The education system does not work

Last week in a post entitled “If PLEs are Incompatible with the System, how do we Change the System?”, I argued that our present systems are unable to keep up with the requirements of society and of industry for learning and knowledge development.  Curricula cannot keep pace with the speed of technological and social innovation and the skills and knowledge required by today’s technology cannot be delivered through a rigidly sytematised, market led educational system.  Present education systems cannot support lifelong learning and it will cost too much to extend the present model of institutional education to deliver the learning required by the present phase of capitalism.I could – and should – have added that in many countries there is still not free access to basic education – let alone to higher education. Even in advanced economies such as the UK students are expected to contribute towards the cost of their education resulting in many leaving higher education with large debts. There is an assumption that they will do this because of the premium this places on their earning power but research shows this premium to be eroding. And such a premium is based on the differential between them and those without higher education; if everyone has equal access to learning then such additional income would disappear.

An emergent alternative

If the present systems cannot be extended to deliver education for all and lifelong learning is there an alternative? I believe we have an emergent alternative based on the use of new technologies and on radical changes in pedagogy.

Open Educational Resources

Lets start with learning materials or educational resources. We are moving from a position of scarcity to one of abundance through the rapid development of Open Educational Resources and internet based media. Books, videos, audio,learning materials, research papers, journals can all be accessed through the internet. Critically the development of cheap sub laptop computers and of handheld devices (plus the soon to emerge, cheap electronic book readers) and increasing access to internet access, provide a wealth of easily accessible educational resources. Such media are socially and economically sustainable through the very numbers of people contributing to their development and publication. There are still issues over quality and discovery but these issues are far from unresolvable.

Social Networks

Secondly, social networks allow us a forum and social space for shared and peer group learning. We are no longer dependent on the classroom based expert learning model of the past. Just by following Twitter isit is possible to find every day streamed conferences and seminars with free online access. More importantly teh culture of free and open education is spreading. A number of educational social networking sites allow anyone to offer courses and anyone to attend. Whilst some are based on business models involving fees, it seems more likely we will move in the direction of free online education. Early Open Educational resource sites are increasingly looking at enhancing teaching and learning provision to support the materials they are posting online.But most critically, social networking allows us to find and collaborate with people who share a similar interest – and that can include a similar interest in learning. As early as 1970, Illich put forward a vision that people would send a postcard to a central address expressing there learning interests and that a mainframe computer would match up their interests with others and arrange them a meeting with such people. Now that process can be expidited through online social media and geographical location technologies could allow us to meet up face to face with those people with similar interests in our geographical vicinity.

Curricula

One of the barriers to such self driven and social learning has been centrally controlled and regulated curricula. Here too, the use of social media is leading to new ideas of community driven, emergent curricula based on the model of the Rhizome. Learning will not so much be driven by enrolment on a officially prescribed course or curricula, but in participation in learning as part of a community of practice where bodies and tenets of knowledge are changing, emergent and transparent.

Participation in courses and programmes of learning also has a social element. But here too, we have an alternative model. Massive On-line Open Courses (MOOCs) offer a model for the scalable delivery of courses and programmes, and more importantly for the organisation of social interaction around such courses, both online through blogs, wikis, online seminars, internet radio, MUVEs etc. and face to face through geographically located study groups and circles.

Personal Learning Environments

A further piece in the jigsaw is the move towards Personal Learning Environments. PLEs are important in allowing individuals to organise and manage their own learning, regardless of where that learning takes place. PLEs can provide a framework for scaffolding and reflection on learning.

Changing the system

Put all the parts together and we have a new model, a model which can extend learning to all those who want it and support lifelong learning. A model which is affordable and scalable. But of course it requires imagination and change to implement such a model.

There are four key changes we need to take.

The first is in the role of teachers. Teachers are important for guiding and supporting learning. Teachers are a precious and scarce resource. Too much to their time at present is pent delivery front of the class learning and lecturing. If we could increase social and peer group learning and free up teachers time, then we should be able to provide open access for teachers to all who require such support.

The second is assessment. present methods and approaches to assessment are one of the biggest barriers to new and more radical pedagogic approaches. If assessment was seen as part of the learning process, rather than as a process of measuring what people do not know, assessment could become an integral and important part of a new system.If education and learning are integrated in society, then assessment can become authentic within everyday living and working situations.

