Free software which could be of use to trainers

Recent prezi I used to discuss the possibility of e-learning techniques in relation to training workshops. The key dilemma is the extent to which face to face training is better than something on a screen, even if that something is interactive rather than passive. Economic arguments push us towards the need to understand how to reduce cost and still give great learning value to people at work.

Of course face to face is great – because people get more than the knowledge, tips, techniques and understanding we are trying to put across as trainers (or indeed as lecturers too). And we may discount social get-together time, but we learn at least as much if not more through that time – (have a look at Bandura’s Social Cognitive Theory for how we learn from others). However today’s workplace is not an easy place to find money or time to get out to a training workshop. It isn’t easy even to find time to watch and interact with a screen, but that’s for another blog. Meanwhile, have a look through the link below if you think there are possible (free) ways in which training can a) be enhanced and b) be used more effectively for what it is really good at.

E-Learning and training – do they fit?

 

Job partnering across generations

Job sharing- the way to address some of the issues raised by the ageing population and youth unemployment….?

Demographics and media headlines from today’s Autumn Statement from the Chancellor leave us in no doubt of the need for many current 40 and 50 year olds to stay in work longer than previously expected. Not everyone in those age groups will be lucky enough to have a paid job. As we progress through this decade, we are seeing more people with multiple jobs or earning activities to maintain their desired living standards. Those who do have a single job meeting their needs are starting to think about their future and wondering whether the pace and pervasive spread of their work will be something they can face for the next 20 or 30 years.

Meanwhile the profoundly depressing figures given for 16-24 year olds out of work are rising, offering little hope to those who would once have been readily recruited and trained to replace those retiring at 60.

What about a happy coupling of these issues?

While we know that neighbouring generations find it hard to get on together (as experienced by many parents and their maturing children), we also know that a 2 generation difference makes for an easier relationship (grandparents and grandchildren). So should employers consider offering job partnerships between 60 plus employees wanting to do less and potential new starters wanting to do more?

Isn’t that an opportunity for genuine talent management?

Counting down to ECEl 2011 at Brighton

The conference website is showing 2 days, 18 hours and 48 minutes to go before Mithras House in Brighton Business School welcomes 200 delegates to ECEL 2011.

With three great keynotes and over a hundred academic papers plus a doctoral symposium, we are going to be busy.
We have mini-tracks on accessibility awareness in e-learning management, personalized learning in online environments, open source and OER in e-learning, beyond virtual silos and institutional walls, e-submission and intelligent tutoring on e-learning platforms.
Lots of information on the conference website and photos during and after conference, but for now, to keep up with the conference follow us on Twitter #ECEL2011

research connections

Online learning has been mainstream for my research over the last ten years and there are still many activities, projects, papers and ideas emerging in that stream. Meanwhile other research interests continue to develop, so when I needed to produce a poster for a research profile it didn’t look that simple. In the end the poster became a set of neural connections – bit like my brain but of course this is only the research part! This is what I do when I get time out of teaching, preaching and breeding sheep…

Sue G Research connections 2011

Facing up to transitions in HE

Great Learning and Teaching Conference at Brighton yesterday.

Excellent keynotes from Sally Brown and Phil Race, always pertinent, funny but also bringing a lifetime’s, well two lifetimes’, work to bear on the problems of the foggy terrain of September 2012 for universities.

Because I am currently focussed on preparing an e-assessment project with colleagues Alison Bone and Stephanos Avakian, Phil Race’s focus on assessment – pulling together all the great and simple lessons of past research on quality assessment practice was stimulating. Yes we do try really hard already, and we are innovating – using online review and peer review and self review increasingly, but we still need people like this to convince us it is worth the effort of changing long-held traditional assessment practices. Phil’s website is a treasure-store of useful material on student learning and assessment. His contention at the Brighton conference was that HE assessment was “broken”, and by the end of his session even the doubters were in agreement. Heavy staff assessment workloads and continuing poor achievement in NSS surveys should be convincing us by now to do this better. And if we do assessment better, we get potential for better learning because assessment drives learning.

I foresee a summer of assessment design ahead.

