

Now I do not think these are really unique to L&D, but they are interesting to me considering I have come to L&D from an information/education background. Indeed at the most basic level you may well say that resource management and building a community around the recommended materials are what libraries have always been about.

There are parallels for others too, including marketing professionals who will be experiencing similar ideas in needing to manage a social network around the brand rather than standalone marketing campaigns, which might be seen as the traditional equivalent of a L&D learning event. Other aspects would be generic to any industry – everyone should research where they are in comparison to colleagues, competitors, etc. with appropriate networking and influence for their department to achieve its aims.

The decline of corporate libraries is well documented, elsewhere they have survived through a focus on competitive intelligence, knowledge management or sector/client research. The question then is does the current L&D landscape mean investment in a ‘library’ service could be worth an organization’s time and money? The answer – perhaps not a library but certainly a clear manifestation of supporting learning via different mediums, suggesting different ways for people to develop in the way the business needs.

Finally, how best to do this? It might be that a learning management system with embedded social features – treating people (and communities of practice) as a resource alongside courses, reading, videos, podcasts, etc etc. or other similar platform?

Do we really need another conference?

This time of year is my peak time for conferences with (in December, January and February) a number of events I am interested in, including:

Online Educa (I have never attended but have followed from a far)
CES (which seems to have got a lot more coverage in Britain this year)
the UK Blackboard User Group (very relevant in my old role but missed this year)
Learning Technology Conference and Exhibition (I have not attended the conference but have visited the exhibition for a number of years) and…

BETT (where I have also attended the free exhibition a number of times).

The big change to the above, this year, is that BETT (British Educational Technology Tradeshow) is transforming itself. Moving from Olympia to the ExCeL, BETT is expanding from its 5-18 year old learner focus with new parallel Higher and Professional Education conferences. These two events are free although presumably the aim, by filtering applicants this year, is to ensure their success and then sell tickets next year.

The move by BETT is interesting in that they are looking to support learning technology in the wider sense. Their diagram illustration of this is similar to some of the explanations I have done in the past for how my experience and skill set can be applied and are not specific to industry or the age of the learner ‘customer’.

This change can be seen as a brave move by the organizers of BETT – whilst there has clearly been support for the event in the past (Michael Gove opened it last year; Vince Cable this) – expanding into new areas in the current economic situation seems risqué. Alternatively, having the event in the same week as the Learning Technology event may cut participants/delegates travel costs as they can ‘make a week of it’ – or it puts BETT in direction position as an alternative (considering many people will only be able to take limited time off work). Interestingly the Association for Learning Technology are listed within the ‘in association with’ section for the HE event, I did not attend ALT’s own conference last year – partly due to the cost.

On the COLRIC JISCMail list there has recently been a discussion on what words can be used other than ‘conference’ – this got me thinking about what different events are really trying to achieve.

conference (mix of sessions [talk, workshops, seminar, etc] but normally talk led with sponsor stalls – in academic spheres conferences will include full ‘papers’ and a focus on research based practice)
tradeshow (wider mix of stalls, focus on selling and product developments)
symposium (suggestion on the COLRIC list that this might be too American to be widely used in the UK)
workshop (interactive with participants ‘doing’ rather than listening)
user group (normally smaller than a full-blown conference but with a focus or common thread on a piece of software, theory, methodology, etc)
roadshow (demonstrations, presentations, end-user support/training)
roundtable (everyone on an equal footing, bar possibly a coordinator, contributing their viewpoint – highly interactive)
seminar (singular meeting/discussion often started by a talk/presentation/demo)
webinar (singular event or the delivery mechanism for parts of an online conference, user group, etc; usually presentation followed by discussion)

In all of the above examples networking around the ‘event’ is of course a key aspect and online networking (Twitter I am looking at you) will keep the conversation going beyond the physical or scheduled activity.

So are the changes to BETT really needed? I would say that, especially when I worked in HE, there was no shortage of elearning events and conferences which supported the need for the sector to develop. A number of years on, some changes are happening (MOOCs being the most obvious) but a lot of talking has failed to really drive change. Therefore, I set the new BETT conferences, both the HE and corporate events, the challenge of focusing on how attendees can get best practice embedded in their organization – not just agreement between attendees which is all too often ‘preaching to the converted’.

