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).

Copenhagen. I chat with two “learning consultants”, whose job it is in their respective universities to help faculty improve how they teach.

Much to my dismay, I understand that their role is perceived as being about the adoption of new tools (“Should I use Adobe Connect or Zoom?”). Yet they are a case in point that learning technologists provide a rare opportunity for university faculty to think through how they teach.

In such institutions of teaching and learning, guess who is paid more?

Cue Felder’s infamous quote: “College teaching may be the only skilled profession for which systematic training is neither required nor provided – pizza delivery jobs come with more instruction.”

Subject matter experts are a problem.

They are expensive. If they are good, they tend to be too busy to contribute.

They often confuse knowing with teaching.

Their best intention is to transmit what they know.

They tend to think a lot about what they need to do to teach (and maybe how to do so), rather than considering what learners need to do in order to learn.

Consequently, they are disappointed and stymied by the apparent passivity of learners. “I wish my students would participate more!”

This problem is compounded by peer learning. It is legitimate to yearn for validation from an established expert. However, the shining light of expertise can blind learners to the potential of what they might achieve together.

What if we flipped convention on its head? Subject matter expertise becomes one input. An important one. But it is pedagogy in the driver’s seat. How we come to know trumps what we know. (What we need to know changes so fast, the former is more important than the latter.)

Renewed relevance of subject matter experts may be in supporting implementation and progression to impact, not in teaching and learning. The expertise that matters is in knowing how to get business done, how to get to a result, how to negotiate the context.

But, then again, teaching and learning that is relevant should encompass that journey to implementation and impact.

If it does not, it is not teaching and there is no learning.

Photo: Bryggerness Plads, Copenhagen (March 2019). Personal collection.

We struggle with the measurement of learning.

Elaborate frameworks compete for attention. The sophistication of complexity theory or fractals, the business speak of ROI, levels, pyramids, concentric circles… every learning guru peddles a model to describe and diagnose the effects of what we try to do – and what learners actually do most often on their own.

How can we possibly describe the complex chain of correlation and causation between a learning intervention or incident and an outcome?

Is there an important distinction separating knowledge or skills “transfer” from the progression to implementation and, ultimately, impact? How much of a difference can we actually make on performance outcomes or human capital development, when so much is related to the environment’s learning culture?

I described a few of the outcomes we are observing for our most advanced global programme. Learners are transmuted into teachers, leaders, and facilitators. In some countries, learners are self-organizing to take on issues that matter to them, evolving course projects into a potentially transformative agenda.

“What you are doing is magic.”

Some are afraid of magic. Others try to mimic it, trying to replicate the secret sauce.

We are not, in fact, magicians. There is no secret sauce. The tool does not enable the process.

It is not about the platform, nor about the network. These outcomes result from modestly intersecting the science of learning with real, lived learning culture and from reframing education as philosophy for change in the Digital Age.

That, and a lot of elbow grease. Also known as execution.

Impact becomes something tangible once we start connecting the dots between course, context, and individuals.

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” states the third of Arthur C. Clarke’s three laws.

So maybe we have discovered a corollary law about “sufficiently advanced” learning.

Image: The 600-MeV Synchrocyclotron, which came into operation in 1957, was CERN’s first accelerator. Personal collection.