Reda Sadki

Opencast Mine / Tagebau - Garzweiler / NRW / Germany

Opening workplace learning

Reda Sadki June 16, 2014Thinking aloud, Writing

For organizations, the paradigm of workplace learning remains focused on internal development of staff, on the premise that staff need to be learning to improve, if only to keep their knowledge and competencies current.

In the past, education advocates struggled to gain recognition for the need to continually learn in the workplace. Opening workplace learning was difficult to justify or finance due to the economy of effort required to deploy educational activities.

In today’s hyper-connected world, organizations can no longer afford to restrict their educational activities to their own staff. Nor can they rationally allow for such activities to be limited to ad hoc face-to-face ‘trainings’ that do not scale. They need to reach their target audiences through education if they want the knowledge they produce to have more than superficial impact.

This is part and parcel of sustainability. Closed learning restricted to the workplace is the knowledge economy equivalent of strip-mining.

Photo: Opencast Mine, Germany (TablinumCarlson/Flickr).

Scaling corporate learning

Reda Sadki June 16, 2014Events

If you are interested in the strategic significance of educational technology for workplace learning, make sure that you do not miss the open, online symposium happening 18-19 June 2014.

The event is organized by George Siemens and hosted by Corp U. I will be facilitating sessions with the World Bank and OECD, as well as presenting on partnerships between corporate and non-profit learning leaders to scale up humanitarian education.

You’ll find more information on George Siemens’s post about the event and (later this week) on this blog.

Photo: Estádio Nacional de Brasilia. Imagery courtesy of Castro Mello Arquitetos.

Performance

Reda Sadki June 12, 2014Learning strategy

Few empirical studies have examined the relationship between learning organization dimensions and nonprofit performance. Susan McHargue’s study was conducted to understand this relationship and how it impacts nonprofit organizations’ ability to become nonprofit learning organizations. The results offer guidance to human resource developers and managers who desire to integrate learning organization concepts into nonprofit organizations.

Conceptual and performance model

Source: McHargue, S.K., 2003. Learning for performance in nonprofit organizations. Advances in Developing Human Resources 5, 196–204.

Photo: Corey Seeman/Flickr

The Robot (Education) Lady

Reda Sadki June 6, 2014Interviews, Personal

With my eight-year-old son, we are planning to build and program a Lego Mindstorms EV3 this Summer. They are robots that look cool and for which you can code tasks and decisions. So, at Google’s Course Builder workshop, when I heard Jennifer Kay, a computer science professor, explain that she has been using robots (including the Lego ones) for education for years, I couldn’t help but ask for an interview.

I’ve been reading The Second Machine Age, which is all about the accelerating pace of technological change and one of its implications, that robots will (sooner than we think) be taking on many tasks that previously required humans to do them, hence my questions around this. However, Jennifer’s work is really focused on using simple robots to teach coding skills to kids now, not think about what the future might look like.

You can check out Jennifer’s Educational Robots for Absolute Beginners MOOC to learn the basics of robot programming and, yes, learn to code.

Summer leaves near Annecy Gorges de Fier

In the leafy month of June

Reda Sadki June 2, 2014Thinking aloud, Travel

June is good busy. Here are three highlights.

Wednesday and Thursday 4-5 June 2014 I’ll be at the second Google Course Builder Faculty Workshop in Zurich. Google engineers built their own platform to host courses internally, but soon offered public-facing courses like “Power searching with Google”, and then open-sourced Google Course Builder. For an organization that seeks to retain full control of its content and data, Course Builder is one of only two MOOC-era open-source platforms available. (The other one is OpenEdX. Moodle is the elephant in the room). The workshop will bring together 30 learning leaders from universities, companies, and non-profit organizations to share diverse experiences, ranging from citizen math to entrepreneurship and global health. Only downside: this workshop overlaps with EdX’s Future Edu.

Then, for two days, I’ll be in the open online symposium on scaling corporate learning, on 18-19 June 2014, organized by George Siemens and hosted by Corp U.

Last but not least, Pablo Suarez from the Red Cross/Red Crescent Climate Centre is running a workshop about humanitarian games in Lugano, Switzerland. To get a flavor of Pablo’s work, see this report to his main donor (note references to videos, publications, etc), or if you want to go deeper you can check out Games for a New Climate.

Keep reading for more about these events – and what they mean for the future of humanitarian education.

Photo: Summer leaves in the Gorges de Fier, near Annecy, France (Christian Baudet/Flickr).

Quick Q&A with George Siemens on corporate MOOCs

Reda Sadki June 2, 2014Events, 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.

From communication to education

Reda Sadki June 1, 2014Content 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 Sadki May 24, 2014Learning, 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

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.

A question of such immense and worldwide importance

Reda Sadki May 23, 2014Thinking 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

Sustainability

Reda Sadki May 22, 2014Thinking 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: