Let’s learn from each other!!

Sometimes you happen to be part of a great WhatsApp group that is called Design Discussions where some invitations for good webinars came by. We shared these invitations with the community. Then I was pushed by the Eumetcal community to put all the available resources from these webinars on one easy to find place. For me this was the trigger to create a “Support for the community” page on the CALMet Commons with all the great resources that were shared between the members in the WhatsApp Design Discussions group and were found in the rest of the community. 

Our plan is to keep this page updated with the new resources we find. Therefore we hope that you will also share with me your suggestions for training material, articles, books and tools which makes your live easier and could be handy for others within our community to use as well. Then I will make sure that this information will be put on the page. In the end we hope that this will help to make your job easier.

My time at Online Educa Berlin 2019

This past November I had the privilege to attend the Online Educa Berlin (OEB) 2019 annual conference. It's a privilege really, as these conference are not cheap, considering besides fees, the time away from the office and the alternative: free, online excellent resources and events (see the ALT Online Winter Conference 2019 or the Open Education Week). I go to OEB for the few, but excellent sessions that encourage critical thinking, the a-ha moments or, according to the Brain Ladies, the light bulb moments when gamma waves activity supports intensive bursts of higher-order thinking. 

The light bulb moment for me this year happened during: 

• Audrey Watters’ keynote - on edtech propaganda, dystopian futures, ideology and myths. Audrey sees herself as a Kassandra of the edtech world and writes nicely at http://hackeducation.com;
• Mike Sharples' session - drawing on his Open University (OU) experience or that of designing FutureLearn, he talked about pedagogy-based design, citizen inquiry, promoted his new book, Practical Pedagogy, and the annual OU Innovating Pedagogy reports, a correspondent of the EDUCAUSE's Horizon Reports;
• Brain Ladies' lively, humorous and playful session from 4 researcher ladies on neuro-science, AI and learning. Online workshops to be offered starting next January;
• Nik Gowing's scary session on thinking the unthinkable reflecting the findings of his study on leadership, global anxieties and disruptions (read more on that). At OEB, Nik warned educators  about the necessity to prepare for what is to come - the unforeseeable.
• Donald Clark sessions on both the pedagogy behind videos (or why they are not enough for deep learning) and predictable AI sessions, while promoting some of his AI or sort of AI work, see CogBooks. His talk was preceded by a lovely presentation by Mathew Day from ESA who showed us how they've been using videos to train astronauts up at the International Space Station.

Jean-Marc Côté, A 19th-Century Vision of the Year 2000

On the first day (pre-conference), I attended a whole day Design Thinking workshop at the prestigious HPI Design thinking school. The challenge: Envision and design Post-Disciplinary Learning: Rethinking Educational Systems in a world where there are no more disciplines. We worked through a 2-phase process, first Problem Space (Understand + Observe + Point of View) and then Solution Space (Ideation, Prototyping and Test), brainstorming, interviewing, analysing, clustering, prototyping and so on. You can learn more about the methodology here and do consider it if you are dealing with complex challenges where potentially disruptive, multi-disciplinary approaches/solutions are needed. Keep in mind thought that an experienced facilitator is key to Design thinking. 

In my past work, I had the opportunity to work with the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management, ISKME (California) which delivers what they call Action Collabs and I must say that their version of a design thinking workshop felt more conducive to the sort of creative thinking that leads to innovating ideas. The Berlin facilitation version focused too much on the rigour of the process, instead of supporting the creative flow.

Moving on, what else drew my attention?

• the TUMO project session, a seemingly utopian, but very impressive after-school solution which works wonders for teens in Armenia at the moment, and it is expanding;
• Bryan Alexander's contributions - you can participate in his monthly online, participatory, open conversation about education, in the Future Trends in Technology and Education project. Bryan's a futurist...
• the Minerva project session, a global high-ed alternative that I'd like to learn more about.
  

OEB 2019 - Official Wrap-up video 

On the last day, I dropped into the Blended Learning design session delivered by Nataša Perović and Clive Young from the University College London (UK). The room was full of excitement. They spoke about the same ABC methodology I had learned from them at OEB 2017. ABC is a visual storyboard approach for designing blended curriculums and it has in the past 2 years been used successfully various time in the meteorological training community. 

The final session of the day for me, Learning cultures, emphasised an old, but important idea - how we, those working in learning and design need to stop acting like a hammer looking for a nail, but instead act as partners, working closely with those we are trying to serve; with a broad ecosystem approach in mind where training is not an universal panacea. 

For more of an impression of the conversations that go on back at forth over the years at & around OEB such as if and to what extent we are ready to work with AI, if we are teaching the right skills for the future, and the role of workplace learning, check out #oeb2019 on Twitter. 

How did others experience OEB2019?

• See Audrey Watter's reflection
• Donald Clark's reflection
• ... and I can't wait to read Tomislav Marekovic's reflection, my colleague from EUMETCAL who came along. 

What produces better learning outcomes: classroom instruction or e-learning?

This is a question that I encounter often in my work as an Instructional Designer for the COMET program.  Based on my current understanding, my answer is - the instructional event that uses effective learning methods.  Some of those methods include realistic decision making, spaced repetitions, real-world contexts, and feedback.

In my experience, the key method that brings them all together was summarized nicely by Michael Allen: 

“To learn is an action taken by and occurring within the learner. Instructors cannot learn for their learners, and neither can e-learning technology even with all its graphics, animations, effects, audio, interactivity, and so on. Learners must be active participants and, in the end, do the learning. Learner motivation determines the level of participation in learning activities and the degree to which learners will make the effort needed to learn.” (Allen, p.121)  I have found this to be useful for designing e-learning and classroom courses.

Our challenge as trainers is to create the conditions in which the learners will think about and take actions in order to learn.  Let’s say that we are training people how to diagnose a disease in a patient.  We can create a lecture about it in which the learners passively listen about how to make a diagnosis, about different symptoms and ask a few questions in the end.  Or we can bring in actors who have rehearsed a list of health symptoms and then ask every learner to go through the diagnosis process and determine what kind of disease this patient has. 

The lecture will likely diminish motivation in the learners and the action they are taking is listening (perhaps one or two  students get to ask a question).  The patient simulation could increase motivation because the learners are practicing what they need to learn and they will have to use their diagnosis and communication skills.  So a classroom lecture will not be enough to engage our learners in the actions to help them learn, but a classroom simulation will.

What if our budget did not allow us to create a classroom simulation?  We can create an online recording of the lecture and ask the learners to view it.  Based on my experience, this will also diminish learner motivation (imagine listening on one hour long lecture online) and the learners will not engage in the kinds of actions that help them learn.  We could create an online simulation in which learners listen to a patient, ask them questions, and then diagnose the disease.  They can then receive feedback on how to improve.  The learners will be thinking and taking actions to help them learn and receive feedback about their performance.  The learners will be able to take the simulation at any time of the day or night and as many times as they need.  This e-learning simulation will be much less expensive than the classroom simulation (no need to find actors and pay them every time, no need to deal with scheduling issues, etc.)

I hope you can see that it is possible to create ineffective and boring lectures and boring e-learning that do not create the environment for our learners to become “active participants and do the learning.”  It is also possible to create engaging classroom experiences and engaging e-learning if we carefully select and adapt our instructional strategies to the learners, the topic, the budget and all the other variables that make our work so challenging.

In 2017, Will Thalheimer reviewed numerous meta-analyses comparing classroom to e-learning and offered the following conclusions:

“In terms of learning effectiveness, it is NOT whether the modality is e-learning or classroom instruction; the learning methods are what make the difference. Realistic decision making, spaced repetitions, real-world contexts, and feedback—among other research-supported learning factors—produce better learning than straight information presentation.” 

Bernard et al. expressed a similar view after completing their impressively nuanced and detailed meta-analysis work on studies comparing classroom instruction to eLearning in 2004:

“it is the characteristics of instructional design, such as the instructional strategies that are used, the feedback that is provided, and the degree of learner engagement, that create the conditions within which purposive learning will occur... Characteristics of pedagogy tended to take precedence over media... This is especially true for achievement outcomes”

The last idea I wanted to share is about implementation.  It is very rare to be successful in our first attempt of using any instructional strategy.  It takes some experimentation and several iterations in order to refine our implementation to match our learners’ needs, in some instances, some learners may never be happy with our work.  It is important for us to reflect after every training event, learn from our mistakes, find additional ideas, and try again.  In this way, we are also learning how to create the conditions that help our learners become ““active participants and do the learning” after every event.