Sally Brown also gave us lots of food for thought. For me, designing a new UG honours course with colleagues this summer, it couldn’t have come at a better time. Her emphasis on continuing introduction over at least the first six weeks was exactly what we were planning – in fact the first semester for this course will be a journey into learning as a professional, rather than what you need to know as a student. And her stress on the need to view the course as a whole rather than a series of unrelated modules more geared to academic reputation than student experience was really well made. Our new BSc Business with Enterprise has a Problem Based Learning ethos, fairly strictly interpreted, which means the course is conceived not as a collection of modules but as a cumulative experience of collaborative learning from start to finish. By the end, learners will be skilled professional learners as well as entrepreneurs capable of leading projects and businesses. We cannot achieve this without a focus from the beginning and throughout all parts of the course on self-directed learning and the development of evaluative, analytical and creative as well as critical thinking practice. So thanks for the encouragement Sally and Phil.

Meanwhile, other highlights for me from the conference included learning about the Cloudbank app from Lyn Pemberton and Marcus Winter – lots of potential there for learning applications – including an idea Tracey Taylor and I had involving building a version, but perhaps more criteria based, to provide a mobile app for referencing.

And a lovely session from Kate Williamson on her findings when she talked to Education ITE students about their experiences of research supervision. The responses were so encouraging, it really did seem like a great idea to find a way to bring the one-to-one relationship of supervisor and student into first and second year as well as third. And that can be done with shorter projects and scaffolding, plus possibly the introduction of some group supervision and e-supervision. The point is attention to the student and the encouraging of the student to believe in their own work and their own ideas. That is best delivered one to one, and ideally face to face. In my early customer service training days, this was called “kissing the sleeping princess” – meaning a personal “stroke” which delivers the one thing we crave – attention to us as respected individuals.

My heroes in learning and teaching: Tom Bourner, Phil Race and Sally Brown

Rhodes sunshine and genuine community learning at ICICTE

This year’s ICICTE conference, my second visit but it’s been a while, was a good learning experience.

learning experience at Greek Night, Aresh not listening!

The link here to the conference website shows the visual evidence, photos from every day of the conference and a great way to remember the names of new friends.

here are Antonis and Olga from Greece, Andrea and myself from Brighton, Aresh from London, Liam and Stephen from New Zealand

As always with conferences, you can choose to have the best conference ever, or you can be passive. The difference is made by being proactive, being open to questions and asking them frequently, being prepared to find common ground and really attending to speakers. All offer some great learning – particularly if good time-keeping means you can really choose ones which interest you.

view from hotel room to Turkey

I enjoyed sessions on digital identity – good paper by Carolyn Woodley, assessment – good paper by Bostock from Keele – and Facebook – our final session which included a lovely example of interesting students in maths by putting up a Facebook page for a revered ancient mathematician and attracting friends. The latter session was where I delivered my paper right at the end of conference on Facebook: perceptions of purpose, learning from the experience of retailers which, like the others, can be found in the ICICTE website where the proceedings are downloadable. Can also be found on the public prezi site.

Andrea Benn delivered her paper at the start of conference so between us we bookended the event, talking about our new Business with Enterprise course based on PBL – lots of differing definitions of this among the audience and some useful experience shared.

A highlight was the keynote from Michael Grahame Moore and his presence throughout the conference – here at the Philospher’s Cafe:

Michael Moore at ICICTE 2011

His ideas about the vertical disaggregation of HE learning struck a chord, a world of aggregated learners and disaggregated (by merit across the world) resources for learning. And an absolute belief in the power of online interaction and affective communication.

Although the work didn’t end with the conference (have netbook, will work), a few days afterwards in the warm blanket of Rhodes sunshine was an exceptional treat.

what kind of research do I do?

Video link: What kind of research do I do?

Online learning

1. What are you researching?

When I began to research, about 11 years ago, the problem which intrigued me was how to use the online learning capabilities we suddenly had at our disposal in university. We were beginning at that time to use intranets with student and staff access and this made me rethink my teaching. I was deluged by questions – could we work online with large groups as well as small groups?, could we run discussions online which were as effective as classroom discussions?, were there things we could do online which were actually better than learning and teaching in the classroom? If we did this, how should we do it? At that time there was very little guidance about.

