If it keeps on rainin’, levee’s goin’ to break. When the levee breaks, I’ll have no place to stay. – Led Zeppelin

While the International Trainer lands at the airport, is chauffeured to her hotel, and dutifully reviews her slides and prepares her materials, a literally and figuratively captive audience has been herded at great cost to that same hotel, lured in by a perverse combination of incentives. The costs are mostly related to the incidentals of travel and accommodation, but the stakes are significant. Never mind that the outcomes are unlikely to be evaluated in any meaningful way. The symbolism of such ‘learning theater’ is well-rehearsed. Its funding is seldom questioned. In any case, questioning its value does not seem to slow down expenditure, much less lead to meaningful change in practice. 

The whole affair is a fascinating microcosm of the broader power relationships that underpin global development. Let us explore how this could be, from the vantage point of the International Training Specialist.

You love training. It is indeed a powerful experience to be the ‘sage on the stage’, presenting, explaining, and demonstrating. Nowhere is that power more evident than in the architecture of an international training. It is power, and in fact it is by analyzing the imbalance of power that we are more likely to make sense of the peculiar role ascribed to the International Trainer in global health.

Bringing knowledge to those who are assumed not to know, to lack capacity, feels rewarding but is based on an assumption of superiority over others. Yet, it feels like you cannot possibly be doing anything wrong. How could teaching be harmful? You are here to help them, after all. For you, it is a profoundly humanizing experience to spend quality time with a small group, at great cost. You are intuitively convinced that it is time and money well-spent. You have observed your trainees’ eyes light up with the knowledge you have given them. They are consistently grateful. You love training. And you are convinced that they love being trained. Here they are, lined up in neat rows or – if you are a progressive trainer – circles, smiling and seemingly eager to receive your expertise.

Yes, there are lingering questions about outcomes. You seldom hear how things turn out after flying back to Atlanta. Your job, you tell yourself, is to deliver training. Mission accomplished. Measuring learning, you tell yourself, is difficult. But this does not worry you. You feel that it is working, and that is good enough for you. No one is really questioning your work, anyway. Every project has a budget line to cover travel, accommodation, and per diem. Job security seems guaranteed and lifelong. What a wonderful business to be in: a cost center that is tacitly accepted as necessary.

Empowered by such convictions, you are offended when you first hear about teaching machines. The idea seems simply absurd. You do not take it seriously. Its advocates are outsiders to the ‘training space’ that is your preserve. They are a strange bunch, seemingly passionate about things that make no sense to you. It sounds like they want to replace the complex human experiences that you love with something else. And that you may not be part of that ‘something else.’

You scoff at the potential use of technology to support learning. “They [your trainees] will never have access”, you exclaim. “It is too expensive and they do not even have X.” (X will first be electricity, then wifi, then mobile connectivity, but you dismiss the fact that things are changing quickly.) The proponents of digital learning obviously do not know everything you know about the reality of work and learning in the field.  You do not question how you know what you know. Your assumptions form blinders that you do not know you wear.

Managers and donors may occasionally challenge you. You have become quite effective at advocating for more training. Managers, you say, need to support staff development by accepting that people should stop work in order to learn. You have persuaded donors that training is the solution, even though you add that it is not always that. They have invested hundreds of millions of dollars, with no evidence of impact, but, curiously, remain willing to blindly invest more. You feel that this is an accomplishment, evidence of the validity and success of your craft.

You do not, by any means, feel responsible for the lack of evidence. Your experience, on a personal level, is sufficient. You are an International Trainer. Let the evaluators deal with that. Change at the level system, you think, is above your pay grade. You have no incentive to question your role in that system. You get paid at the end of each month, no matter the outcomes.

For as long as you can, you deny that meaningful learning can happen online. You ignore the conclusions of the two largest meta-analyses comparing modes of learning (face-to-face, blended, and online). 

Because you sit in an institution that is a key player in global health, your denial does have consequences. Your “expertise” results in startlingly ineffective and improductive investments. Yet no one is holding you accountable for your convictions, your priorities, or your disregard for evidence. Your seniority leads others to consider you as the authority in your domain of expertise. You wield authority without accountability, with all the risk that entails, but somehow manage to remain unscathed.

