Challenges of change

The internet and the programs that make use of it are in a constant state of change. You accept an update (usually suggested as a 'security' update), and hey presto something else no longer works. This has been the case with blogspot - suddenly getting in to edit a post is not longer available - or crashes when you try. The problem error messages assure me is Firefox. That is the internet browser program I usually use. But here I am working in IE and the same thing is happening when I try to access/edit an older post. So I will wait patiently until the programmers detect the tiny bit of code that is in conflict with another tiny bit of code and solve the problem.

Change is also one of the challenges in the area of training. No sooner have you designed a course to cover the current parameters in your industry, than hey presto a new machine/process/set of government requirements are invented. First your research and reading has to keep up with every possible change that is adopted by your industry. Then, just like the programmers, you have to search through your course material for any contrary mention or lack of mention of the change.

This is where industry-based associations are so valuable. They take off some of the stress of monitoring everything and dish up the changes in summaries. You can then choose where to go to find out the details. They act as 'scouts' leading the way safely through the jungle of change.

Sometimes paying the annual fees may seem like a lot of money for very little gain, but the cost of NOT being informed may be greater:

• Loss of course credibility if your material is not up-to-date!
• Being left behind in knowing what the industry is actually adopting or where problems are occurring.
• Leaving you out of the loop in talking to industry and asking the right questions.

All of the information industry organisations provide not only keep you informed, they keep you involved in the industry you serve. That's what maintaining a training course is all about. Being seen to offer more than your trainees could have gained elsewhere.
- Heather Sylvawood, http://www.edutechkm.com/

Financial literacy under the microscope

For the first time since the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) began across international countries, the financial literacy of 15 year-olds will be assessed. In New Zealand 180 schools (about 5,500 New Zealand students) have been randomly selected, and marking will occur in September and October.

PISA is a large international study of the mathematical, reading, scientific and financial literacy capabilities of 15-year-old students around the world. It is a collaborative effort among participating countries (65 in 2012) commissioned by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

The interesting thing about the PISA study is that it focuses on not the absorption of knowledge but how the selected 15 year-olds are able to:

• Meet the challenges of the future
• Analyse, reason and communicate their ideas effectively
• Develop the capacity to continue learning throughout life

Then from the data the study hopes to find out if there are some ways of organising schools that make them more effective than others.

In many respects this last goal mirrors the policies of the current New Zealand Government. Ostensibly, national standards and performance pay are to give an incentive to lift student achievement. But in what?

NCEA units are prescriptive in their achievement targets, and to ensure the most students achieve the greatest number of the standards, the skills that will help them meet the challenges of the future can only be an ‘also-ran’ – something to be done if there is time after teaching the basics.

If 15 year-olds are to learn to analyse, reason and communicate their ideas effectively then they must have a clear understanding of how the skills they are learning relate to their future. They must also grasp that this is only the first stage in their lifetime of learning and developing skills. Too many young people in this age-group are already turned off school (learning) because they see it as having no relevance to them. All they want to do is leave school and start earning.

That’s where financial literacy is really required. But is it on the school curriculum? Primary maths teaches about currency, and some secondary home economics and economics classes include budgeting and other financial information. However, not everyone takes these classes. So where does it fit for the other 15 year-olds?

• Of course, the first issue is: what questions/tasks will be used to assess financial literacy?
• Has it been designed to remove any skew from cultural bias? (I wonder if this is ever possible.)
• And pivotal to the financial literacy outcome is: how does PISA define ‘financial literacy’?

I shall watch with interest to find out where New Zealand sits on the financial literacy scales.

Heather Sylvawood, Director, Edutech KM Ltd, www.edutechkm.com

How important is social media in training?

I’ve been reading widely on the ways trainers have been integrating social media into online and off-line courses, and my feeling is that trainers who use it are:

• Already using social media themselves in their out-of-hours lives
• Are teaching subjects where trainees are likely to believe they can research the topic themselves
• Work with trainees/students for whom literacy is not an issue
• Train groups who can easily afford and access online technology

And before anyone jumps in and points out that it is the rare young person who does not own a cell phone, let me illustrate my point. I was involved in designing face-to-face training for a group of trainees who:

1. Live in rural New Zealand
2. Come from families with limited resources apart from telly, DVD players and cell phones
3. Are sometimes challenged with literacy

We designed an experiential activity in a pilot where a member of a small group had to phone an expert on a cell phone to elicit information to help them write a report (basically notes that they would speak to). What we failed to realise was that no one in the group felt comfortable actually phoning someone on a cell phone. They texted in txt language even during the course, but never used the phone to actually speak into. That cell phone was passed like a hot potato around the room until one of them finally agreed to try. It was an amazing success for the young man with the courage, but certainly challenged our assumptions about cell phone confidence.

Social media probably can be and is used as a research tool in more formal courses, but there is a still, I believe, a rather large gap between the social media learning opportunities within formal courses and those that can be used with less resourced groups.

Heather Sylvawood

www.edutechkm.com

heather@edutechkm.com

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Practical versus passive?

In the developed world we have tended to look at learning as something you do in a formal situation. That situation may be out in the field where we have a ‘buddy’ or tutor assigned to teach practical skills, or in the classroom or lecture room.  

As our society has mechanised practical activities, the training in the field has turned more into formal teaching, theory and testing. The more teaching and testing involved the higher are the barriers for people who just do not learn in that way.

In the process we have developed something akin to a ‘caste system’ in education. Bright, practical people are failing, especially boys whose physiological make-up is not geared to sitting still for long periods or absorbing information in a passive way.

Part of the problem is, in fact, the trend towards using the Internet and distance learning as the means for transferring information. Learning institutions have been pressured towards increasing their options for students in order to keep up in a competitive market. That means they have to reach out further – beyond their immediate location – to attract fee-paying students. Originally practical courses are having large chunks of their content turned into passive theory-based information.