My academic advisor gave me very important advice early in my training to become an Instructional Designer.  He said “Designing training is a series of compromises.  The key is to find the set of compromises that will help people learn.  Choose the approach and medium that will best serve the instructional goals.”  In my experience, I have found that the choices and compromises change with every audience, method, topic, budget, and delivery media.


References
Allen, M., Sites, R. (2012). Michael Allen's Guide to e-Learning: Building Interactive, Fun, and Effective Learning Programs for Any Company, 2nd Edition. ATD Press Wiley, Inc. 
Bernard, R.M. Abrami, P. C. Lou, Y., Borokhovski, E., Wade, A. Wozney, L., Wallet, P. A., Fiset, M., Huang, B., (2004). How Does Distance Education Compare to Classroom Instruction? A Meta-Analysis of Empirical Literature    Review of Educational Research, p. 35/63.
Thalheimer, W. (2017). Does elearning work? What the scientific research says! Available at http://www.work-learning.com/catalog.html.

Join us for EUMETCAL/CALMet XIII 2019 in Darmstadt, Germany!

17 - 20 September Darmstadt, Germany
Hosted by EUMETSAT

Join the international CALMet/Eumetcal community for four days of sharing best practices in training for the meteorological, hydrologic, and climate workforce. EUMETSAT will host the 13th biennial, in-person gathering. The themes are:

Training challenges and opportunities
- The future roles of personnel providing weather, water, climate and oceanographic services;
- New sources of data, such as satellite, and new sources of decision support, such as enhanced NWP and nowcasting systems, and their impact to the training needs;
- Changing standards, course content and delivery to prepare the workforce for the new service roles;
- Adapting courses and learning to address the WMO qualification and competency requirements;
- Using virtual reality and /or augmented reality in training; 
- Using training to develop and maintain communities of practice.

Teaching and learning
- Best practices in implementing learning and development activities;
- Motivating the learner for now and the future;
- Misconceptions and myths about learning;
- Lessons learnt from evaluation of training programmes;
- Advanced teaching and training techniques;
- Interactive online learning;
- Increasing the long term impacts of training initiatives;
- Improving the connection between initial education and work based training.

Collaboration
- Identifying opportunities for shared education and training;
- Ensuring all countries can prepare their workforces for the changing services through international collaboration and cooperation opportunities.

Please read more about the event at Conference Web Site. The registration is CLOSED. We are looking forward to seeing you in Darmstadt!

Next CALMet Design Workshop session

CALMet Design Workshops continue also in October. The next session is scheduled for 25 October 2018 at 14 UTC. Feel free to share with your trainer contacts.

Workshop facilitator: Tsvetomir Ross-Lazarov, COMET.

If you are working on a training project for which you would like more ideas, you are invited to submit your project ideas using the form : http://bit.ly/calmetdesign

The CALMet Design Workshops

CALMet Design Workshops continue in September. The next session is scheduled for 27 September at 14 UTC. Feel free to share with your trainer contacts.

Workshop facilitator: Tsvetomir Ross-Lazarov, COMET.

If you are working on a training project for which you would like more ideas, you are invited to submit your project ideas by 20 September 2018 using the form : http://bit.ly/calmetdesign

Greetings,

Roro and Vesa for CALMet Online

CALMet Design Workshop

Greetings everyone,

As promised during the CALMet conference, I would like to offer to our community a Design workshop.  Please bring a project that you are working on and we can discuss ideas about implementing competency-based strategies to engage the learners and assess them.  The workshop will last one hour and will happen online on January 17th, 2018. The exact time will be determined based on the timezones of those submitting the form below.

If you would like to bring a project to the discussion, please fill out this form so that I can summarize the project for the group ahead of time and use our time to generate many ideas. Please complete the form by January 10th, 2018.

https://goo.gl/forms/po12dUlO6oltpsyS2

If we find that this is a useful activity, we can try to hold another workshop.

Hope to see you there.

Staying Informed About the Latest Trends in Education and Technology

The Horizon Report is a great way to stay informed of the latest trends in technology and education.  The report is published every year by the New Media Consortium and is prepared by experts from around the world.  This year’s report focuses on blended learning designs, measuring learning, re-designing learning spaces and deeper learning approaches among others.  You can find it here:

http://www.nmc.org/publication/nmc-horizon-report-2017-higher-education-edition/

They have translations in Chinese, Korean, German, Japanese and Spanish.