Conrad Gottfredson led a session on employee engagement about which he has co-authored a book with the same title.
Jack Welch has said that there are three key metrics for any business: employee engagement, cash flow and customer satisfaction. The first is the most important, because you will never have the second and the third without the first.
For the book they interviewed highly engaged people. Their findings were that engaged people…
feel the least entitled,
usually stay engaged wherever they are, and,
take charge of their engagement and feel responsibility for their own engagement.
Engaged employees also use the following six personal action drivers: shaping, connecting (there are four ways to connect with your work: social , intellectual, environmental and inspirational), learnig, stretching (pushing beyond your comfort zone, through your discomfort zone to your outer limits, you anchor yourself there until it become your comfort zone), achieving and contributing.
According to Masie there are a few things different this year in comparison to previous years:
Eight years ago everybody was rushing to a session on how to buy your LMS. We have now realized that the LMS is an important form of “air conditioning”: if it doesn’t work you’re screwed (so you do need it), but it doesn’t necessarily create the next step in learning.
We are now having a clear conversation about personalized learning. How can I learn what I want/need to know in the timeframe that makes sense, in the style that is appropriate, with the level of collaboration that I want and in the location that I am?
Another interesting question is: What will be the role of content created by the users (user generated content).
They had a short conversation about how they teach not just the health professionals and students but also the patients and the “concerned” public. Education is really one of the cornerstones of their mission.
Diana Oblinger from Educause was on stage next. Educause is an organization in the field of Higher Education. There often is a disconnect between the world of corporate learning and the world of higher-ed. Diana made an argument that technology is enabling large changes in learning. We now have the ability to deliver large scale learning at a low cost. She also mentioned DIY Learning which is a topic that I did a session on too. Masie asked her how come higher-ed campusses only deliver a smart part of the learning in corporations. She does see this changing: MOOCs are an example. Masie then urged us all to connect with her and ask her about something like portfolios in higher education to see what we can learn from that world.
Charles Duhigg is a New York Times journalist and has written a book titled The Power of Habit. His inspiration for the book came from the military where habit formation is a key element to success. Because of advances in neurology in the last decade we now finally are starting to understand how habits work. In research with rats they have found out that as a habit forms the rat stop thinking. We now know that habits consist of three parts:
There is a cue that kickstarts the habitual behaviour
The behaviour itself is called the routine
Finally there is a reward, this is why we continue to show the behaviour in the future
The Habit Loop
We used to focus on the middle part, but the cue and the reward are very important too. The cue is usually easy enough to find, but the reward is harder to find. In the context of learning we are of course interested in shaping the habits of other people. Duhigg gave a couple of examples from Starbucks where they are trying to imbue will power habits in their young employees. One thing they use is the L.A.T.T.E. loop (they Listen to the customer, Acknowledge their complaint, Take action by solving the problem, Thank them, and then Explain why the problem occurred). Duhigg also showed the marshmallow experiment (it relates to will power):
Changing individual habits can best be done by giving people insight in to how habits work. Habits take place just below our consciousness. They happen without us really thinking about it. Organizational habits are different. This is about culture. Some habits are more powerful than other in organizations, these are called keystone habits. Once you shift the keystone habits other things will start changing too. This is a way of unlocking cultural change in the organization. Masie related this story of habits to gamification (badges, etc.). He is afraid that we are overly simplifying things when we think about gamification as a way to shape habits. According to Duhigg we understand very little about rewards. There are two types of rewards: expected rewards and unexpected rewards. For rewards to be effective we need to have both. We usually only create expected rewards in our incentive systems. This is a problem because we tend to discount expected rewards when we get them and are overdelighted by unexpected rewards. There is also the distinction between extrinsic and intrinsic rewards. Often we need to have extrinsic rewards to kickstart or bootstrap a new habit which can then be sustained through intrinsic motivation.
They also discussed an article that Duhigg wrote about (software) patents. According to him we are starting to realize that software patents are broken (more information about how bad software patents are can be found here). Masie talked about the ridiculous story of IP learn. This is what some would call a patent troll set up to sue LMS companies. The company has already managed to pick up about 17 million dollars without ever having invented anything.
Unfortunately I had to miss Josh Bersin speaking as I had to prepare for my own session.
Curtis Bonk led a session about MOOCs at Learning 2012. His slides are available at TrainingShare (this is the direct link). His presentation must have been one of the most insanely paced sessions I have ever been to. That is a compliment by the way.
