Much scaffolding, King's Cross Station, London

Back to London on Thursday to talk learning strategy for humanitarian and development organizations

Reda SadkiWriting

I’m looking forward to being back in London on Thursday 13 March for People In Aid’s Learning & Development network meeting.

This group meets four times a year to discuss issues in which there is a shared interest across organizations. Previous topics have covered how to “measure” learning or the design of competency frameworks, for example. Recent projects presented at the meetings include Save The Children’s Humanitarian and Leadership Academy (a major project to scale up professionalization of the sector) or RedR’s competency framework for humanitarian training. Each meeting’s report is a short but often insightful summary around a project or theme, and can be found here.

As for me, I’ll be sharing key insights from the European MOOC Stakeholders’ Summit as we try to figure out what these massive, open online courses might mean for the humanitarian and development sector. I’ll also share a couple of case studies documenting how online learning can be used to learn 21st century knowledge skills. The whole point is to think about how learning can go from being incidental to strategic.

You can find out more about this event on LSi.io’s events page or from the People In Aid web site.

Photo: Much scaffolding, King’s Cross Station, London (orangeaurochs/flickr.com).

www.lsi.io

Scaling up humanitarian education: my presentation at the European MOOC Summit

Reda SadkiEvents, Presentations

I’ve just published my presentation (25 minutes with slides) about the urgency of scaling up humanitarian education on LSi.io. This is a recording with both slides and my narrative, that looks at a number of issues:

  • Training like it’s 1899 – and why we need to think about learning beyond training
  • The need for scale – some indicative figures
  • What is broken about humanitarian education
  • VUCA – What has changed about the nature of knowledge and why it matters
  • IGO/INGO MOOC models – things to consider

LSi.io is the new web site for Learning Strategies International, a talent network for people who yearn to help solve the ‘wicked’ learning problems of the humanitarian sector. Right now, the network is by invitation only. Just send me a message if you’d like access to the presentation.

Link to European MOOC Summit presentation (for LSi.io members)

Meet Barbara Moser-Mercer, the lady who did MOOCs in a refugee camp

Reda SadkiInterviews, Video, Writing

I first heard her described as the “lady who did MOOCs in a refugee camp”. It was completely ambiguous what that meant, but certainly sparked my curiosity. Barbara Moser-Mercer is a professor at the University of Geneva and a  cognitive psychologist who has practiced and researched education in emergencies.

I finally caught up with her at the Second European MOOC Summit.

 

VUCA

MOOCs for international and nongovernmental organizations

Reda SadkiEvents

International organizations already deliver training at a massive scale, but they do it mostly the old-fashioned way – one workshop at a time. The urgency of scaling up learning, education and training (LET) is real: with 320 million people affected by climate change-related disasters in 2015, 30 million deaths from non-communicable diseases (NCDs), and many more such grim numbers, it is clear that the challenges need to be met at scale.

This morning’s session (9h–10h30, C101) at the European MOOC Summit on MOOCs for international and nongovernmental organizations will look at workplace learning in IGOs, INGOs and NGOs. Here is the line-up:

  • MOOC now, not later: Sheila Jagganathan is  Senior Learning Specialist and Program Manager of the World Bank’s e-Institute. On January 27th, the Bank launched its first MOOC on the Coursera platform with 10,000 participants. Based on a global report published in 2012 that asserted “a 4°C warmer world must be avoided”, it aims to discuss the “main policy choices needed to prevent warming above 2°C”. Given the content source (a report), format (4 weeks, rather than a university-style semester) and informal title (“Turn down the heat”), could this be a new breed of MOOCs? Why and how did the World Bank Institute, which already manages a successful distance learning program using the Moodle platform, engage in this new space?
  • Road MOOC: How does an organization decide to engage in developing a MOOC?  Patrick Philipps heads the International Road Union’s Academy, the only global body dedicated to road transport training. Patrick will share the process through which he became interested in MOOCs, the criteria considered in choosing a partner, and the ongoing analysis and decision-making steps that may or may not lead IRU to produce an accredited MOOC with a university.
  • MOOCs for development? UNCTAD’s TrainForTrade team are long-time believers in e-learning, using educational technology to support capacity-building efforts.  Distance learning officer Dominique Chantrel will describe the e-learning efforts of his organization, and examine whether MOOCs offer solutions for training in developing countries.