The third is the role of schools and the design of learning environments. The schooling system has become institutionalised. the vast resources used to support and maintain school buildings and facilities could better be used supporting learning within the community. Schools should be opened to learners of all ages providing guidance and support for learning. But schools are not the only place in which we learn. It is widely accepted that much of our learning is informal. Yet we do little to enhance working and community environments to support that learning. The working environment is not juts the physical surrounding but the deign of work tasks and the work organisation. For learning to be effective we need opportunities to put that learning onto action. We need a holistic approahc to learning environments. A positive outcome of deschooling society is to introduce learning in the wider spheres of activity in our societies.

The final change is in accreditation. There is little point in developing learning in the workplace and in the community and encouraging the development of Open Educational Resources and Personal Learning environments, if access to future opportunities is reliant on accreditation which can only be obtained through participation in prescribed courses. Accreditation can and should be based on presentation of evidence of learning and competence, based on our e-Portfolios and participation in learning activities. Of course, this may require some forms of presentation, in electronic and other media and may require expert and peer testimonial. This is not so much of a technical change, but a change in how we view the validation and recognition of learning.

Of course these are radical chnages. But the main point of this post was to say that we have the ideas and the technologies to support an alternative to the present education systems, systems which are failing so many indiviidals and failing society as a whole.

Posted below is a PDF copy of a new book: ‘Creating Learning Spaces: Training and Professional Development of Trainers’. the hard back copy will be published early in the new year. The book comes out of the two year TTPlus project on professional development for trainers. The project involved researchers from six European countries and was coordinated by Eileen Luebcke from Pontydysgu and funded by The European Commission Leonardo da Vinci programme.

At the heart of the project was the aim to develop a Framework for the Continuing Professional Development fo trainers. But we had also set out to look at who is responsible for training, what trainers do in practice and how training is changing. In fact, considering how much is talked about the importance of training, it is quite remarkable how little is known about who the trainers are and what they do.

We found that increasing numbers of people are responsible for training as part of their work – as skilled workers, as team leaders or as managers. Very often they do not have the word trainer as their job title, neither do they identify themselves as a trainer. In some cases responsibility for training comes as part of the job, in other cases they were selected because they appeared to have an aptitude for the role. In some cases they had some prior experience of teaching, in others they attended some courses but in many cases they had no training or professional development as trainers. We found that whilst there were differences between countries, especially in regulatory regimes, in terms of practice and changes in practice nationality was not a particularly significant variable in what trainers do. In all the cases we examined there appeared to be a move towards more work based learning and more use of technology for learning. This is important as most studies of trainers in Europe have started from a comparative methodology based on country. We wanted to go beyond this and examine the real practice of trainers. This involved talking to trainers themselves, talking to learners and talking to managers in different companies in the six countries involved.

We felt that if the standards of training are to be raised, improving the training of trainers must be a priority.  However, given the heterogeneous nature of the group and the range of sectors and occupations in which they work, it is difficult to see how this could be standardised, or indeed whether it is desirable to do so.  Certainly some sort of common framework would have advantages. It would provide a degree of coherence to what is a very fragmented field. It would increase the visibility of trainer training and in so doing, increase awareness. It could also stimulate the establishment of communities of practice between trainers.

Previous attempts at solving this problem can be roughly divided into two:

a)    Competence framework approaches
An output based solution that depends on disaggregating the skills and competences that have been identified as necessary for skilled performance. It is often used as a way of providing recognition for the skills already possessed by the trainer, typically though the compilation of a portfolio of evidence. It will also highlight missing competences so that the trainer can see which areas they need to develop. The disadvantages are:

• It is essentially a backward-mapping exercise – recognizing and rewarding competences rather than providing opportunities for new learning.
• There are invariably problems with granularity and with designing a credible classification system.
• It identifies gaps in skills and knowledge but does not fill them.

b)    Qualifications approach
An input based approach that depends on increasing the professionalisation of trainers by providing accredited training-the-trainer opportunities, which lead to formal qualifications, hierarchically arranged. The assumption is that the provision of higher levels of trainer training and thus higher-level qualifications for trainers will push up standards of the training they deliver. The major problems with this approach are:

• This can only operate on an individual level and is not transferable to organizations
• There is an issue around occupational identities. Many ‘trainers’ do not see themselves as trainers per se, their occupational identity being based on being a skilled worker or manager but who still have some responsibility for facilitating the learning of colleagues.
• It implies that progression for trainers is ‘vertical’ whereas in practice many of the trainers’ learning needs will be lateral. That is, they may want more knowledge or skills at the same and not a higher level.
• The assumption that if qualifications are higher and harder then standards somehow go up, is unproven. In countries with a formal training-the-trainer framework (e.g. UK) there is little research evidence to suggest this.

Instead of a competence based approach we have developed a series of principles and a series of standards, together with a flexible accreditation process. The principles include the recognition of the importance of:

• trainers in facilitating learning and the role of learning for individual competence development and organisational development
• different modes of learning and different modes of assessing learning
• different roles people play in training and learning
• opportunities for initial and continuing professional development
• opportunities of opportunities to practice
• networking
• partnerships
• the development of tools and platforms
• ongoing research and monitoring

The standards are expressed in the form of a series of commitments. The commitments are not only for individual trainers, but for teams, organisations and enterprises and governmental bodies. The proposed accreditation framework supports a process of trainers (or organisations) themselves deciding on what steps they wish to take to meet the different commitments and then of developing a portfolio or evidence to show that they have achieved this. We have also provided examples of the sort of measures they might tackle.

We have discussed the Framework with trainers and other people involved in training and there is considerable enthusiasm for our approach. In the next year we hope to further develop the framework and to run a series of pilots.

Personally I am very happy with this work. We have moved beyond competences to place practice and learning at the centre of the Framework. I would love to hear your comments on the book. And if you are interested in working with us please leave a comment or email Graham Attwell.

To download the book click here.

I have spent most of the day working on the Mature project. The project, funded by the European Commission, is developing services for knowledge maturing in organisations, including the introduction of Personal Learning and Management Systems and Organisational Learning and Management Systems. Of course, before we can develop or implement such systems we have to work out what they are. For me that is half of the attraction of the project.
This morning we had an on-line meeting for one of the work groups, this afternoon I had a long talk with Tobias Nelker from Paderborn University and in-between I started writing up overdue reports.
here are just a few thoughts following our discussions.
One of the attractions of the project, which is relatively well funded, it it brings together an interdisciplinary research team including researchers from sociology, computer sciences, education and work sciences. We are struggling still to find a common language. sometimes I do not understand what the computer scientists are talking about – and I am quite sure they have similar problems with me. More problematic is the development of a shared research approach and methodology for the project – different disciplines have different approaches to similar issues. We need to find ways of using this as a strength for the project.
With reference to knowledge sharing, I think we have some tensions between those who view knowledge through artefacts and others of us who see knowledge development and maturing as a process. I am by no means convinced we can measure or even understand knowledge maturing in the progressive iteration of a document or artefact – to me it is the social use of such artefacts which matures.
The project is through the technology programme of the European Commission and oart of the work involves the development and testing of tools. There seem to be two tensions. How can we marry together research into how people learn and how knowledge is developed with actual practice within organisations?
And how can we design tools which help people in their everyday work and lives based on their practice – rather than saying – here is a cool wizzy tool which we would like you to try out.
I am increasingly aware of the importance of context in learning and in knowledge development – especially in work based learning and in informal learning. there are multiple contextual variables of which I feel the most important is work organisation. It is not only an issue of opportunities for learning but an issue of the autonomy to use such learning in practice. This cannot be reduced to merely adopting to the work environment but the ability to shape that work environment based on individual and collective or organsiation knowledge.
This in turn requires change processes. But any project such as Mature is acting as a change agent in the very processes it studies.
All in all this is complex. But I am convinced that we can use technology based tools to open opportunities and support learning in the workplace – not just to courses – but for individual and peerr group learning from everyday working experience. This can not only lead to individual learning but can enrich work environments and lead to enhanced quality of goods and services. And in many ways I think this may be the real impact and potential of what we have called e-learning – rather than trying to use technology to implement traditional classroom based learning at a distance.
NB I am increasingly convinced of the potential of microblogging systems for knowledge exchange and development. This was what I taled to Tobias about this afternoon. Will write something more on this over the weekend.

