Quick Q&A with George Siemens on corporate MOOCs

Reda SadkiEvents, Interviews

Here is an unedited chat with George Siemens about corporate MOOCs. He is preparing an open, online symposium on scaling up corporate learning, to be announced soon. The World Bank and OECD are two international organizations that will be contributing to the conversation. Here are some of the questions we briefly discussed:

  • What is a “corporate MOOC” and why should organizations outside higher education care?
  • By Big Data or Big Corporate standards, hundreds of thousands of learners (or customers) is not massive. Corporate spending on training is massive and growing. Why is this “ground zero” for scaling up corporate learning?
  • How does educational technology change the learning function in organizations? What opportunities are being created?
  • University engagement in MOOCs has led to public debate, taking place on the web, recorded by the Chronicle of Higher Education, and spilling over into the New York Times. So where is the debate on corporate MOOCs going to take place?

For those with MOOCish six-minute attention spans, you may watch this in two sittings. Apologies to George for the slow frame rate, which is why it looks like he is lip-syncing.

Philadelphia, early morning

From communication to education

Reda SadkiContent strategy, Thinking aloud

There is of course an intimate relationship between communication and education. In many universities, both sit under the discipline of psychology.

However, in most international organizations, these tend to be siloed functions. Communication often focuses on external media relations and, in the last few years, has expanded to take on the role of organizing social media presence. Education is reduced to ‘training’ or subsumed under staff (or talent) development, sometimes (but not always) inside of human resources. Worst-case scenario: an organization may not even have a centralized learning function, even though a quick survey would probably reveal that learning, education and training are at the core of its knowledge production and dissemination.

Communication counts eyeballs, downloads, or retweets.

Education tracks what is happening behind the eyeballs – and changes it, in measurable ways. This is equally true of the industrial-age classroom (and its organizational corollary, the training workshop) as it is of online learning environments that maximize technology’s amazing economy of effort.

In a knowledge-driven economy, impact matters more than perception.

In addition to being ephemeral (especially social media), this is why communication-based approaches feel increasingly superficial.

Photo: Philadelphia sunrise, 21 April 2013.

Learn and change

Reda SadkiLearning, Learning strategy

A learning organization is an organization that has an enhanced capacity to learn and change.

Watkins and Marsick dimensions of a learning organization

Watkins and Marsick dimensions of a learning organization

 

Source: Watkins, K.E., Milton, J., Kurz, D., 2009. Diagnosing the learning culture in public health agencies. International Journal of Continuing Education & Lifelong Learning 2.
MAVEN Atlas V Launch

A question of such immense and worldwide importance

Reda SadkiThinking aloud

Scale: Predictions over the impact of climate change and globalization suggest that we will see more frequent disasters in a greater number of countries, along with more civil unrest in those states less able to cope with this rapidly changing environment, all generating a greater demand for humanitarian and development assistance (cf. Walker, P., Russ, C., 2012. Fit for purpose: the role of modern professionalism in evolving the humanitarian endeavour. International Review of the Red Cross 93, 1193–1210.)

Complexity: The world’s problems are characterized by volatility, uncertainty, and complexity in a knowledge society. The industry to tackle these growing challenges has expanded rapidly to become increasingly professionalized, with a concentrated number of global players increasingly focused on the professionalization of more than 600,000 paid aid workers and over 17 million volunteers active worldwide in UN agencies, the Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement, and the main international non governmental organizations (INGOs).

Innovation: The scale and complexity of humanitarian and development issues call for doing new things in new ways. The skills and processes that will prepare the humanitarian workers of tomorrow are not yet embedded in our educational structures. In fact, education is failing to prepare humanity for the challenges of the future. Existing partnerships do not address this gap. Attempting to do more of what has been done in the past is not the answer. No single organization can solve a question of such immense and worldwide importance. It is the future of humanity that is at stake.

Photo credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls via flickr.com

Lifebuoy soap for health

Sustainability

Reda SadkiThinking aloud

In a complex, knowledge-driven society, learning, education and training are key to sustainability. Sustainability initiatives need to explicitly make learning strategic in order to succeed in the face of growing challenges. No organization, no sector can do so alone.

Professionalization alone is not the answer. Education is failing to prepare humanity for disasters, climate change, globalization or conflicts. Existing partnerships do not address this gap. Attempting to do more of what has been done in the past is not the answer.

There are three main reasons why a profit-making enterprise has a shared interest in sustainability:

  1. To increase and maintain stability
  2. To resolve crises so that business can continue
  3. To improve the economy

This is what links profit and non-profit sectors. Learning is the unexplored conduit.

Photo credit: Under the floorboard

Chicken crossing the road

Panamanian chicken

Reda SadkiThinking aloud, Travel

Why did the chicken cross the road?