 

IGO NGO session map

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LSi.io interviews Plan B’s Donald Clark: Universities and humanitarian organizations in the Age of Disruption

Reda SadkiEvents, Interviews

Donald Clark is an education innovator with no institutional ties to refrain him from telling it like it is. He answers three questions from LSi.io‘s Reda Sadki:

  • Zach Sims at Davos referred to university brick-and-mortar structures as the “detritus” of a bygone area. Agree or disagree?
  • We all remember Sebastian Thrun’s predictions about the impending concentration of higher education. Why does it feel like it’s just not happening?
  • A key insight about MOOCs is the significance of suddenly connecting millions of adult learners to faculty previously bunkered down at the top of their ivory towers. Can you tell us more about your analysis on the significance of MOOCs?
  • The humanitarian sector faces growing challenges, yet we continue to train like it’s 1899. How would you approach such a ‘wicked’ learning problem?

Interview recorded at the Second European MOOC Summit at EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland on 11 February 2014.

The MOOC Tornado

European MOOC Summit: What looks tasty – for organizations thinking about transforming how they learn

Reda SadkiEvents, Writing

This is a quick overview of what I found of interest for international and non-governmental organizations in the program of the Second European MOOC Summit – possibly the largest and probably the most interesting MOOC-related event on the Old Continent – that opens tomorrow at Switzerland’s MIT-by-the-Lake, EPFL.

The first interesting thing I found in the program is that it includes an instructional session, titled “All you need to know about MOOCs”. Indeed, the more I meet and talk to people across a variety of international and non-governmental organizations, the more it is obvious that the so-called “hype” has remained circumscribed to a fairly narrow, academic circle – despite international media coverage and a few million registered users. That makes it both smart and relevant to offer a primer for anyone attending the conference who is discovering MOOCs, before they get plunged into the labyrinth of myth, paradox and possibility that is the future of education. Where the most current knowledge about MOOCs changes too rapidly for any one individual to keep up, it’s now possible to break down the basics – never mind that it might all be very different a year from now.

Now, my beef is that the raging MOOC debates have been focused almost exclusively on higher education, and been restricted to academic and edutech circles. That is changing – just look at George Siemens’s prediction that “corporate MOOCs will be the big trend of 2014”. I’m still not sure what “corporate MOOC” means but I’m assuming we’re talking about workplace learning, which meshes nicely with what I’ve been arguing all along: continual learning in organizations is a key driver for organizational performance, and only the affordances of technology can make this strategic (ie, help to realize the mission). This is true for the humanitarian sector (where I’ve worked for 21 years, and where I’ve just started LSi.io) but really extends to any mission-driven, knowledge-based organization, irregardless of whether profit is the motive.

First, some blunt (and possibly caricatural) ideas. Traditional learning and development is dead or dying, one face-to-face workshop (or one behaviorist, compliance click-through e-learning module) at a time. In the United States, the majority of higher education students are already “non-traditional”, ie they are working or looking for work, adults with family and professional lives alongside the need or wish to learn more. In Western Europe, unemployment for under-30s is structurally high, with many twenty-somethings spending years as “interns”, exploding the baby boomer model in which affordable university leads to job security. Learning looks like it’s going to be lifelong, as the EU keeps proclaiming, but not necessarily by choice… Last but not least, in the BRICs and other connected countries in what was known a long time ago as the Third World  (sorry, nostalgia of sorts), educational opportunities and social mobility may not be uncoupled (yet), but most middle-class professionals see continuing education as a key to their development.

For international organizations  and NGOs, the stakes are high. We know that traditional higher education produces young people without the practical skills, competencies, or critical thinking capacity to do the work of 21st century humanitarians. Worse, most of our own organizations’ training efforts are still premised on unscalable, expensive face-to-face training – training as if it were 1899. And from educational technology we have, so far, retained only the most reductive, behaviorist kinds of click-through e-learning, using it to transmit information in “pre-work” before the “real learning” can start in the classroom. (Of course, there is a more optimistic story to tell, given the number of brilliant humanitarians leading innovative efforts around learning – just drawing the broad, pessimistic strokes here).

