Change or no change in Workplace learning

Clive Shepherd

Change and uncertainty: the making or the breaking of corporate learning and development.

Learning methods are (relatively) timeless. Only a few are depended on media. But the choice that we made amongst them do change.
Forces for change

1. New thinking
2. new expectations
3. new pressures
   

1. New thinking

Connectivism is new; it is all about connections, more importantly we learn in 2008 by means of connections externally.
Defining neuroscience: now we are much more aware to overload learners, to change the way present things to learners, Now we know that 30 hour e-learning course are too much.

Teachers do not create learning. Learner create learning. Teachers create the conditions to facilitate learning.

2. New expectations

How gen Y want learning to be:

• Interactive
• Student-centred
• authentic
• collaborative
• on-demand
  

Don't we all want this. Maybe Gen Y says what they want. In the end we don't have to pamper Gen Y or anyone else. We need do to the right thing.
So new thinking and new expectations demand a shift in emphasis....

3. New pressures

• Time pressures : "72% of all training are time-critical" (Bersin & Associates (2005))

A pyramid of learning interventions
Formal responses (we still need those)
Rapid responses
Use-generated responses

The last becomes more and more important.

• Environmental pressures (drastical reduce of travel)
• Cost pressures (Due to the financial crisis it might occur that some training departments will be eliminated almost entirely (Jay Cross (2008)) Employees are more than your greater asset.

We can't meet these pressures, but have to choose methods to maximise the effectiveness of learning.
Media to maximise the effectiveness of learning.

Learning media are evolving rapidly. New media enable change, like web 2.0 tools.
New tools, cost are getting down remarkably
new devices, mobile devices, laptop, low-price multimedia tools, as half the people are working away from their desk.
new bandwith

A time for action...
When the rate of change outside exceeds the rate of change inside, the end is in sight (Jack Weigh)
We need to be pro-active.

Generation Y

Donald Clark (shares the session)
Ton Zijlstra

Some ideas from his intervenience.

Suggestion:
Bring in your children, it makes everything more human and talks more interesting.

Now 50% of the companies are one-person companies, it all started when mobile phones reached 2/3 of the Dutch population (2000).
Change in planning, workplace, work life balance, visibility,

Gen Y is not about the digital natives, it is about the world that has changed. Kids are kids. They like to play outside the most and secondly they like to play with the computer.

Is fooling around a part of learning?
never learned so muchn while having such fun (how do we engage them?)
Now i need to choose what to apply

Immerse yourself, be Gen Y(ou)

Training Teachers to carry out e-learning

Inger-Marie F. Christensen is hosting this session and she works for a organisation which wants to facilate e-learning and its tools.

How do they work at the University in Denmark?

Copyrights is something that always pops up. Therefore they have one person responsible for that.
A lot of teachers think that is too time consuming. They are still looking for the best solution to engage teachers in carryin out e-learning.

How motivating teachers, what competences are needed?

• By helping the enthousiasts and hopefully they bring more and more teachers online.
• Sometimes you have to oblige people using several tools.
• Oblige teachers on an online archive folder.
  
• In that way it is easy to uploading it to an LMS.A course on e-moderator is obliged to all teachers.
• Start with teaching them the basic skills of computing.
• What kind of learning activities do your students have to undertake? And what activities can you teach online? What do you hope that they do online?
• Pedagogical approach.
• e-learning support. A responsible person who can tackle the problems teachers have in creating their courses. Just to avoid that they stop at the first barrier (f.i. what if they forgot their password).
  
• Define first what you want to develop. Afterwards the software pops-up.
• Teaching face-to-face sets the teacher as a leader, while an online course gives other opportunities.
• Look for easy software, so that teachers don't have problems with that.
• We have to follow the new way of living, don't stay with "medieval" ways of teaching. In a supermarket workers were obliged to use the barcode system (otherwise they were fired), while in teaching they tend to stay on his 'traditional', well known way.
  
• Management needs to be positive about introducing e-courses, otherwise it will not work.
  
• Gully Salman model. 5-steps model.

The formal model is below. Enjoy!


Conclusions.

How do we secure motivation and commitment?
We believe that you have to put in the compulsery field.
If they get the chance to teach one course online, they will know what it is like.
The e-course has te be firmly planned.

Embedding web 2.0 into workplace learning

Paul Coyne shows some Case studies and reflections:
Why workplace based learning?
Develops critical awareness of research and inquiry issues - self awareness
Involves learning practical

We have a diversity of

• learners on the workplace.
• learning platforms (formal and informal)

Do we support these formats?
Formal course (using web2.0 tools like blog for reflection, wiki for group and individual work
Use of a non-formal academy with action learning, group focus, personal reflection, tacit to explicit knowledge exchange and assessed. (blogs for learning blogs, personal reflection, wiki for group reflection).

He used ELGG open source platform.
After the first month of launch not a big use. Why?

• Another system to learn,
  
• more passwords to remember,
  
• security and confidentiality concerns,
  
• high barriers to participation.

In the meanwhile some other were impressed as

• sms and email alerts were included,
  
• remote contribution to mail, text, ms word and other tools allowed,
  
• reduced the feature set and simplified the design.

After some changes the first users used it more frequently as

• They didn't need to learn a new IT platform in order to use the service effectively.
  
• They can use the more advanced web 2.0 features.

Still some will never use this as

• security and confidentiality concerns
• anxiety of expressing opinions on a public safe
• inability of teaching staff to use the system
• Can't see the value or the point for such an approach.

Some reflections:

• Simple, works (don't offer all users all features, it can be very overwelming)
• web 2.0 evangelism will get you so far
• Be prepared (f.i. support the staff in the long term)
  

Web 2.0 tools and Workplace Learning

Hank Horkoff

Time is too short supply
Not personalised
A lifetime endeavour

Web2.0 tools can address these problems Key success factors are :

• Customization
  
• Collaboration
  
• Channels
  

Podcasts are at the core. They are modular.
Daily routine go to the website, practice (10') f.i. with councelar, at home using Ipod.
In stead of going to the classroom transfer it to your own personal life.

Customize to individual students, if you want to pay for.
1% of students actively contribute to forums, etc...
Try to split the group of students in smaller groups, in order to increase interaction.

Roles of classroom and ICT
In 1980 the classroom was responsible for 100%
In 2000 classroom was still responsible for 75%
In 2006 ICT levels the role of the classroom (50%)
In the future the role of ICT will increase.

Presentation of Hank Horkoff can be found on http://thenetworksense.com/

The future of education

Dr. Michael Wesch (on you tube better known as Mike Wesch) talked about the future of education mostly based on this movie: A vision of Students Today

Look close and enjoy.

Keywords in his presentation were:
User-generated Content
User-generated Filter
User-generated Organisation
User-generated Distribution
User-generated Commentary
User-generated Ratings

Online Educa Berlin: Plenary session

Dr. Harold Elleston ( The new security Foundation, UK) opens the conference by telling that this conference is not just a conference, it is a Phenomenon because of us, the participants, we are here to transfer knowledge, when you come to the conference you feel a kind of optimism in contradiction with the newspapers headlines.

This year we have 2064 delegates of 91 countries.

Top four of the delegation Poland, Norway, The Netherlands and British as highest with 247 delegates.