Whether you are heading for an MBA, a PhD, a first degree, a professional award or Yr7 history, you want a course that is at the right level and that excites you, involves you, makes you actually want to do it.  The trouble is, providers are usually so keen to tell you which accreditation they have and how highly qualified their staff are that they forget you may want some realistic idea of what the content is like.  I have seen business courses so staggeringly knowledge-skills based that it is a wonder the students stay awake, much less actually understand how the information relates to the office.  I have also seen courses that give wonderfully inspiring, fun introductions but then narrow down to a very prescriptive set of requirements.  You may need (or want) prescription and that is fine, but you do need a course that engages you on some level so what should you do?

Simply, you need to ask questions, lots of questions, before you sign up.  Remember it is your time and probably your money and you may also be putting your friends/family/colleagues under some obligation to support you or at least fit around your schedule.  You have a perfect right to demand to know what you are going to get. Here are some questions to try, with notes.

1. When I finish, what can I expect to be able to do?

In academic terms, this is the ‘Outcomes’ question.  Note the word ‘do’.  Doing can be knowledge (e.g. reciting relevant laws) or it can be application.  If it is application, it can be application in one context or many and it may require you to work out what that context is or it may explain the context very thoroughly so that all you have to do is apply the relevant formulae/procedures.  Do you need basic skills (as an example, Quantitative Methods) or, following the example, do you want to find some numerical method of analysing various business problems or do you want a mix of both?

2. How do you know the course delivers those outcomes?

Frankly, if the answer is to the effect that ‘we only appoint the best/most highly qualified staff’ or ‘we have accreditation from X’ – run a mile.  Perhaps that is a bit harsh but I’d still say some very loud alarm bells should be ringing.  There is an exam/test and there are inputs (lessons, readings, seminars, wikis, etc).  If the provider cannot show how the one relates to the others in ways that you can understand, think hard.

3. Can you accommodate my needs or interests?

This is a question of flexibility and it has two sides.  There are, obviously, compliance course where individual interests will take a very low priority and there are occasions (e.g. wheelchair-bound) where practical arrangements need to be considered.  There is also a huge grey area of fitting a course or programme to your own agenda, assuming you have one (see next). The higher and more professional the level, the more adaptive the course should be.  That costs the provider in terms of staff academic skills, time and professional judgement so there is a straight cost:benefit analysis to be done by you.

4. Can you cope with practitioners?

Let’s agree: there are many practitioners out there who really know what they are doing in their own organizations. In the current economic climate you may be getting major grief because recruitment agents cannot cope with experience and just want badges.  You are potentially aggrieved.  Subsidiary questions include:

• Will my (short) comments on real-life be welcome? No-one wants waffle about past experience but targeted experience can be really useful if the course is appropriate
• I know what work problems I want to fix so can I adapt assessments to suit? This is a tough one.  There are those who sign up to courses/programmes and expect free business consultancy from their teachers.  That is not fair.  Teachers are paid as teachers, not consultants. You need to figure out whether you need skills for yourself – and the course to go with it – or consultancy.  Sometimes, buying in consultants is more time effective.

5. How do I know what my peers think?

‘Peers’ is a weird jargon word but it is the cultural and professional root of acceptance. Whether it is your local printed newsletter, your Chamber of Commerce recommendation or your Facebook/MySpace/Twitter/LinkedIn profile, you need to know that your study is understood and recognised.  Rankings are irrelevant: you need reality. Good marketing departments will provide all sorts of links and tables but be a good consumer – think about what each link really means.

6. Fun or duty?

Sometimes you really need to plod mechanically through a course and other times you want inspiration and fun and opening of horizons.  Does the course headline translate into reality?  It is very common for a course to offer the World and somehow narrow down into BloggsVille. The front desk staff/advisors have a duty to perform.  Ask and ask again: does the course reward innovation?  You may get, ‘Of course!’  but push them: how does innovation fit with officially defined required course Outcomes.  If the answer is panic or waffle, move on.

This note could go on forever.  Write if you want to give expertise or if you need help…

Returning from Qatar, I started pondering the future of education for individuals.  The often-feared GMAT has been compromised, Western newspapers carry frequent complaints about slipping standards (e.g. maths needs to improve) and Yong Zhao puts a clear case for the mismatch between standardised testing and education automatically leading to innovative knowledge economies as he looks at the ‘myth‘ of Chinese scholastic supremacy.

