Sunday Posts

  Over the years, competency-based education has become a central focus of my work.  This started with a simple assumption: That the transition from education to employment would be smooth if the education that learners receive correspond directly to the competencies that the employers need.  What it translated into practice is: First, instead of writing courses driven by content, identify the job roles that the employers are finding most difficult to fill - and work with the employers to create a competency map for those roles. Then, prioritise these competencies (using classification such as must-have, should-have, could-have and would be nice to have) and work with employers to define the acceptance criteria for someone to be deemed competent in each of these. Finally, do what educators do and map assessments and content to this to generate a course. But the practical challenges Of course, this process requires unfettered access and trust of the key employers. I have ...

The venture-funded 'disruptive' higher education start-ups often claim that they can offer a better education than the universities, because, apart from other things, they have great instructional designers. Just like the claim that AI will provide better learning strategies, this is also an attempt to hide behind jargons to avoid hard questions.  Instructional design sounds serious enough to invoke deferential responses, particularly as it's not a common term in academic circles (except in schools of education) and indicates a certain affinity to workplace learning and invoke the holy grail of employability by association. But whether this is good enough to make better education remains to be asked. Instructional design is popular in workplace learning but it's more a method than magic. Besides, for all its advantages, the instructional - process - bit is at the heart of it, rather than what one would make of the term 'design' at this day and ag...

As I work on implementing project-based learning in different countries in Asia, one objection, that this 'idea' is not Asian, comes up all too frequently. Citing anecdotal evidence, my correspondents tell me that the Asian students are taught not to challenge and to ask, and that this approach to learning, built around a passive and respectful learner-teacher relationship, is too Asian to be swept away anytime soon. Correctly, they point out that the Asian students often behave the same way when they study abroad, at least initially, attending the lectures and displaying unquestioning respect for the teacher, trying to photograph every slide, note down every word.  The usual argument is that the same students will start learning differently, if exposed to a different system of learning, should be investigated in the background of these observations. Because, this discussion is not just about teaching methods, but learning: A Different approach to inquiry may lead to a di...

I am working towards a framework for developing global expertise. In my mind, it starts with a disjuncture, a disconnect, when things don't turn out the way it should. This should indeed be easy, it happens all too often when one travels to another country or starts working with someone from a different culture. Or, so we think. In reality, though, it does not happen that way at all. Even when we travel, or start working with someone from a different culture, we still remain within our own context: The disjuncture does not happen, we reject anything odd as an anomaly, an exception. So, my starting point is how one could establish the starting point - the disjuncture! Also, most of this may happen in a classroom or workplace setting, rather than travel (which I am now getting to think about - whether I start working on a travel learning model) and hence, I have to find a way to simulate 'disjuncture'. I don't think this is a particular challenge though, because dis...

We have been working on a programme for 'Global Employability' for a while . The shape of it now finally crystallising, after labouring on for several weeks and exploring various different ideas. This is indeed as much a statement about our approach to education as it is about the subject matter of employability. We have researched the area quite extensively, particularly as we had to explore not just what it means in the UK, but also what it signifies in our key target markets, such as India. We find a pattern, a pattern that we were keen to break away from. Most of the programmes we reviewed takes employability in some sort of old fashioned, static sense, which is no longer valid in our crisis-prone post-recession world [As the entrepreneur and author Tim Clark says, Career is a verb now! ] What we do at U-Aspire is solely focused on preparing our students for this, contemporary, world of work. Our starting point is to align with a world shaped by possibili...

I am working with a number of senior tutors with long experiences of teaching face to face in developing the courses which we shall deliver using technology. Indeed, our model is globally collaborative learning, which is as much as about distance delivery as about distribution of various learning activities. The learners are locally supported, their learning is designed collaboratively between the tutor, who is remote, and mentors, who are local, and they work with local peer groups as well as global ones. The technology we employ is easy, based on Open Source platforms and something that can run on a washing line, as they say: The trick of the trade for us is to design this complex learning structure effectively. So, this is a business about effective instructional design more than anything else. And, being in Higher Education space in Britain, where instructional design is usually seen as the prerogative of the trainers (and not of educators) and essentially American, it is an i...