Denial becomes harder to maintain over time. Reluctantly, you timidly recognize that perhaps online learning may be used to transmit information, albeit in limited ways. You become an advocate for click-through e-learning modules that are proliferating in international organizations, often promoted by human resources departments. Once again, you disregard the evidence already available about the limited effectiveness of this kind of “e-learning”. In a way, the inefficacy of such modules is your job security. At best, your teaching methods are being mimicked in an inferior digital format. That is reassuring. The technology is so imperfect and frustrating, you tell yourself that a machine presenting slides will never be as compelling as you can be in that hotel auditorium. And good luck getting the participants to show up and pay attention online, while your audiences remain captive.

Peer learning scares you. Experts teach. Not everyone can or should. Peers can, at best, share their experience. You are convinced that this should not happen without proper supervision. If peers support each other in a country in order to get something done, but there is no International Trainer present to observe, assess, or validate it, how could it be making a difference? More generally, you dismiss self-reporting as unreliable, doubting in both your trainees’ honesty or perhaps their intellectual ability to describe or analyze what they are doing or how they are doing it. You are the only one who can truly know. You are the International Trainer.

As donors timidly begin to question the value of your model, you double down on training as you have always done it. You look for arguments to undermine emerging approaches. Some are fragile innovations being offered by new entrants no one had ever heard of. Like the earlier proponents of digital learning, their mental models are completely foreign to you. You are convinced that your prevailing model is correct and therefore does not need to be questioned. When they present promising results, you either dismiss them or look for limitations and frailties. The latter are inherent to any innovation, but you use your established institutional position to dismiss, undermine, and marginalize. You believe that is your role. Your ability to influence is primarily negative, because the approaches you have advocated have so clearly failed. In fact, you hope that no one will start to ask questions about your outcomes. And, luckily, no one does.

Scaremongering does seem to work with your global health colleagues. Innovation may be a buzzword but it is nowhere in their work plans or performance objectives. They are already risk-adverse in order to keep their jobs, even those who have “innovation” in their titles. It is implicitly an existential question: if people in countries turned out to have indigenous expertise of their own contexts, and global knowledge is increasingly available through digital networks, this would threaten a number of prevailing assumptions about why and how the International Trainer is needed.

Then came the pandemic.

ADELAIDE, 27 November 2020 (University of South Australia) – More than 80 million children under the age of one at risk of vaccine-preventable diseases.

UniSA researchers are evaluating a new vaccination education initiative – the COVID-19 Peer Hub – to help immunisation and public health professionals tackle the emerging dangers of vaccine hesitancy amid the pandemic.

From March to April 2020, more than 50 per cent of immunisation programs around the world have reported significant disruptions to their vaccination services.

The new program is developed and delivered by The Geneva Learning Foundation, and supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the COVID-19 Peer Hub programme is connecting more than 4000 immunisation professionals across the globe – most of them working in developing countries – in a bid to keep essential vaccination programs open and safe during COVID-19.

UniSA’s Centre for Change and Complexity in Learning has been engaged by the Geneva Learning Foundation to research the COVID-19 Peer Hub. Preliminary findings show that it is fostering new approaches for immunisation staff who often remain the most trusted advisors and influencers of vaccination decisions.

Reda Sadki, President of The Geneva Learning Foundation says overcoming vaccine hesitancy is now a primary challenge for immunisation professionals.

“In 2020, immunisation has never been more important. But amid the pandemic, routine immunisation services have been severely disrupted, leaving more than 80 million children under the age of one at risk of vaccine-preventable diseases,” Sadki says.

“Because of the infectious nature of COVID-19, many people have been reluctant to bring their children to public health facilities for fear of infection. But, by avoiding immunisations, they’re placing their children at risk of other vaccine-preventable diseases including measles, polio, rubella and rotavirus, which can be life-threatening for very young children.”

The Geneva Learning Foundation COVID-19 Peer Hub is working to remedy this by providing a forum for thousands of immunisation professionals to connect and share new ideas and existing practices to tackle vaccine hesitancy, maintain immunisation coverage despite the pandemic, and prepare for COVID-19 vaccines.