I lived in Qatar years ago when I was the seventh woman to be allowed to drive – and my husband had to sign to say I could drive without wearing umpteen layers of net over my eyes. Today, the country has an Aspire (sports-based) education programme, an Education City with foreign universities, syndicated televised debates including female students, a goal to become a true knowledge economy and more pristine, interesting buildings than I could have imagined on my first, happy, visit.  Even more astounding, in a public place in Doha I was asked a question by a young person who just wanted an answer to what was, effectively, a debate about where in the world they should study.  I was carrying a book at the time that must have given away my interest in higher education.

If a country can move that fast in much less than a Western world’s age-21-to-retirement span, then the message is clear: learning is living, vital.  To return to Yong Zhao, he argues strongly that education should not be about homogenisation.  I can but agree.  Learning is more than passing exams or meeting standards, important though they are as markers of progress and pathways to employment.  Learning gives the opportunity to explore, to innovate, to reinvent oneself.

Words in red, blue, green and orange. Long words, short words.  A rapidly thickening jungle of words.  All in eager response to a simple question: “What do you think?”  People were obviously having fun even though some had only just got to the office, some were in their pyjamas and one brave soul had stayed up all night just to be able to attend.  This is the reality of modern learning.  As George Siemens led the session from his Norwegian hotelroom, 160 people from round the globe explored the dichotomies of learning in relation to economic/business requirements.  The focus was completely on the questions, not the technology.  Elluminate (the platform being used) functioned as smoothly as any physical classroom – and had more ‘equipment’ (tools) than most.  There are even public GoogleWave records of proceedings with ongoing debates – just search on #learntrends.  At long last, we can just get on with learning when and where we want.

Thank you to all at LearnTrends!

There’s still something vaguely surreal about participating in a webinar where the presenter has an English-sounding name but is speaking in flawless French from San Jose, California.  Jon Husband, at yesterday’s LearnTrends first session in French, discussed the notion of wirearchies which are very relevant not just to people in the workplace but also to learners in a more individual sense.  (Jon also has a podcast for which I’m trying to find a valid link.) That means you and me.

We all know (some of) the online world of social networking which is often informal, where context affects what we say, write or show and where our purpose informs our choice of network. (Tony O’Driscoll later elaborated on this.)  We all know that organisations are changing because of this.  Vincent Berthelot talked of a return to synchronous learning; not this time face-to-face but online with a global community. Clark Quinn and Jay Cross discussed the effects this has on organisational learning.  What struck me most clearly throughout it all was the effect on social capital and the implication for what you and I care to learn, how and why.

Sticking to the individual aspects for now (Harold’s PKM still resonates), wirearchies matter more than hierarchies because:

1. Performance matters more than knowledge
2. Knowledge underpins performance (so you need it!)
3. Knowledge can be acquired anywhere
4. Knowing where to look gets you there faster
5. Being a node (connection point) in a wirearchy both helps you reach information faster from other nodes but also to pass on that information to others that, in turn, may help connect you to bigger nodes.

This wiring diagram analogy is useful as it depersonalises the process of learning.  The old lessons of the formal classroom where you worked to be better than the kid in the next desk – or gave up – have gone.  Starting from a position of ‘how do I best achieve what it is I want to do’, be that weighing a black hole or making a Windsor chair or increasing turnover, the answer is in the connections.

If computers could have indigestion, mine did.  And like a kid at a birthday party, it still wanted more.  LearnTrends is only one day through a three-day conference (so time to join in!) and I’ve never before used so many programs simultaneously but this was no geek-fest.  It was adults, learning and having fun; proving that work-based and personal development, social and individual learning continue from 20 to, well, decidedly ’senior’.  No-one had all the answers and anyone could participate in one part or many, using one tool or many, just listening or trying everything.  Being me, I was trying everything and the computer knew about it; so did my brain so now I am trying the advice from Harold Jarche’s session on PKM (personal knowledge management) to try and process it all and maybe pass on some ideas at the same time.