In this multitasking twitter and hash tags and live blogging world we live in I was following the Jisc CETIS conference on Technology for Learning, Teaching and the Instiution yeserday (as aside not Andy Powell provides wonderful live blogging from the conference circuit).

There was a keynote speech by Professor Andrew Feenberg. His conclusion appeared to be that we needed new metaphor for education – to move away form the model of a factory to the idea of city. Now I see the appeal in terms of modernism. And that is interesting since the connectivism strand of think appears to go far closer to post modernism in its approach. The city, I suppose, could be said to be multi cultural and socially enriching in terms of interaction. I still remain unconvinced but anything which moves education beyond the present factory modals has to be a good thing.

And then my eye fell upon an article by Mike Baker in the Guardian newpaper extolling the virtues of US universities, where his daughter had recently studied, as opposed to the practice of universities in the UK. Mike Baker points to the greater flexibility of US universities in terms saying “the libraries were open 24 hours a day, seven days a week…. my daughter’s fellow students could pack in extra credits if they wished to get through their degree more quickly or, if they needed a part-time job, they could take fewer credits and stretch out their studies. Equally, they could stay on for an extra summer semester if they wished. ….Many of her fellow American undergraduates arrived at the university from community college, transferring in their course credits……Our universities also seem reluctant to change admissions.”

All good points I suppose. But is this not really just ramping up the Taylorist education factory production system to make it more effcient and flexible to churn out yet more students. I am at one with Andrew Feenberg in wanting to examine the purpose and worth of our university system. It is the enterprise approach to teaching and learning which has done so much harm to attempts to develop new pedagogic approaches to the use of technology for learning. More enterprising enterprises is not going to help.

I have been working with Cristina Costa to write a review paper on Personal Learning and Working Environments. The paper is now avaiable online on the Research section of this web site.

This review paper part of a series of papers commissioned by the Institute for Employment Research at the University of Warwick under the title of ‘Beyond Current Horizons – Working and Employment Challenge’. In turn, in forms part of a larger programme of work under the banner of Beyond Current Horizons that is being managed by FutureLab on behalf of the UK Department for Schools, Children and Families. The brief was to cover:

• The main trends and issues in the area concerned;
• Any possible discontinuities looking forward to 2025 and beyond;
• Uncertainties and any big tensions;
• Conclusions on what the key issues will be in the future and initial reflections on any general implications for education.

We had also agreed that we would produce such a paper to inform the work of the European Union Mature project which is looking at knowldge maturing and developing Personal and Organisational Learning and Management Environments.

It is a longish paper and covers such issues as:

• new ways of learning using Web 2.0 schools
• deschooling society
• workbased learning and the social shaping of work and technology
• organisational networks and communities of practice
• Personal Learning Emvironments
• the future of universties
• informal learning
• knowledge development and sharing

We were given a wide brief to look at what might happen up to 2025 and what developments we thought were likely and what were desireable. We have used the opportunity to think a little more freely than is often possible within the scope of traditional academic papers.

Annotate this paper

We would be very interested in your views on the ideas in this paper. We invite you to use Diigo tools to annotae the paper. If you have not used Diigo before for annotating and leaving comments here is a short introductory video. We invite you also to join the Diigo e-learning 2.0 group and to share your bookmarks through the group.

But we knw some people still prefer paper publications. So you can download an Open Office and a PDF version of the paper below.