If they fail to do this then BETT remains, as it was before, a networking opportunity, an opportunity to catch up with changes in technology and theory. But this would mean that in many ways I would feel the HE and corporate strands would risk replicating and repeating other events. The benefit of attending BETT in the past was to be more aware of the 5-18 (k-12) sector and learn lessons from it. Pushing people intro the three stands of compulsory, post-compulsory and corporate education will risk loosing that cross-pollination.

Overall, it will be interesting to attend the corporate stream at BETT this year (my other physical event attendance is likely to be limited to the Learning Technologies exhibition) but I would not be surprised if, when I reflect on the week, I decide BETT is best for getting me away from my current sector and engaging with those companies whose primary focus is elsewhere but ideas and technology can be leveraged in corporate training and higher education.

My initial thoughts on FutureLearn

FutureLearn, and MOOCs in general, have of course been in the news a lot recently so I thought I would put my initial response here for my future record. This is the response I gave to a colleague…

…Ultimately [it has seemed to me that] a lot of [Higher Education] management don’t ‘get’ the possibilities (especially the scale [the University of] Phoenix and others operate on) and have been slow to support online, others continue to be put off by the eUniversity experience. That said, when institutions have had a branded offer (Ulster CampusOne for example) student numbers have been low so it might make sense to aggregate even if many institutions will see it only as a way to advertise/sell full courses … the OU might steal a leap and continue to take a bigger share of the pie through Apps and other innovations.

Personally, I think the key question is how many resources will be pooled here. If it’s limited, they would be better opening up their existing course catalogues and online environments so courses are more discoverable via Google, etc. The idea of creating a portal which people go to because of perceived quality all seems a bit pre-Google to me.

Jisc has announced they are supporting the idea of this but they are perhaps the only organisation which could encourage proper shared systems and resources. I remember the JISC conference 6(?) years ago talking about this, in terms of SaaS, so it’s only taken half a decade.

… [Is there a] big fear that tutors would just go off and put something on Alison or build a MOOC – [when] there is a real trade off between reputations, publishing opportunities, salaries/bonuses and most tutors/experts actually enjoying classroom teaching beyond any other bit of their job[?]

Lots of great posts on this elsewhere, including:

Donald Taylor (http://donaldhtaylor.wordpress.com/2012/11/28/what-price-moocs/)
Gavin Henrick (http://www.somerandomthoughts.com/blog/2012/12/21/more-thoughts-on-moocs/)

I would also agree with the ALT members lists which seemed to come to the conclusion that the key element will be how the ‘1.0’ generation of MOOCs are evaluated and lessons learned impact on 2.0.

Capability models – useful structure in an unsure world

CILIP have recently published a new ‘Professional Knowledge and Skills Base‘ for uses including:

Self-assessment tool for planning personal and professional development
Demonstrating your skill set to employers
Framework for in-house learning and development
CILIP’s own course validation and standards processes.

CILIP are set to back this up with “some guides to different sectors” to show how the PKSB applies to different library and information roles across the various industries they appear in.

However, do such guides really help members identify their expertise or ignore the wider trend in a period of austerity and redundancies?

I would argue that these high-level guides are very useful to set out the areas involved in a professional identity, which can then be filled out with more detailed knowledge and skills specific to a job. It should also help with the mapping of learning outcomes from development activities to ensure they are indeed improving knowledge or skills.

The problem may come with the proliferation of professional organizations as a result of disillusionment with the cost of professional membership against the independent opportunities available via social media and local activities. The other issue is that as professional boundaries break down with new roles I would marry skill sets from, amongst others, CILIP, LPI and CIPD. As such, perhaps the most interesting thing is the variation in approach between bodies.

Following conferences online: the good

It has taken a long time to get to this post – partly as I struggled to catch up with ALT-C online. However, I thought I would comment after seeing Brian Kelly’s post on Does Sharing on Mobile Devices Hinder Real World Discussions?

I would agree with Brian’s points:

In reality, I would argue that use of Twitter at conferences helps to develop new links and strengthen existing connections.

But also stress the value in extending the scope of the conference beyond those physically there.

In many ways the ‘social’ elements of a conference (dinners, etc) can therefore become more important – tweet during the day, meet during the evening so to speak.

(I wrote that last point before seeing the tweet copied in Brian’s post: we are sharing and building through twitter and online but maybe next year we say no tweeting over dinner? #ili2012)