First, maybe a word about why the computer was smoking – and there’s no need for yours to do the same!  The conference was being run in Elluminate with whiteboard, chat, emoticons, audio, microphones for participants and powerpoint – and there were so many participants the original 150 seats allowed were increased.  I was running Twitter from Tweetdeck so started using that to alert people I had expected to see in the conference that extra spaces were being added.  In a quieter part of a session, it seemed sensible to try and see how GoogleWave held up. Then I needed to save a link to Eduardo Peirano’s booklist so Delicious needed to be fired up while a message came in on Skype (fortunately not a voice call) and I remembered I needed to send something to someone on LinkedIn.  I had no idea if the computer, or I, would cope but we both lived to tell the tale and that’s where personal knowledge management comes in.

Jarche’s model says you first sort information, then categorise it before making it explicit so that you can later retrieve it.  For me, the sorting and categorising may not be perfect but at least I am used to doing it and I’ve got used to the idea that it is an art more than a science.  It was good to see so many other people also struggling with the art as the Twitter stream shows just how many people have gone off to ‘digest’ or ‘contemplate’.  The making explicit part of the model is where I am really experimenting.  I usually prefer to think things through a bit more before blogging but the theory that modern life and information overload requires learning through  social networking means learning is never quite ‘cooked’ or complete.  Again, the Twitter stream shows others are further down this road than I  and were already chasing off to write blogs or draw mindmaps. So, what else did I take away from that first day of participating in LearnTrends?

Two things really struck me as the computer struggled away:

1. GoogleWave may be in prototype but it really is going to be a great help for individuals to organise work-based, academic and personal learning moving and copying relevant chunks of ’stuff’ (text, pictures, sound) from one place to another as required and involving different groups of people for different purposes
2. In one way or another, most attendees, presenters and moderators demonstrated that while they were in a conference they were also learning about learning technologies and were not afraid to say so.  Adult returners and nervous students, take note!

Do I take a general degree to maximise my career options?  Do I try and update my existing degree or do I change direction?  Will a PhD make me unemployable? Finding answers to these questions takes time and knowing where to begin can be hard.  Tomorrow, I’ll post a possible approach but today’s subject is the preparation – examining the baggage of past experience and deciding what is still useful.

Education and career choices are intertwined over a lifetime so it is not surprising that most people find making the ‘right’ choice difficult.  In addition, adults often have a mental list of job-related and education labels that get dusted off and applied as filters in the choice-making process without much thought as to whether or not they are appropriate.  A four-part MBTI label remembered from a job interview, a manager’s Belbin descriptor of you aged 21 (‘Oh, you’re a Team-worker’) and a business card that says ‘Java programmer’, plus a file of school and work certificates and a host of memories about previous formal learning experiences – when faced with a decision about your future it simplifies matters to use those as a fixed base, to accept them as current reality.  The danger is that you build a future on a view of you that is, at best, out of date.  Here are some examples taken from real life to get you thinking.  (I’ve changed the names.)

• Elaine told me in an email she had done the MBTI when being interviewed for a job and she was P, not J – so perceptive not judgemental – and this meant she would never get into a top-flight MBA programme.  Quite apart from the fact that this indicated a poor understanding of the MBTI itself, did this mean she had survived five years as a divisional marketing director on perception alone?  The evidence suggested otherwise.  MBTI and similar ‘type indicators’  are just that, indicators.  They have internal relativities, results may be debated, context will affect specific instances of behaviour and you need expert help to interpret the results.  If your profile has been reduced to four letters of the alphabet with no recent explanation or discussion, you might want to consider just how useful it is to hang on to the label.
• Hamid came to me with ten years’ experience and a reference that  stated he was a  ‘Belbin completer-finisher’.   Belbin’s team roles theory is better known in the UK than the US and, while it can be useful, it has limitations.  Hamid had been working with a mostly inexperienced team in a procedurally complex environment so, while the younger ones ran round ‘doing’, he tidied up the mess and sorted out the paperwork.  He hated it.  Out of that team and into one where he could use his experience to be a resource investigator, he was far happier.
• Emil said he was an accountant and indeed had a degree in accountancy but no current professional accountancy institution membership.  He did have three years’ experience in public sector operations management.  Being an operations manager with accountancy skills rather than an accountant with no recent experience completely changed the type of course for which he searched.
• Grant was ‘no good at education’ so the company requirement that he get a degree if he were to be promoted was producing near-panic.  True, he had left school as soon as he could, and with a not-very-glorious collection of exam results, but since then he had passed one or two exams every year – for 14 years.  The problem was not so much ‘no good at education’ but the wrong sort of education.

Other examples welcome!  Tomorrow, I’ll look at the search stage.