workandlearning – PDF vesrion

workandlearning – Open Office version

I had a fascinating meeting with two representatives of a Bejing school district last night. They are in Bremen as part of a European programme which including other things is developing a programme for the Continuing Professional Development of vocational teachers in the city.
They came to visit us to discuss e-learning and how the use of new technologies might help in their project.
The big issue that emerged was that of the scale of they challenge they face. Most of the teachers in vocational schools have received no pedagogic training at all, gong straight from university to become a teacher. Because of pressures on the system, the CPD programme is being organised out of school hoursd. Attendance is voluntary. And the teachers are keen. A recent seminar held on a Sunday attracted more than 800 particpants! The biggest issue is that there are not enough resources to organise a tradtional CPD programme. There are simply too many teachers who want to participate and not enough trainers. And that is when we started thinking about Massively Open On-line Courses (MOOCs). The infrastructure and access to networks and computers is relatively good in Bejing. Teachers are open to new ideas. Could we organise a programme that combined face to face events with on-line provision open to all who wished to attend? How could support be organised? What kind of platforms and tools would be required?
I started out as a sceptic about MOOCs but the meeting last night has changed my thinking.
If you are interested in hearing more about the project, we recorded a quick podcast with the Chinese colleagues and we will try to get this online in the next couple of days.

Lsy week I helped organise the on-line conference on the training of teachers and trainers. And thanks to hard work from Dirk Stieglitz and cristina Costa the proceedings of the conference are now all on line on the Network of Trainers in Europe website. It is well worth checking out the web site and especially looking at the online exhibition which accompanied the conference.

We have been doing an online surevy to help in the evaluation of the conference and I will post some of the results this weekend.

In the meantime, if you missed the conference here is your second chance to see what happened.

5 November 2008

Theme: The changing role of trainers in learning

Morning sessions (for Elluminate sessions click here) featuring:

• Professor Alan Brown, Institute for Employment Research, University of Warwick
  • Employees supporting the learning, training and development of other employees while working in groups: examples drawn from aerospace, health and accountancy (mp3, ppt, paper)

• George Roberts, Oxford Brooks University, UK
  • Education, training and employment (mp3, ppt)

• Barry Nyhan, Ireland
  • Lifelong learning and the role of trainers (mp3, ppt, paper)
• Lorna Unwin, Professor Alan Felstead and Nick Jewson, Professor Alison Fuller
  • Can anyone be a trainer?: towards a more embedded role for vocational trainers (ppt)
    

Theme: Support for the professional development of trainers

Afternoon sessions (for Elluminate sessions click here) featuring:

• Seija Mahlamäki-Kultanen and Anita Eskola-Kronqvist, HAMK, Finland
  • New Innovations into trainers’ training: Documenting and analyzing work processes with digital photos (mp3, ppt)

• Prof. Eduardo Figueira, University of Évora Portugal
  
  • Developing competence for trainers in Portugal (mp3, ppt)

• Simone Kirpal, University f Bremen, Germany
  • The Eurotrainer network survey (mp3, ppt)

• Eileen Luebcke, Pontydysgu, Germany
  
  • A framework for continuing professional development of trainers (mp3, ppt)

• Summary of the first day By Graham Attwell (mp3)

6 November 2008

Theme: E-learning for trainers

Morning sessions (for Elluminate sessions click here) featuring:

• Cristina Costa, University of Salford / Pontydysgu, UK
  • Using social software tools for supporting the online training of trainers (mp3, ppt)

• Doris Beer, Lohberger Unternehmerinnenzentrum e.V., Germany
  
  • e-learning for medical healthcare assisstants in Germany (mp3, ppt)

• John Pallister, Wolsingham School, UK
  • The ePortfolio process, supporting the Trainer and Training (mp3, ppt)

• Vance Stevens, Petroleum Institute, Abu Dhabi
  • Teacher professional development in groups, communities, and networks (mp3, ppt)

Afternoon sessions (for Elluminate sessions click here) featuring:

• Carla Arena & Mary Hillis, USA and Japan
  • Professional Development in Online Circles of Learning (mp3, ppt, wiki)

• Anne Fox, CV2, Denmark
  • VITAE – introducing 21st century skills through mentoring (mp3, ppt)

• Regina Lamscheck Nielsen, DEL, Denmark
  
  • TrainerGuide – made in Denmark (mp3, ppt)

• Linda Castañeda, University of Murcia, Spain
  
  • On-line Collaboration to teach and learn with each other (mp3, ppt, wiki)

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Last week I write that with the emergence of open learning in the form of freely available courses, seminars and events on the internet, and with the increasing availability of open educational resources, open accreditation is the final frontier.