 These complex issues are most likely to be addressed at least implicitly in the Summit’s Business Track, where on Tuesday at 11h00 IMC’s Volker Zimmermann will moderate a session on MOOCs as “training instruments” for employees and partners. So that’s where I will go. Nevertheless, in the Experience Track, there is also a session on SPOCs (small, private, online courses – think Moodle on MOOCs) which could be useful to learning contexts where small-group work is a key to success.

I’m betting that Tuesday afternoon’s session on MOOCs for online external corporate training and communication will turn into a showcase for new companies trying to corner the corporate MOOC market. So off I will go to listen to Barbara Moser-Mercer’s talk on MOOCs in fragile contexts, which include refugee camps.

On Wednesday morning at 9h00, I will moderate a small-group discussion on MOOCs for international and nongovernmental organizations, hoping that MOOC providers and academics will attend in sufficient numbers to hear about how badly we need solutions to transform the way we do learning, education and training.  IGO and NGO online learning pioneers Sheila Jagannathan from the World Bank Institute, Dominique Chantrel from UNCTAD, and Patrick Philipp from IRU will be sharing their early experiences. Let’s hope that the folks who build, sell, research and think about MOOCs will be listening.

Reda Sadki

Corrected on 11 February: the session on MOOCs for IGOs and NGOs starts at 9h00!

Alligator trumps turtle

Learning beyond training, to survive and grow

Reda SadkiWriting

Humanitarian organizations already organize and deliver training on a massive scale. For example, the Red Cross and Red Crescent train 17 million people each year to practice life-saving first aid, in addition to the training of its 13.6 million active volunteers. Training has been tacitly accepted as the primary mechanism to prepare volunteers and staff for humanitarian work, from the local branch (community) to the international emergency operations (global).

However, the humanitarian sector lacks a strategic approach for learning, education and training (LET), despite a widely-acknowledged human resource and skills shortage. In addition, the sector is deeply ensconced in face-to-face training culture, with many humanitarian workers earning at least part of their livelihood as trainers, and training events are key to developing social and professional networks but not necessarily to developing key competencies needed in the field. Whatever its merits, this approach to training cannot scale up to face the consequences of climate change, deepening gaps between rich and poor, or other growing humanitarian challenges.

Also, the sector suffers from high turnover, lack of standardization in training practice, proliferation of education programs with no measurable benefits or relevance to operational needs, and a dearth of evaluation of learning outcomes. There are several cross-sector initiatives that are trying to address these problems, but these initiatives have ignored the potential relevance for the humanitarian context of both the rapid change in workplace learning and the disruption and potential transformation in higher education through educational technology and 21st century pedagogy.

First, a reductive focus on formal training is unlikely to lead to improvements in service delivery.

Second, the strategy should leverage both innovation and history to do new things in new ways, mobilizing multiple appropriate technologies to accelerate all dimensions of learning, and updating them whenever this demonstrably improves outcomes. It should rely on rational experimentation linking research with learning, even when this may involve a risk of failure.

Third, this strategy needs to conceptualize learning from a global perspective, and provides solutions to both scale-up (take a successful local innovation and increase its impact so as to benefit more people) and scale- down (localize and adapt to local knowledge and needs) to foster policy and programme development on a lasting basis. It should provide practical solutions for staff and volunteers from the periphery (branches, village) to develop, peer review, improve, and circulate their own knowledges, in addition to harnessing, remixing and augmenting knowledge from the center (headquarters, capital city).

Fourth, knowledge will be characterized as a process (“know-where”), not as a reservoir (“know-what”), and the strategy will serve to connect with others to cull out the most current from the flow of knowledge, however rapid its pace. An adaptive, individualized lifelong learning strategy should encompass accretion (learning is in the network), transmission (learning as courses), acquisition (self-motivated learning), and emergence (learning as cognition and reflection).

Fifth, learning analytics (scalable, continual analysis and feedback loops learning outcomes), leveraging the affordances of technology, should feed research and drive innovation and improvements in delivery science.

