Complexity & Networks

Know-where

Reda SadkiThinking aloud

Six months after starting to develop LSi.io, I have 64 ongoing conversations with 150 interlocutors, connecting humanitarian and development learning leaders, Chief Learning Officers and academic researchers.

Being independent has given me a unique vantage point from which to examine the humanitarian and development sector’s learning, education and training strategies. I believe that such perspective is indispensable if we are to give more than lip service to “cross-sector” approaches, in an extremely competitive industry faced with shrinking resources (think ECHO budget cuts) and growing needs (think climate change). And I’ve found learning leaders from our world to be a smart, thoughtful and active bunch, finely attuned to the sector’s changing landscape.

I’ve also enjoyed profound and promising  discussions with CLOs from the corporate sector. One of the most humble I’ve met manages two large brick-and-mortar campuses, one in Asia and the other in Old Europe, running hundreds of courses and dozens of educational programs on twenty-first leadership, fueled by a vision of sustainability in a volatile world that goes beyond trite, wooden and hollow corporate social responsibility.

Presentation for People In Aid: How scale can transform humanitarian education

Reda SadkiLearning strategy, Presentations

Making learning strategic in development and humanitarian organizations

Reda SadkiEvents, Learning strategy, Presentations

This is the third in a three-part presentation about learning strategy for development and humanitarian organizations. It was first presented to the People In Aid Learning & Development Network in London on 27 February 2014.

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!