This week I will be writing a series of blog pots on accreditation. But first up an excellent quote from J,M Coetzee in his novel ‘Diary of a Bad Year’. Just substitute ‘open online networks for ‘peoples homes’

“In the days when Poland was under communist rule, there were dissidents who conducted night classes in their homes, running seminars on writers and philosophers excluded from the official canon (for example, Plato). No money changed hands though there may have been other forms of payment. if the spirit of the university is to survive, something along these lines may have to come into being in countries where tertiary eduction has been wholly subordinated to business principles. In other words the real university may have to move into peoples homes and grant degrees for which the sole backing will be the names of the scholars who sign the certificates.”

Continuing the open learning debate….I greatly like this diagramme by George Siemens. I think there is much of merit here. Very happpy to see acknowledgemnt of the importance of self publishing (as opposed to academic reporsitories). However there are a few things missed out.

Firstly if we take congniscence of Jenny Hughes’ defintion of learning as ‘to find and follow a track’ as counterposed to curriculum  from the latin ‘currere’, which means to run or race and ‘curriculum’ as race or racecourse, then instotutions and teacher have an important role in assisting learners in developing their own learning pathways.

A second important  role is that of assessment. But to understand this we need to decouple assessment from acceditation. If we design assessment as a learning process and move from assessemnt of learning to asssessement for learning this could become an integral part of the process of finding and developing learning pathways. This is not so utopian. Serendipitously. The Times newpaper today published an article about innovative assessment in UK universities. The struggle, though, as with self and peer assessment is in assessment having to match accreditation procedures. Without this link, we could open up all jinds of new forms of assessment.

A final point on accreditation. Many learners do not want or require accreditation. Indeed it is the formal accreditation procedures which deters them for signing up for a learning programme. And as Antnio Fini, talking about the home made certificate he got from the OpenEd2007 course, says: “all my connections, blog posts, comments, collective works, presentations, articles related to that experience, are still out there as tangible proofs of this learning. So I could equally put the OpenEd course in my CV and could ask to my supervisor to evaluate all that activity for credit in my PhD, also without that piece of paper!”

Why not put the learners in charge of accreditation. Lets leave it to them to decide how they wish to show what and how they have learned – albeit with support. I once co-ran a course with Jenny Hughes where we offered the particpants their certificate at the start of the courese. They refused! But it did raise the issue of why they were doing the course and how they valued learning. And that is an issue we need to bring to the fore.

Jenny Hughes has been undertaking the thankless task of trying to edit (or more to rewrite) an article of mine on Personal Learning Environments as part of a handbook for teachers for the Taccle project.

I am intrigued by her reference ot the orgins of the words ‘curriculum’ and ‘learning’ in this excerpt from the draft:

“Traditionally, knowledge has been conceived of something possed by ‘experts’ . The formal education curriculum is based on the idea that learning can be neatly and conveniently divided into subject areas which in turn are based on traditional university disciplines.  The people who have the knowledge (the teachers) are accorded higher status than those that do not (the learners) and although all good teachers maintain that they learn a lot from their pupils, the passage of information is conceived as being one-way. There are desgnated places (schools) where learning officially takes place, where learning is tested and  which control access to the next stage or level of learning

The new technologies have challenged this status quo.  The explosion of freely available sources of information has increased the range of knowledge available to people and has made it accessible when and where they want it, in bite sized chunks that do not necessarily form a coherent subject discipline.

We are moving from the idea of knowledge being developed and controlled by experts to collaborative knowledge construction which can be facilitated by the use of social software, as we describe above. Even more importantly, we are starting to rethink what qualifies as ‘knowledge’.  Instead of the ‘curriculum’ being defined by experts, communities of people interested in the same things – or even just by being part of a community – are acting as a curriculum.

Interestingly, the word curriculum comes from the latin ‘currere’, which means to run or race and ‘curriculum’ was a race or racecourse. It is easy to see how this was adopted to describe a learning course which had a starting point, travelled along a straight route and reached a finishing point with competitors battling with each other to finish first or to be the best.

Maybe for the first time learning has stopped being a race course. Conversely ‘to learn’ originally meant ‘to find and follow a track’  and this seems to sum up rather well the current shift in emphasis from formal curriculum to informal learning.

This changing model requires not only different approaches but different technologies and implicit is the change from an institutional approach to learning to a more learner centred approach.”