2. Why is it important?

For me, these questions were important to my role as a university teacher. I needed to find answers and I needed to find people who were as enthusiastic as I was about online learning so we could share ideas and learn ourselves. That took me into a doctorate study of students’ readiness for online learning – it seemed vital to me to work out whether some students might be better prepared for this kind of learning than others, and to see what we could do to support students as we began to require online learning activities.

3. What are the results?
In those intervening 11 years, e-learning and online learning have taken off in universities. Now we all have virtual learning environments and my research has helped me to understand and share ideas with other teachers on design of online learning and assessment. I am still experimenting, but our collective knowledge has informed the way HE courses are delivered, and has increased opportunities to offer students a blended learning experience – getting the most out of both online and face to face teaching.

2. But that isn’t all. My research activities led me to question issues around learning in a deeper way. That has led to ongoing research into graduate employability and reflective learning.

1. What are you researching?

graduate employability: We wanted to find out whether universities which made a point of developing so-called employability skills as part of their degree courses were actually helping their graduates get graduate-level jobs. Or whether there was a better way to help. We studied HESA data  graduate destinations – this is with my colleagues Asher and Tom, which involved using the statistics which graduates themselves supply about their jobs or lack of jobs after graduation.
2. Why is it important?

There has never been a more important time to look at graduate employability: the fees changes due in 2012 and the media focus on high graduate unemployment make this a vital area to research.
3. What are the results?

We are finding that universities have been making some assumptions about what employers want from graduates. Not necessarily very accurate ones. We have used the term “new vocationalism” to express what we think is the case based on our research, that what employers want is more about a willingness and ability to learn than specific skills or vocational content which will never quite fit the employer requirement, except for specific professions such as medicine or engineering where specific learning content is vital for careers. If you couple this with the increasing turbulence in labour markets, you find that university learning is much more about how to learn than about what you learn. On the back of this we need to research further to find better ways to develop that learning capability which will fit graduates for work in constantly changing knowledge jobs. Part of this is to improve the way students learn to reflect systematically on experience and unplanned learning, as well as their formal planned course study. Reflective learning is going through a revolution in universities – we are increasingly seeing assessment of reflective learning, but perhaps not enough is yet know about how and why this is helpful. There’s another research target ahead for me and for my colleagues.

New course at Hastings campus from 2012

BSc Business with Enterprise will open to new students at the University of Brighton in Hastings from September 2012. This course is designed to work from business practice to an understanding of business theory, not the other way around. Learning will start with real business problems and students will work through a structured collaborative learning approach as they devise solutions and responses to the problems, at the same time redefining their business understanding.

Students will be treated as apprentice business professionals, developing a range of transferable skills to make an immediate contribution to employment or enterprise.

Enquiries to S.L.Greener@brighton.ac.uk

 

Two-thirds of illiterate adults are female

“Too many women, in too many countries, have no other role beyond marrying and producing children at a young age, then taking care of those families.

“Although the gender gap in education is closing, far too many girls are still denied schooling, leave prematurely, or complete school with few skills and fewer opportunities. Two-thirds of illiterate adults are female.

“In the area of decision-making, we see more women, in more countries, taking their rightful seat in parliament. Yet fewer than 10 per cent of countries have female heads of State or government. In just 28 countries are there more than 30 per cent of women in parliament.”

This is from a speech by Ban Ki-Moon, Secretary-General of the UN, speaking in April this year to University Presidents.

Double bonus

Bit of a plug. For any graduates you know who are finding it hard to get a job.

Suggest they download the book “Graduate Employment: 333 tips for finding your first job as a graduate“. Downloading this FREE book produces commission all of which is being donated to the UNICEF campaign mentioned below.

There are at least two reasons to download this book of tips. One is to find practical and encouraging advice on how to find graduate employment. The second reason is that the authors are giving all proceeds from the download of the book to charity. In 2009, there were 2.5 million children under age 15 living with HIV. By downloading this book, you will support UNICEF’s Unite for Children, Unite against AIDS campaign raising money and awareness about HIV and AIDS and helping millions of affected children and families.