Sixth, the learning strategy should address not only the levels of action (from local to global) but also the connections between them (ex: how local volunteers and global teams learn from each other before, during and after emergency operations). Leadership and team work development (ie, nodes and networks) will be recognized as cornerstones to learning in our hyper-connected world.

Like the outcomes it aims to produce, the strategy development process should be practical, agile (iterative), adaptive, evidence- and results-based, and demand-driven. New, practical approaches to learning (ex: George Siemens’ connectivism, Bandura’s social learning, MOOCs) first theorized less than ten years ago can already deliver a KISS (Keep It Simple Strategy) with scalable solutions effective in both outcomes and cost.

At the end of the day, a learning strategy needs to be laser-focused on a single question: how to further learning in all its forms to leverage an organization’s (or sector’s) mission. Building on the already-central role of learning, education and training, a learning strategy is urgently needed for the sector to survive and grow. We need to do new things in new ways to deliver on our mission faster, better, and further.

 Reda Sadki

Photo credit: Claus Wolf/flickr.com

Street view in Oxford

Learning Technologies in London and European MOOCs in Lausanne

Reda SadkiEvents, Thinking aloud, Travel

My feet hurt. I’ve just returned from a week-long trip for LSi.io pounding the pavements of London and Oxford, meeting 26 humanitarian, academic, and corporate people in four days. I wish to thank every organization and individual who took the time to welcome me and share thoughts, insights, and experiences. The common thread is that all these amazing people are working on the same wicked problem: how to transform learning in the crazy VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous) world that we live in.

Right after leaving IFRC, I tried to formulate the problem statement to a potential partner. Excerpt:

Currently, the humanitarian sector has no global platform for learning, education and training (LET), despite a widely-acknowledged human resource and skills shortage. In addition, the sector is deeply ensconced in face-to-face training culture, with many humanitarian workers earning at least part of their livelihood as trainers, and training events are key to developing social and professional networks but not to developing key competencies needed in the field. Whatever its merits, this approach to training cannot scale up to meet growing humanitarian needs. Also, the sector suffers from high turnover, lack of standardization in training practice, proliferation of education programs with no measurable benefits or relevance to operational needs, and a dearth of evaluation of learning outcomes. There are several cross-sector initiatives that are trying to address these problems, but these initiatives have ignored, so far, the disruption and rapid transformation in higher education through educational technology and its potential relevance for the humanitarian context.

Tomorrow, I’m headed to Google HQ in Zurich and, next week, will be attending EPFL’s European MOOC Summit.

Reda

Photo: Hitting the pavement in Oxford, 29 January 2014.

Quality in humanitarian education

Reda SadkiPublished articles

Humanitarian education is a huge undertaking. Each year, for example, 17 million trainees learn first-aid skills through face-to-face (FTF) training programmes run by the 189 National Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies worldwide. People of varied educational backgrounds join their local Red Cross or Red Crescent branch because they want to learn how to do first aid, how to prepare for or recover from disaster, or how to make their community more resilient. They also join to meet other like-minded people, building social ties and using the power of peer education to learn by doing.

FTF training has been efficient in terms of preparing volunteers to perform the tasks assigned to them, and social, peer-education training has also been an important component of the identity of volunteers and their sense of belonging to the organization. However, this formal way of teaching reproduces a one-way, didactic transmission of information, in which volunteers are given the knowledge they need to perform pecific tasks. Recent progress in massive open online courses challenge this model, although ques- tions remain about how effective and sustainable such learning approaches are (Daniel, 2012). This trend generates important questions for the IFRC concerning the use of educational technology while maintaining the purpose and quality of humanitarian education (Stracke, 2012).

In 2009, the IFRC published its first online course – World of the Red Cross and Red Crescent – to support the training of its international personnel. Experts developed courses on global health, security and other thematic areas. These courses were delivered through a single ‘Learning Platform’ which became part of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Learning and Knowledge Sharing Network in 2010. The network initially emphasized accredited learning, thus acknowledging that such learning remains the only valid currency in the professional world, even though Red Cross Red Crescent workers have acquired skills and knowledge in the field that deserve recognition.