UniSA project lead, Dr Vitomir Kovanović, says such initiatives are critical for building collective wisdom that can be leveraged and adapted to counteract vaccine avoidance.

“Current information sharing processes are hierarchical and slow, losing too much information as it progresses down the chain,” Dr Kovanović says.

“By connecting immunisation professionals from around the world, there is a fantastic opportunity for sharing new ideas and existing practices that can contribute to maintain immunisation coverage during the pandemic.

“Importantly, with more than more than 90 per cent of participants reporting that the program has been useful for their work, we’re clearly onto a good thing.”

Reda Sadki, President of The Geneva Learning Foundation says that education initiative has delivered a valuable and timely resource for health professionals.

“We were already building a digital platform to support immunisation staff when the pandemic hit,” Sadki says.

“We had very little time to pivot. The Centre for Change and Complexity in Learning has provided – just in time – the capability, talent, and tools we needed to make sense of the deluge of data that participants have been generating.

“Furthermore, these data are empowering immunisation staff to generate ideas and turn them into action and results, while informing ministries of health and global partners in ways that simply would not be possible without learning analytics. The Centre is truly helping us ‘close the learning loop’.”

Notes to editors

The full project team includes Dr Vitomir Kovanović, Dr Sasha Poquet and Professor George Siemens, and current and former UniSA Masters of Data Science students: Aastha Rawat, Sidarth Nair and Bipin Karki.

Source: https://www.unisa.edu.au/media-centre/Releases/2020/covid-19-peer-hub-combats-vaccine-avoidance-amid-pandemic/

“Please, I need someone to enlighten me on the pros and cons of online courses for active learning and professional development.”

There is quite a bit of contextual information missing to decode what is really being asked. We only know that it is an individual professional from an anglophone country in Africa. Still, I can think of at least three ways to answer this question.

Answer #1. Wrong question.

This is the wrong question. Pros and cons depend on the quality of the pedagogy, the teaching and facilitation team, the resources, technologies used, context, learning and learner objectives… everything except the medium.

Review a course against criteria like the above, not as an abstract consideration. Define your own goals. What are you hoping to achieve?

What is the relationship between perceived quality and cost?

The residential experience is still perceived as the gold standard for education. And it tends to be the most expensive.

To what extent are your choices driven by an economic imperative?

Are you considering an online course because you cannot afford a residential experience or it is otherwise not feasible (lack of time, inability to travel)? Are you assuming that lower cost signifies lower quality? What kind of credential will have value that you are willing to pay for? Will potential employers recognize this credential?

Answer #2. The research says digital is better.

Years ago, Bill Cope pointed me to the two most comprehensive meta-analyses (here and here) comparing online, blended, and face-to-face learning outcomes. One way to summarize these studies? Since 1992, people who learn online get slightly better learning outcomes than those who learn face-to-face, after leveling for all other differences. Furthermore, there appeared to be no benefit from blended learning, except for the fact that people tend to spend more time learning because they do more work, tending to repeat practice online with practice face-to-face.

Of course, it is much more complicated than that.

People fear losing per diem (receiving cash for attendance), the ability to create new relationships and see people they know and work with remotely, travel and other perks, time away from work… that is usually where resistance to digital learning comes from. There is also a lot of really bad, ineffective digital learning that is very damaging, replicating the worst of face-to-face methods and practice.

Learning outcomes are often just one goal being sought through training. (Conventional instructional design sees this as a problem. In fact, it is an amazing opportunity for those of us who are interested in education as a philosophy for change.)

Access to opportunities, professional network development, credentials of value, and many other goals may actually be more valued by learners than the knowledge acquired. Knowledge acquisition is likely to be the least valuable part of learning beyond the basics.

Adapted from: Staton, M.P., 2013. Unbundling Higher Education, A Doubly Updated Framework.

Answer #3. It’s all digital, now.

The key consideration is the rate of change of the digital transformation that is sweeping across our societies. This has enabled new ways to work and learn remotely. For example, coaches and mentors will hold Skype calls without even realizing that they have gone “digital” and are now practicing digital learning. They may in fact still be adamant about their skepticism that it is possible “learn online” and remain attached to sharing physical space to practice their craft, oblivious to their own dependence on technology and the way it benefits them.

The change is profound. Technology is embedded not only in our every day work but in the fabric of our lives and cultures.  

Almost a decade ago, Nathan Jurgenson coined the term digital dualism, “the habit of viewing the online and offline as largely distinct.”

“But this idea that we are trading the offline for the online, though it dominates how we think of the digital and the physical, is myopic. It fails to capture the plain fact that our lived reality is the result of the constant interpenetration of the online and offline. That is, we live in an augmented reality that exists at the intersection of materiality and information, physicality and digitality, bodies and technology, atoms and bits, the off and the online. It is wrong to say ‘IRL’ to mean offline: Facebook is real life.“

Of course, digital learning is imperfect. It remains horribly clunky, ironically difficult to use, and mired with the legacy of transmissive lectures, an obsession with summative assessment, and a foggy nebula of evidence. Yet that it beside the point. Why? It is very early days and what matters is the accelerating pace of change: everything in digital learning is changing all the time, with new tools, platforms, processes constantly improving.

With face-to-face training, the rate of change is, to put it politely, slow. Face-to-face is a wonderful medium. Sharing physical space is our most familiar gateway to intimacy. It is an “always-on” experience, rendering isolation from other humans painful in some instances and a relief in others. However, the use of physical space for learning has finite limits, as some of the basic constraints of physical space are immutable. For example, simultaneous dialogue in which everyone has a voice is difficult to achieve in a physical space. (It’s called ‘everyone’s yelling at each other’ in a room and the chat box in a digital space.) It works best in formats that are low volume due to high cost, and the most effective formats are difficult if not impossible to scale.

The possibilities with digital seem endless by comparison — despite the current clunkiness, limitations, and frustrations that face-to-face trainers may feel because they lose the familiarity of experience that they are used to, digital means are enabling new ways of doing new things. And that is what we need because it is obvious that the conventional means we have been using are failing to deliver the outcomes we need.

What does this answer mean to the potential purchaser of education? If digital is the new default, quality and value in education are in flux, more than they have been for centuries. There are new factors to consider in the complex equation of when and how to invest in one’s professional development. The medium is just one consideration, but may not be a matter of choice.

Image: International fruit combo. Personal collection.

L&D is dead.

Pushing us down the blind alley of technological solutionism, the learning technologists have demoted learning to tool selection.

• Microlearning reduces the obsession with knowledge acquisition from a one-hour video to 60 one-minute videos.
• Gamification is lipstick on the pig of behaviorism.
• xAPI and other “X”-buzzwords are just the latest tin con by desperate LMS vendors.
• Fantasizing that VR or AR will save us perpetuates the persistent confusion between tools and process.

As ‘learning leaders’ we are condemning ourselves to irrelevance by chasing ephemeral fads, investing in empty gimmicks, and embracing bearded gurus spouting non-sense.

• ‘Learning in the flow of work’ is a successful consultant’s buzz word, but will not help us any more than 70-20-10 did.
• Leadership ‘development’ remains about pampering a few executives old enough to appreciate cushy hotel and conference rooms.
• Kirkpatrick died, replaced by a coterie of rabid Kirkpatrick wannabes frothing at the mouth about their new, convoluted learning ‘measurement’ systems, pretending they are now driven by research, in denial that evidence for education in general – and for learning and development in particular – is pathetically weak.

Clutching the pearls of ‘strategic relevance’ to the business supported by pseudo-studies to measure ROI is, at best, a tenuous proposition when every choice in the labyrinth of possibilities leads to the dead end of a cost center in perpetuity.

How could the role of education for the future be limited to providing better tools, in the midst of a Fourth Industrial Revolution or Second Machine Age, in which a range of new technologies are fusing the physical, digital and biological worlds?

It is mostly a failure of imagination. That is the only reason to shed a tear.

Image: Inside a lava tube, Kazumura Cave, Pahoa, Hawai’i (Personal collection).