Lunch time, after a jet-lagged conference morning. Hand shakes and smiles, mingling Spanish and English. Forks and knives scrape plates as we skewer the plump, roast chicken.

Within the first 90 seconds, I am being mandated or tasked to request funding immediately upon returning to headquarters. Before dessert, we are exploring how Caribbean and Asia Pacific island nations could – should – work together on sustainability. There is funding for that, too.

Pause. Smile. Eyes light up.  Puckers his lips. Whispers. Confides.

“Cross-cutting.”

“It’s a magic word,” he bursts out. Say this word and you are skewering the organizational silos. You are cutting through the red tape. You are opening the doors to the world. You are bridging the gap.

Why did the chicken cross the road? To get to the other side, of course.

ARM-processor

Four billion

Reda SadkiGlobal health

A few months ago, a malaria guy showed me the $20 dumb Nokia phones he buys in a Geneva convenience store and then gives out to trainees who then use it to collect data via SMS text messages. ARM says that the US$20 smart phone (read: Android with an ARM chip) will arrive this year. At stake: how to get the next four billion people online.

The $20 dollar smart phone

The $20 dollar smart phone

Source: ARM says $20 smartphones coming this year, shows off 64-bit Cortex-A53 and A57 performance. Photo: Fr3d.org/Flickr

There is no spoon

There is no scale

Reda SadkiThinking aloud

So, you are unhappy with a five percent completion rate. Hire tutors (lots of them, if it is massive). Try to get machines to tutor. Use learners as tutors (never mind the pedagogical affordances, you only care about scale and completion). Set up automated phone calls to remind people to turn in their homework. Ring the (behaviorist) bell.

Or not.

Google’s Coursebuilder team has an interesting take on completion rates. Let’s start by asking learners what they want to achieve. Then examine their behavior against their own expectations, rather than against fixed criteria. Surprise, surprise: take learner agency into consideration, and it turns out that most folks finish… what they wanted to.

Bill Cope has an interesting take on scale. He says: there is no scale. It is not only that face-to-face/online is a false dichotomy. The intimacy of learning can be recreated, irregardless of how many people are learning. Public schools break down an entire population of children into classes of twenty-five. The Red Cross and Red Crescent train 17 million people each year to do first aid, one workshop at a time. That makes the best aspects of those experiences ‘personable’. But depersonalization is not  a function of scale. It is a function of learning environments that limit the affordances of learning and assessment.

In the United States, 26 million already have Type II diabetes. That is already massive problem on a national scale, part of the very wicked problem that makes non-communicable diseases the world’s bigger killer, responsible for over 36 million deaths every year. Prevent is a start-up that just raised 28 million U.S. dollars to deliver personalized health education on the very intimate issue of pre-diabetes, where a positive outcome equals a change in real-world behavior. In its model, each person is matched to a small (read: personable) group of no more than a dozen peers, and then works as part of this small group. The first published clinical study (apparently sponsored by the start-up, but due for publication in a scientific journal) indicates that the approach helps people lose weight in clinically-significant, long-term ways. The scale is in the opportunity, not in the experience of Prevent participants.

There is no scale. 

Château de Divonne

Divonne

Reda SadkiThinking aloud

Demure, soft-spoken, personable, affable, no-nonsense. All those things, in that peculiarly North American way. Those words don’t do justice to B., the uniquely compelling individual I met for the second time last night in Divonne-les-Bains. To describe him as a living legend in the world of learning and development is accurate, but far from complete. The first time we met, our lunch turned into a nine-hour knee-to-knee exploratory journey of the linkages between corporate learning and the wicked problems of humanitarian education. Reflecting on his insights kept me awake at night. When I finally found sleep, it was only to find myself wrapped in vivid dreams in which the ideas became colors and shapes, many moving parts dancing in complex patterns.

B. shared three lessons from a time when he set out on his own, leaving the comfort of an established organization.

Lesson #1: Autonomy. Learn that being independent means doing it yourself. Your legitimacy and credibility are based on your self-reliance, not by the power of the brand you are affiliated with.

Lesson #2: Focus. Boundless possibilities. Limitless conversation. Consider applying the 80/20 rule that sales people use (focus on the twenty percent of prospects that can turn into a sale) even if you do not have anything to sell.

Lesson #3: Structure, but only when the time is right. The liquid concrete used to pour the foundations is in the quality of the relationships, not their volume.

Photo: Château de Divonne (Patrick Nouhailler/Flickr)

Pipeline

Pipeline

Reda SadkiLearning

“In a knowledge economy, the flow of knowledge is the equivalent of the oil pipe in an industrial economy. Creating, preserving, and utilizing knowledge flow should be a key organizational activity.” – George Siemens, Knowing Knowledge (2006)

Photo: Oil Pipeline Pumping Station in rural Nebraska (Shannon Ramos/Flickr)