Learning Blended Learning

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In general terms (and few words), Blended Learning is defined as the combination of traditional face-to-face classroom methods with more modern computer-mediated activities.

Though we may look at blended learning strategies for a variety of primary reasons (from improving the effectiveness of your training initiatives to optimizing costs, to leveraging the synergy of multiple training actors in a community or organization), we all agree that a full blended approach to training is the key to success in every organization addressing change management at any level.
A blended approach guarantees that the right people have access to the right piece of knowledge anytime anywhere, regardless their role in the organization (both internal and external), their duties, their working time and location, the technology they can access.
In a blended approach, assuring consistency of learning content design is key to an effective definition, transfer, assessment and certification of the appropriate learning objectives and outcomes. Classroom-Based (Instructor-Led) Training initiatives cannot be addressed separately from online training and eLearning project without losing a great opportunity to boost the effectiveness of your training processes, and keeping costs for both content production and training delivery significantly higher.

In short, a full blended approach has key advantages for those organizations that need to dramatically reduce the costs and time for creating and maintaining Training materials across several delivery mechanisms and a mixed network of Authors (SMEs, IDs, Trainers).
At the same time, it allows implementing effective Web-Based Training initiatives while still keeping (and improving) Instructor-Led Training initiatives in parallel.

Nowadays, high end authoring tools and learning content management solutions propose, as part of their offering, modules and features that support the production of multiple output materials from one and the same set of source documentation, all produced across one and the same publishing process. This is what we use to call “single source – multiple output” approach.

“Single source – multiple output” approach is needed to those organizations having needs such as:

• reducing the overall investment of the organization in training initiatives, maintaining the effectiveness of the related publishing processes
• leveraging the actual skills of the different actors involved in the above mentioned processes (“SMEs are subject matter experts, IDs and Trainers are instructional and training experts, not the other way around!”)
• building and maintaining a central knowledge hub from which contents may distributed through different channels in an effective and durable way
• as a matter of fact, maximize the re-usability of their contents – see my other post on re-usability of content.

“I don’t want to write, review, translate, and repurpose the same content multiple times!”

In short, a well designed “single source – multiple output” publishing process enables fully blended learning at a reasonable cost.

If the eLearning market had seen in ADL SCORM or IMS Common Cartridge its reference standards, the publishing market has identified in DITA (the Darwin Information Typing Architecture, an XML-based standard introduced by IBM and now maintained by OASIS) the standard modality to structure documentation in a way that “single source – multiple output” can become reality and traditional publishing mechanisms can be kept intact, though extending their scope to also address new media and new distribution channels.

The key component of DITA is its Topics-based authoring paradigm. Indeed, content can be structured into self-standing information chunks, each chunk (or “Topic”, in DITA terms) being the smallest piece of information that can stand for its own. This is possible because every chunk (“Topic”) is organized around a single subject. The length of a Topic may vary from a single short sentence (or word, or image) to a whole paragraph or chapter.

A second key aspect of DITA is its ability to be extended (“specialized”) to cover at best the semantic needs of a specific discipline. DITA specializations already exist for a variety of disciplines including, of course Learning and Training Content (L&TC).

To get an idea of what DITA is all about, you may check the DITA World website, collecting a comprehensive list of DITA resources (articles, vendors, user groups and more).

We plan to address DITA in further posts. Among them:

What happens when DITA meets SCORM? Happy end?

Stay tuned!

The Future of Learning: Preparing for Change.

Some time ago I was involved in a foresight study entitled “The Future of Learning: new ways to learn new skills for future jobs”. The study, launched by the European Commission, aimed at developing visions and scenarios on new ways to acquire skills and competences in Europe in 2020-2030. The following dimensions were mainly addressed:

1. Emergent skills and competences associated with future jobs
2. New ways and practices of acquiring knowledge, skills and competences
3. Associated changes in the roles of the participants in the learning process, i.e. learners and teachers
4. Implications for existing Education and Training institutions, systems and policy frameworks
5. The role of information and communication technologies in transforming and supporting creative and innovative learning
6. Changes and challenges to assessment, certification and accreditation
7. Implications of the envisaged changes for present policy action and support

The study was conducted by a group of researchers from the European Commission Institute for Prospective Technology Studies (IPTS) in Seville, the TNO (the applied research and technology organisation of the Netherlands), the Open University of the Netherlands and AtticMedia (a specialist learning communications agency from London), and a set of domain experts were involved from different disciplines and organizations, which were asked their contribution to the vision building process based on the “group concept mapping” (GCM) method.

The study, recently published by the IPTS, is worth reading and now available for download.

The report aims to identify, understand and visualise major changes to learning in the future. It developed a descriptive vision of the future, based on existing trends and drivers, and a normative vision outlining how future learning opportunities should be developed to contribute to social cohesion, socio-economic inclusion and economic growth.

The overall vision is that personalisation, collaboration and informalisation (informal learning) are at the core of learning in the future. These terms are not new in education and training but will have to become the central guiding principle for organising learning and teaching in the future. The central learning paradigm is thereby characterised by lifelong and life-wide learning, shaped by the ubiquity of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). At the same time, due to fast advances in technology and structural changes to European labour markets that are related to demographic change, globalisation and immigration, generic and transversal skills become more important, which support citizens in becoming lifelong learners who flexibly respond to change, are able to pro-actively develop their competences and thrive in collaborative learning and working environments.

Many of the changes depicted have been foreseen for some time but they now come together in such a way that is becomes urgent and pressing for policymakers to consider them and to propose and implement a fundamental shift in the learning paradigm for the 21st century digital world and economy. To reach the goals of personalised, collaborative and informalised learning, holistic changes need to be made (curricula, pedagogies, assessment, leadership, teacher training, etc.) and mechanisms need to be put in place which make flexible and targeted lifelong learning a reality and support the recognition of informally acquired skills.

You will especially appreciate the way the EU challenges for future learning policies have been described through a set of “user personas”, and in particular:

• Chanta, the 6 year old child of Cambodian immigrants who came to Poitiers (France) in 2023
• Bruno, who lives in Milan (Italy) and is in the 9th grade of a public school
• Emma, a 17-year-old girl who lives in Munich (Germany) and is in her last year of high school
• Joshua, a young man form suburban England who finished his three-year vocational training programme for hotel industry and who is now strugging to find a job
• Sven, a 42-year-old father who lives in the Swedish town of Katrineholm and lost his job when the car factory he worked for closed in 2014
• Martina, now 59, highly qualified and specialized programmer from Prague (Czech Republic) whose skills became obsolete because of the rapid rise of quantum computing and neural self-correcting networks

All these personas have something in common: there seems to be no place for them in their surrounding labour market.

How can they improve their skills and get ready for new professional challenges?
A quick and effective answer can be found in a set of videos produced as part of the study and now available on YouTube.

And you? What do you think will be the challenges of learning in 2020 and beyond?