Even if students are required to research material, they are likely to do it passively in front of the computer. Interactive learning games are still prohibitively expensive to produce for single courses, and still require the user to sit at a desk.

The books I read about adapting distance learning to suit kinaesthetic learners tinker with the options, e.g. using cell phones, Twitter accounts and Facebook to engage learners. Those activities don’t, however, use the body’s larger muscles, lung capacity and brute force.

Maybe the only option is to adapt to meet the needs of the greatest number, but how do we do that without creating an educational caste system?

I’d love to hear if there is a practical answer.

-       Heather

Director

Edutech KM Ltd

(Nelson Office)

Ph: 64-3-525-7073

Mob: .021-251-2141

www.edutechkm.com

heather@edutechkm.com

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How much does personality affect learning?

I believe most people will agree that a person’s willingness to learn affects how much benefit they will get from any face-to-face course they attend. They may turn up to a course because they were told to do it, they thought it would be good, it will earn them more, help them find a job, or their friend is doing it. Their success, however, depends on their personality and the conclusions they have drawn about themselves and learning.

Even if they are willing and eager to learn, their ability to interact within a group without letting feelings of self-doubt, fear of being stupid when answering a question, fear of failure, fear of the unknown, fear of being embarrassed, may interfere with their openness to learn. Personality and personal experience will keep getting in the way.

Why personality? Personality is a person’s in-built emotional guidance system. It is how they deal with daily life, and comes into play in a big way when the person steps outside their comfort zone. If they’re a positive person, new experiences are less likely to faze them; if they generally react negatively to new things, then any course will be a challenge. Their personality/ego will be sitting at their ear filtering everything they hear and judging it ‘good, bad, or okay. If the person comes from deficit-based thinking very little will get the thumbs up. The ego’s filter is: “How will this affect ME?” The answer or decision about whether to accept the new information will be based on judgements like: “I might have to work harder ...” “No one will listen to me if I suggest this ...”, “That’s not the way we do it at work ...”

If attendees come on a course without any understanding about their personality and how it works or affects them, they are less likely to benefit from new information. Their minds are closed to new ways of doing things.
The world population is generally deficit-based. This is not good news for trainers.

Most of us are trained to think of what we haven’t yet got, rather than to be happy with what we already have. (Don’t get me started on advertising which picks up on this tendency of ours!) On the face of it, dissatisfaction with what we have might seem like a great motivation to improve. However, when you’re entrenched in deficit-based thinking it becomes your comfort-zone. You’re not goal orientated. You’re constantly waiting for the axe to fall, so it’s much safer to stay where you are. Often failure is better than success because ‘failure’ feels familiar.

In my experience, the best way to get past the negatives is to turn the course into fun. Stop worrying about ALL THIS STUFF they need to know. Use fun, challenging activities without winners and losers, and turn debriefs into moments of revelation. Give them the STUFF in written, audio or video ‘notes’! If they’ve enjoyed the course and got past their fears, chances are they might even refer to their ‘notes’ after the course. Oh ... and follow up personally with emails or text messages to encourage better take-up.

Best regards

Heather Sylvawood

Director

Edutech KM Ltd

www.edutechkm.com

heather@edutechkm.com

Who does 'learning' belong to?

To answer this question we have to ask ourselves several other questions.

1. Which party of the employer/employee relationship is supposed to benefit from the learning or training?
2.  Is learning for long term or short term gain?
3. Should learning apply to work or personal development?

The answer to all three questions is: Both!

Learning is a partnership even if the employer is upskilling the workforce for company benefit. First the trainee (learner) must feel there is enough benefit in it for her or him to put the effort into learning new skills or knowledge; second, the trainee must feel confident enough to apply it once back on the job. They must also feel that they personally benefitted from the effort. That benefit could come in many shapes, feelings of satisfaction about their personal achievement, admiration from others, monetary benefit, personal recognition, the promise of more opportunities. Each learner/trainee will have a personal motivation that moves them forward.

Learning isn’t a pour it in, top it up and it goes into action. Learning requires attitude as well as aptitude. If the employee goes along to a course reluctantly only because they were told to, they will challenge everything that is said, look only for reasons why it won’t work at her/his work, and fail to apply any of their new learning to their job. Then all the learning in any course will not make changes on the shop floor. The new skills will be seen as something related only to the course, and the employer will not achieve the benefits for the company.

So whose responsibility is it to turn learning opportunities into company benefit?

• ·      The employer?
• ·      The employee?
• ·      The trainer?

Okay – you guessed it – all three. Learning and success needs to be valued by the three because it is a partnership. Here are a few ways that trainers and employers might leverage attitude:

Employers: Institute a reliable system of communicating anyone’s training achievements. Make a point of personally congratulating those who pass a course, either face-to-face or via a phone call. Suggest new directions now that this goal is achieved. This can also be done by the HR or trainer on site, but “the boss” always carries more weight in the praise stakes. Measure productivity or a drop in waste so that if there are fewer production problems these too can be shared company wide. It is human nature to try to achieve more in less time. But make sure you are not putting out the message that more production is all you want. Stress the quality you want to achieve and link it back to those who have been training.

Trainers: Use stories to illustrate the potential achievement from the training, not just for the employer/company, but also for the trainee. Store up stories that you read about and learn to tell them like a storyteller. Even if they are not in the trainee’s own industry the trainee will see the parallels. Use motivational speach to pull the trainee onside. Uncover their goals and try to relate them to achievement in the course. Draw the parallels between their own goals and an improvement in productivity or quality as company goals. Take one small improvement in performance and cost it out as a benefit over a full year. The changes can be staggering!

-          Heather Sylvawood, Edutech KM Ltd

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