By May 2013, less than 1 per cent of the world’s 13 million Red Cross Red Crescent volunteers had accessed the Learning Platform. The cost of internet access and the digital divide remain major obstacles. But the number of learners on the Learning Platform doubled in 2012 and its growth rate is accelerating. Users have completed nearly 60,000 online courses since the platform’s launch in October 2009, with more than 5,000 course registrations every month. At almost 50 per cent, the completion rate is a major success compared to the 20 per cent that is considered an acceptable rate in e-learning. Eleven National Societies already have more than 1,000 learners on the platform, with the Canadian, French and Swedish Red Cross among the early adopters. In November 2012, the Australian Red Cross, which had never used online learning in training, became the first National Society to adopt the Learning Platform for training all of its 3,300 staff members. It organized a nationwide roll-out and integrated online education into its workforce development strategy, with research already scheduled to document impact on performance.

For the first time, the Learning Platform enables volunteers to tap into a global knowledge community with no intermediaries prescribing or circumscribing what they should learn. By connecting to the platform, volunteers discover learning opportunities that relate to an essential aspect of their engage- ment: their thirst for learning as the means to changing their reality.

In 2012, following the Learning Platform’s success, the IFRC offered a ‘new learning’ programme using dialogue between learners and peer review to promote open, active learning. In its pilot phase at the Global Youth Conference, 775 people from more than 70 National Societies – four times more than the number of conference attendees – participated in learning ‘missions’ and ‘live learning moments’. Fifty-eight per cent of participants worked consistently on the learning activities, producing more than 140 pages of content. The same percentage said the programme improved their ability to think critically, analyse, evaluate and apply what they had learned about youth issues.

Questions arose about the learning effectiveness and impact of the IFRC’s online courses. Perhaps prompted by the legitimate demand that a new medium demonstrate its value, these questions also reveal an attachment to and assumptions about the comparative advantage of traditional learning modalities. However, researchers completed two comprehensive comparative meta-analyses in 2010. Their conclusions were definitive: since 1991, distance learning has delivered equal or better learning outcomes than traditional FTF programmes (Shachar and Neumann, 2010), while ‘blended learning’ (supplementing FTF instruction with online instruction) has not enhanced learning results (US Department of Education, 2010).

These studies demonstrated that quality is not determined by the means of delivery; however, they did not determine or assess the quality of the pedagogies used, whatever medium or technology. Many online learning technologies of the recent past, including the IFRC’s first online courses, were modelled on top- down, legacy training systems – somewhat like early film-making, which started by recording live theatre. As Bill Cope at the University of Illinois explains: “In their basic approach and use in practice, these are heavily weighted to the transmission of centralized knowledge from the center to the periphery.” They are “frequently not effective” as the transmitted knowledge is “often abstract and de-contextualized”, while “the value of existing local knowledge, practices and understanding” is “not recognized or incorporated into the learning experience” (Cope and Keitges, 2013).

The IFRC is exploring how innovation in learning connects back to National Societies’ rich history and culture, how technology might support learning from the local knowledge of National Society volunteers to strengthen cross-cutting knowledge, skill and competency development, and how collaborative learning communities might be developed across language and other barriers for National Society volunteers. More than 50 online courses destined for the Learning Platform are now in the pipeline, with clearly established, open standards for technology, content and pedagogy, aligned to the ISO 19796-1 quality standard for learning, education and training. Every course is now required to have an evaluation framework in place, to collect data that will be used in an annual review process.

But for humanitarian education to truly be transformed, further pedagogical innovation is needed. For example, online educational resources should also be accessible from mobile devices, notes IFRC’s new guidelines. This opens up new pedagogical possibilities: non-traditional contexts for learning, reaching remote constituencies and allowing interaction both between teacher and learner, and between learners. New courses, like the public health in emergencies modules, use mobile-first responsive technology to deliver an immersive learning experience to any device (mobile, tablet or desktop) with a modern browser. These courses are grounded in the field experience of IFRC experts and the evidence base. The peda- gogical patterns emphasize application of knowledge, analytical skills and the ability to discover, analyse and interpret from a multiplicity of data sources through teamwork.

The ability to recollect information still matters, but developing the skills and competencies that will enable the learner to perform in the face of the unknown takes precedence.

Written by Reda Sadki. First published in the World Disasters Report 2013: Focus on technology and the future of humanitarian action.