A Corporate Mini-MOOC on Digital Literacy Skills...An Idea Growing in My Head

Reblogged from Activate Learning Solutions:

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For a while now, I've been teasing out an idea in my mind about rolling out a mini-MOOC in our organisation. After reading Ignatia de Waard's eBook MOOC Yourself , watching the Google Hangout with Jay Cross and Dave Cormier and completing various MOOCs,  I thought that it was high time to start applying this in the corporate context.

For those who have been reading my blog, you may have noticed my fascination for the MOOC but in particularly, eagerly awaiting if any Australian corporate has created their own for their staff and/or customers.

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I really like this idea of Helen's, as a lot of you know I struggle with how to utilise 3rd party mooc's as part of a corporate learning stratagey, however in concept of inhouse style mooc's I think is a good one.

Learning to Change and Changing to Learn or BBQing the scared cows

 Why is it so hard to people to accept change?

 Sorry for the lack of posts recently the world of work was very busy over the last couple of weeks, which has amongst other things prompted my thinking around change in the workplace, changing how we learn and how we deliver learning and change management in general.

Organisational change is a difficult and sometimes messy beast, but there is a lot I think we can learn by changing and by thinking about how to change.  Over the past few months I have been involved heavily in assisting an organisation through a process of change around how a core piece of their training.  This is a total revamp of the package, content packaging, delivery, even the outcomes of the training and its structure to achieve those outcomes.  We really were BBQing sacred cows with this change and there in lies the issues I wanted to touch on today.  The concept of changing something in order to learn and people and organisations learning how to change.

To paint a little bit of a picture, there had been for about 12 months or so prior to this change been a level of discontent in some quarters about the training that was being delivered, particularly around how it was delivered and what the outcomes were, it was frankly, starting to show its age.  That is not to say that it was fatally flawed, just ideas about delivery and content had moved on as had the landscape into which its outcomes fell.

As a result a project was put together to look over the entire package of the training and see what could be done to make it better fit the outcomes that were needed.  Now it was made clear at the start of the project that there really wasn’t any part of the training that was out of scope, if something needed to be changed and there was good justification to change it and it was going to fit the outcomes better, then there was an ongoing commitment to change.

So after about 6 months of consultation and work the team started to talk about and show parts of the new package to stakeholders and this is where an interesting thing happened, a lot of the people who had been critical of the original training program, did not like what they were seeing and we heard things like,

“Why did you change that?”

“That’s not how we do things around here.”

“You have changed everything, it’s not the same course.”

People who had previously complained about the program were now defending it and a lot of the issues seemed to be around the fact that things had actually changed,  the Powerpoint hadn’t just been updated, the actual material, how it was being presented and the outcomes had all be reimagined.  It drove home to me the fact that a lot of the time people don’t actually want change or at least not real change, they want superficial change, so that they can still feel safe and comfortable in what they know.

It really strikes me as a shame though we as individuals and organisations learn so much through change, if everything stayed the same why would we need to learn anything new, how would we grow and become better at what we do.  In fact some of my strongest learning come out of the most confronting of changes.  Now I know that individuals and organisations have vested interests in staying where they are, in not changing, but not changing is an evolutionary dead-end, it goes nowhere.

Both as individuals and os organisations we really need to Learn to change and change to learn.

Manifesto for Learning and Development

First of a big thansk to Simon Ruscoe for pointing out this article by Cathy Moore to me.  This is a fantastic blog post, which should serve to remind us all that sometimes it is the simple things that we should continue to do and to stand our ground on with the business that will make the most difference in the long run.

Manifesto for Learning and Development

 

EduTech 2013 – Some comments and ideas

As  lot of you already know I spent the last two days at EduTech 2013 – Corporate and Government Learning Congress.

and already a couple of people who didn’t attend asked me ‘How was it?’  Well it was good, I enjoyed it, Day one was for me better than day (and I will explain why later) and again for those of you who know me I usually at these things spend a fair bit of time in the exhibition hall talking to vendors and seeing where things are going.  I often joke with people (though in truth it is not a joke) that I learn as much from the exhibition floor as I do from the presentations, that didn’t happen this time and I didn’t really spend all that much time in the exhibition area, why? Well I think because the focus of the entire event has traditionally been Formal Education k-12 and tertiary, and the corporate market is a very different one, there are different vendors and people like me are looking for very different things.

For example; wandering around I spoke with vendors who made an assumption that I worked for school, even though everyone had different coloured lanyards, (though to be completely fair I had a presenter one so I could have been anyone) and seemed confused when I said look sorry I don’t work for a school I work for a large organisation and seemed to continue to talk to me about something I was never going to be interested in, some of the stands even restricted entry into their competitions to people having a valid education institute email address it was little things like that, and that  I am not interest in hardware and servers I have an IT department for that, I am  not interested in school management software, i’m not a school.  I am interested in learning and training aids (and not just ones that involve ipads or technology) for adults, learning content and delivery, not curriculum, things that the corporate side of learning is interested in.