If you want to be a leader in the MOOC space then there are a few things you could do. Each of the following points was backed up by some news item or article:
Be first
Offer something novel
Define brand
Take risks
Rethink your classes
Inspire your team
Form partnerships
Offer incentives
Set bold audacious goals
Create media attention
Build on strengths and niche areas
Do not make rash decisions
Be pro-active in addressing concerns
Give something away
Look way ahead
Expanding marketss
Ask questions
Part II. MOOC Instructor Guidelines
Next Bonk discussed a few guidelines for instructors of MOOCs:
Plan and Prepare
Designate Feedback Providers and Tasks
Offer Ample Feedback in Week One
Use Peer, Machine, Volunteer and Self-assessment
Gather geographic data
Use a Warm and Friendly Tone
Form Groups and Social Supports
Arrive early for Sync Session
Allocata Ample time for Questions and Feedback
Share Resources
Personalize
Use Polling Questions
Check Chat Window for Comments and Questions
Reflect After Each Session
Offer Weekly Recaps and Podcasts
Part III. Type of MOOCs
We are alreading seeing a whole set of different MOOCs. His attempt at a typology is here:
Alternative Admissions Systems or Hiring System MOOC
Just-in-Tme Skills and Competencies MOOC
Theory- or Trend-Driven MOOC
Professional Development (practical) MOOC
Loss Leader (dip toe in water) MOOC
Experimental MOOC
Have to look it up
Personality MOOC
Name Branding MOOC
Rotating MOOC
Repeatable MOOC
Reusable MOOC
Part IV. Business models
This was a part that I was interested in. What are the business models behind MOOCs? How can they be sustainable? Bonk has come up with the following (incomplete list):
Advertisements
Small and flexible application/enrollment fee
Course assessment fee
Certificate fee
Enhanced Course Fee
Option for full university credit
Company sponsored
Percent of first year salary (sell companies names and contact details of high performers)
Sell or Lease Courses (for example to community colleges)
Share Revenues
I think he missed an important value driver: the (aggregated) data of all the participants. We already see that university are not calling MOOC participants “students” because they don’t want to have to account to FERPA and I can see universities monetizing that data quite easily as a consequence.
Some more things from Curtis
Curtis has created a set of Creative Commons licensed videos about how to teach online. Well worth a look.
His next book is is about a learning framework that he has titled: TEC-Variety:
Richard Culatta is with the US Department of Education at the Office of Educational Technology. He is an exceptional speaker and a “smart cookie”, I dig his self-deprecating style.
He kicked off by showing examples of what he calls “pencil sharpening” technology. Pencil sharpening is a metaphor for just making the same thing a little bit better without changing the paradigm. From the traditional blackboard to the digital whiteboard, from the traditional textbook to the e-book, from lectures to webinars. We should not be sharpening our pencils but instead let technology help us with the three challenges that prevent us from breaking with the one-size-fits-all methodology:
Challenge 1: We treat learners the same despite different needs and challenges. The least equitable thing we can do is treat everybody the same.
Challenge 2: We hold the schedule constant and allow the learning to vary.
Challenge 3: Student performance data comes too late to be useful.
Culatta has made the following formula for personalized learning:
Adjusting the pace + Adjusting the learning approach + Leveraging student interests/experiences = Personalized learning
If you don’t have each of these three elements, then it isn’t personalized. This needs thinking on each of the following: learning, teaching and infrastructure.
Next he shared a set of examples. The one that stuck out for me is School of One, a concept school that creates personal curricula for its students using technology.
School of One – Learning Algorithm
Taking a cue from this Richard suggests we should capture way more formative assessment data from our learners.
Melodi Albert and Nancy McClary from Dominian Enterprises, a company with about 3400 employees, talked at Learning 2012 about how they used hackathons as a learning tool.
All of their hackathons are two-day long events. They have now organized four different ones for their developers, each focusing on a different API. One of their hackathons was focused on a product I hadn’t heard of before: the Learning Registry. The Learning Registry is:
creating a set of technical protocols as a platform for innovation by content authors and aggregators. Applications built to harness the power of harvesting and analyzing the Learning Registry data will allow educators to quickly find content specific to their unique needs. The Learning Registry will store more than traditional descriptive data (metadata)–it will also allow sharing of ratings, comments, downloads, standards alignment, etc.
Initially the hackathons were organized as a recruitment effort, but they found out that they are great learning events too: people can break out of their normal walls, they can learn from eachother and they can actually do something. It was a challenge to sell to management that developers could take two days out of their schedule to work on this, so the first one was on a (rainy) weekend. After the success it became easier to get the time. Outside of the opportunity costs these events are very cheap to run (about $75 per person for the two days).
The first hackathon was just for their own employees. Later on they opened up to the rest of the world with the code hosted on Github. They fill them up on a first- come-first-serve basis with developers, business leaders, designers and marketeers. Each of these types get their own colour, so that they are recognizable and can come together as mixed teams. The teams build something of their own choice and they present it at the end of the two days. During the two days the people are well cared for with nice food and usually some swag (e.g. a T-shirt with a logo).
There is a lot of return on investment for these events. Melodi literally said: “There isn’t any amount of money we could have paid to get the same level of learning as these events delivered”.
I think this is an interesting model to play with. Can this work in domains that aren’t about programming? Could we do a “hackathon” for developing a learning experience? I want to find out (and will start by reading this Wired article on the topic)!
