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 ...

Since October, as I walked out of my job, I have been looking to fine-tune my ideas about Education-to-Employment transition.  The first step of this was to look at the experiences of last six years, which I spent developing, first,  an online competency-based education programme and then on building employer-engaged online project-based education. These were all good ideas, and the reason that I am not doing these any more are partially operational: The first business was underfunded, and the second one was poorly conceived and implemented. But those are discussions for a different day. I am focusing currently on understanding the key conceptual elements - what works and what doesn't work - of a successful education-to-employment transition. Indeed, the claim that we can make a student employable with a few months of training is apparently pretentious. The years of schooling, family background and the students' dispensation, and luck, plays a much bigger role than...

The problem of connecting educators and employers is not a new one. There are many organisations and institutions working at creating this interface, some more successfully than others. The field is full of well-meaning individuals and fascinating ideas, some more workable than others. However, one key lesson, a common one, has perhaps been ignored by most of the people: That no closed, proprietary solution may actually work. This should have been obvious in a field where the key problem arise because of the closed, proprietary approaches. The Educators mostly believe they are doing a great job - at least, the best possible one - and the degrees and grades they give out, under the full authority of the state and with the gravitas of their quality assurance, should be accepted at the face value by the employers. The employers, in turn, believe that the people they require should appear, with right skills and attitude, a perfect understanding of their cultures and customers, an...

I have been working on Projects-Based Learning, and recorded my experiences and reflections on this blog as I went along. Through this engagement, I have learnt the following things: 1. Content is over-rated. Because it costs money and effort to create, content owners believe Content equals Learning. Yes, the learners use content to learn, but they do not learn from content. It is the baseline, not an end in itself. 2. Teachers make a lot of difference, but not through 'teaching'. The relationships that underpin teaching, rather than the process of teaching, as in delivering lectures, is fundamental to learning. A good teacher knows the learners - not just their 'strengths and weakness', but their fears, aspirations, what inspires and intimidates them, what they love and loath. The act of 'teaching' is more about inspiring, empowering and connecting, than delivering, disciplining and evaluating. 3. Because the way we have come to see learning, a...

There is a philosophical justification for learning from experience: That it connects us to real life with all its complexities and detours, and allow us to escape the 'one size fits all' assumptions of grand theory. Learning, at the messy swamp of practice, where human life is really acted out, is real - and therefore, useful.  However, now, we have further arguments for learning from experience based on new breakthroughs in cognitive sciences. As our understanding of human brain and memory improves, we are discarding deeply-held assumptions that lie beneath our institutions, approaches and even language. There are many things that we are learning anew, but one aspect in particular - how our memory works! Right now, the breakthroughs in cognitive sciences are altering our idea of the memory: Its ideal, as a retention device that accumulate useful bits of our life to carry forward, is seriously being doubted, and it is now being seen as an active construction device, ...

Buzzwords have disadvantages. Right now, experiential learning is one, and that means we put the label on everything and it stops to mean anything. Also, this means reasonable conversation about experiential learning becomes difficult - at times such as this, either you preach experiential learning or you are traditional, antiquarian and hopelessly out of touch. But, overlooking the limitations of experiential learning can cause big problems. Experiential Learning does many things - putting practice at the heart of learning is an important paradigm shift - but not everything, and it is important to be aware what it does not do.  Usually, we equate the terms Project-based Learning (the method) with Experiential Learning (the idea) and Learning from Experience (the ideal), treating them as one and the same and using the terms interchangeably. Any talk about distinctive meaning of these terms is usually seen as pedantic, but really represent very different ideas about educat...

If one contrasts the way Colleges usually deliver education - defined around a set of textbooks, driven by lectures and reading and assessed by essays - it should be clear that Project-based Learning, where learning is defined by a set of real life tasks, driven by collaboration and interaction and assessed by outcomes, works better. Here are six reasons why. First, the best way to learn is by doing it. We all know this. Even the college model of lectures, textbooks and essays is itself built around this assumption - it is teaching one to become a scholar, by doing scholarly work. It is a proven model and has worked for centuries, well grounded in the experiences of what Hannah Arendt called Vita Contemplativa , contemplative life. The objective of college has changed, though, and now we expect the college to prepare for Vita Activa , life of labour, work and action. The best way to prepare for this life is through activities. Second, while a contemplative life may be expecte...

My first job ever was to set up corporate email networks. Yes, this was days before the Internet as a commercially available service, and I worked for the first e-mail service company in India. We would get corporations to buy subscriptions to our services, and then people like me would turn up at their offices to set up servers, modems etc. However, a big part of our job was to make people use the service to communicate with each other. The point was to save money on long distance calls and fax, because the subscriptions were sold precisely on that sort of cost-benefit analysis. But the users were all too reluctant in 1993 to switch over to a different mode of communication, and our system did not have its full benefit till everyone started using it. So, I would turn up with my comparison charts (this was before Powerpoint too) and explain to people how email may be better than Fax. And, as one would expect, it was not an easy idea to grasp, because most people were paralysed with t...

There is consensus that Higher Education must change, but many views on what it would change to.  This conversation about Higher Education change are usually carried along two parallel lines. The first, Financial, is closely linked to the decline in popularity of the Welfare State, and of the doctrine of publicly provided education in general. The second, Technological, stems from the dematerialisation of communication and contact technologies, and the emergent possibility of human relationships (and, therefore, instructional contact) without the constraint of physical facilities or the availability of learner and the tutor at a specific point of time and place. However, there is a third way to approach the shape of coming change in Higher Ed, and this is to approach the conversation from the changes in the nature of knowledge and work. At this point, the conversation about educational change becomes a conversation about education, not just limited to policy wonks or ventu...

I wrote previously about the futility of Career Planning and recommended Career Design instead. ( See here ) The modern workplaces are fast changing. McKinsey points to four Global Trends, each powerful on its own right, which are reshaping the work and the workplaces. These trends are Urbanisation, Technology (Automation, Micro-manufacturing), Demographics (Aging workforce, Young workforce) and indeed Globalisation. As all of these forces reach a tipping point, and therefore, industries are disrupted and new industries and players emerge, the hands-off rational approach of planning a career looks terribly out of date. There are no other ways of appreciating the forces at work other than experiencing them first hand. There is no rational way of coping with such change, since we do not know what the changes could be, but creating a practical, practise orientation, one of adaptability and infinite adjustments. And, in context, what one likes or dislikes, what trade-offs one would make,...

I wrote about the futility of the much-loved 'demand-led' approach to education ( see here ): The essential argument is that no one really knows, and can't know, what the demand will look like even over a short time horizon. This is indeed due to globalisation, which has exposed even the most localised of the economies to the ups and downs of the global economy. And, globalisation wouldn't mandate that all economies follow a predictable path to industrial revolution and beyond: Rather, it only stands for constant churn, ordering and reordering of economies, with movements of global finance, which is affected by zillions of factors outside anyone's control, including unfettered greed of some individuals as well as callous fraud (as we saw in Libor or Foreign exchange scandals). I argued that project-based approach to education, where the learners are exposed to real life work, is an alternative, and a better approach, than 'demand led'. This is the free...