Now this might sound like a criticism, it is not meant to be, but I think there needs to be some work done in how the exhibition hall is set out, maybe segmenting it a little bit, perhaps as two people now have suggested, putting the ‘corporate’ venders in one section of the hall, rather than being spread out, something that makes it more engaging for me.

Now the exhibitors are one thing, the content is something else and it is the content on which a conference will ultimately thrive or fail.  As I said I liked day one much more than day two, why?, well that is simple, day one was much more practical with an array of outstanding  Learning talent, Charles Jennings is always great to listen too, and Natalie Goldman and Helen Blunden are outstanding practitioners with solid practical, hands on experience and wonderful delivery styles that engage and provide the audience with solid outcomes and value.  Day two was very different however, not in the skill or expertise of the presenters, but in the content.  My pick of the day was Ewan Macintosh from NoTosh, who offered some truly interesting insights followed closely by John Stericker who was insightful funny, without a single powerpoint slide to help him along (it was an outstanding job in my opinion as it was his first time presenting at a major conference).  As for the rest of the day, the breakout sessions were solid, but not as engaging as they might have been, and while I like to think about the future of L&D and data and all of those things, but what interests me and I think I lot of us in the game of corporate L&D is how to solve todays problems, how to engage with our learners today and over the next 12-18 months.  Now I know that is short-term thinking  and we need to look to the future and I talk about where we need to be and how to get there constantly at an executive level, but and here is the big but, there are plenty of problems that need fixing now and over the next 3-6 months that are in real terms far more important for us.

So all in all I had a really good time, I want to think Fiona, and Charles and Tony from EduTech, for being so helpful and making the experience a great one.  I hope you decide to continue with the corporate congress in 2014.  I look forward to attending.

New Community on Google+

So I have created a new community on Google+ called Organisational Learning and Development

https://plus.google.com/communities/109783412464520607298?fd=1

It is somewhere where we can all get together and talk about all things learning and development within organisations, be they big small or in the middle.

So if you are on Google + come and join and start chatting and if you are not on plus come and join it and have a conversation.

Four HR Directors enter a pub...

Reblogged from People Performance Potential:

Four HR Directors enter a pub.

The first HRD says... "Do you know what, I've come to realise that my HR function is ineffective. In fact I couldn''t even tell you what our purpose and values are. What should I do?"

The second HRD says... "I think my HR function is effective and we've defined our purpose & values.

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David, has posed a great little thought experiment here. Have a think about the question for yourself and I think that you might learn something.

VET, RTO’s and Innovative Accelerated Learning

How long doe sit take to train someone, how long does it take to be competent.

I have been involved in a number of discussions around the time it takes for someone to be competent.  Mostly this has revolved around the Cert IV in Training and Assessment qualification, however it did bring home to me once again the abuses of Australia’s Nationally Accredited VET system that occur in the name of profit, while be wrapped in this veneer of Innovative or Accelerated Learning.

Now first off I need to be very clear here; I am not against innovation or accelerated learning, I have plenty of examples of both, both within the VET sector, and external to it that has provided participants and organisations with the outcomes they were looking for.

Too often though, the terms Innovative delivery and accelerated learning, are simply code for how can we get as many people through the door as possible in the shortest possible time.

Why is this such a large issue in the RTO world, well because, despite what people may argue, it is not an open commercial market place, where market decides the value of the course or program and part of that decision is how the program is delivered and the outcomes it provides.  No the VET system is one where, the government sets the price for courses, through funding.  Now I admit this is a little bit of a simplification, the government does not actually say that the price of a  Cert IV qualification is $3000, it says we will give an organisation or a person $3000 to be trained in this qualification, it is not for want of a better analogy a recommended retail price on to p of which the RTO may place a premium.  It is simply the dollar amount the government will provide for the qualification.

So if therefore it costs an RTO $2500 to deliver the program and the government funding they get, either directly or through organisations is $3000, then they are making $500 per participant.  So therefore it makes sense if an RTO can reduce the cost related to delivery they can increase their profitability.  One very easy way to do this is to simply make the course shorter, with less contact time between the trainer/assessor and the participants, therefore reducing a significant cost and releasing the trainer to run other courses.  Shorter courses also means more course can be run over a 12 month period of time, therefore again more profit.

Again I need to state that I am not against RTO’s making a profit, private RTO’s are necessary and they need to be able to be profitable in order to be able to provide the service they do.  The problem for me is RTO’s that put profit before outcomes, who believe that they have some right to issue Nationally Accredited Qualifications (rather than it being a privilege) and using the smoke screen of Innovative Delivery and Accelerated Learning to cover up bad practices and bad outcomes solely designed to increase their profit margins.

It takes time to train people properly, particularly if they don’t have any background skills in the area, it takes more than 5 days for someone to be a competent Trainer and Assessor, it takes more than 12 days for someone to be a competent aged care worker and it doesn’t matter how you wrapper it.  Competence takes time.