Bill Law and Rachel Mulvey yesterday evening kicked off the NICEC/CRAC debate entitled, Past its Sell-By Date? Career guidance for the 21st Century. People spoke with passion about the good that can be done – whether for fourteen year-olds, undergraduates or employed adults – but the broad consensus was that career guidance may not be dead but the sell-by sticker now needs a use-by date.

Few people have ever taken a truly detached, scientific view of their “education, training and labour market ” options and chosen the career with “the greatest net utility” (Bennett et al, 1992) but, in an era of widespread social media and serial short-term employment, the pragmatic rationality and careership theory of Hodkinson et al (2008) takes on greater significance. Yet, does even this theory go far enough to explain what is needed today? Our social selves are no longer bound by the place in which we live or a bricks-and-mortar campus. We have widely dispersed and diversely skilled online networks on which we can call for ideas and expertise. We can work online and carry on multiple simultaneous ‘careers’. Even if in regular employment in an organisation with a hierarchy, there is awareness both that the security can disappear (look what happened to all those financiers or car makers) and that the terms of what remains can change (reduced benefits, rising pension ages).

Throughout last night’s debate, four points kept nagging at me:

1. I would never call myself a careers guidance professional and yet I and many like me frequently pass on knowledge through LinkedIn to those who are independently seeking next steps in their career-related education.
2. There is an inherent conflict (felt by several in the debate) between the short-term funding of publicly-funded career advice and the long-term socio-economic needs of individuals. This need not be the case.
3. The UK seems to me to do pragmatic rationality rather too well. Where are the running footsteps and the breathless enquiry from a 20 year-old about how to set up a school for journalists? Why are the UK funds for study in Europe so little used? Where is the celebration of those with serial careers and life experience?
4. The health of our social capital in a rapidly changing global environment lies less in advising someone on the route to a specific job and more in developing a range of skills for a variety of circumstances. That requires fostering of curiosity, encouragement of aspiration, support in entering the unknown.

So, existing career guidance may well be past its sell-by date but careers development has never been more necessary.  The responsibility for that lies primarily with individuals but they need mentoring, facilitation services and an aspirational politico-social environment focused not on targets but on supporting individual growth for net collective benefit.

The open workshop I gave yesterday at the BILD stand at WOLCE in the National Exhibition Centre  raised a laugh when I mentioned that L&D teams usually get tucked away in a side office somewhere (if they are lucky enough to be granted a ‘department’) and yet learning design cannot work in a vacuum.  The glee and creative anticipation that affects most learning designers when somebody walks through the door and says, “We need a course on X,” has led to many a disaster as one or more people enthusiastically set to work and produce the course on  ‘X’ only to find that Lou has already bought in something similar or Jo has decreed X is obsolete or Jim is furious because it does not link tightly enough to what his team do, etc.

In the workshop we worked on the (already reduced) basic learning design framework in the simplified form:

Refine Proposal and Contract

The group looked at the importance of refining a course proposal so that a contract or, within an organisation, an internal email can be drawn up. This gives everyone a reference point that varies in role depending upon whether you are taking a strategic or fledgling instructional designer standpoint or something between the two.

From an operational point of view, the contract or email informs the creative process and the essential requirements list.  For those who use the ADDIE Model of instructional design, the A (analysis), starts in the refining phase  – although designers at the outset of their careers may be restricted to a post-contract version of ADDIE where the analysis consists of refining a brief where the analysis was begun by others.  If that makes the contract or email sound too remote to be of any significance to your own job, it’s worth thinking of it as an essential but often overlooked piece of armoury in office survial wars: project creep and latecomers to the project may complain and the project as originally envisaged may get abandoned, but at least the learning designer can point to a document that shows the accounts department, quality guardians, line managers, users and others agreed the work and asked for it to be undertaken.

From a strategic point of view the refining of the proposal is vital to get maximum return on investment – whether that investment be in money, people, knowledge, use of systems or anything else. In organisations where there are written quality procedures (ISO, SERVQUAL, IIP, etc) or compulsory project management methodologies (e.g. PRINCE), these need to be built in from the start and they may, depending upon how they are written, help identify the key stakeholders, zones of supportive activity and areas of common interest. The problems only arise when the procedural terminology starts to drive the project: most seasoned learning designers can recall projects with lists of roles that make the credits on a Disney film look short but actually no-one knew whether or not the eventual product had a market. At the very minimum, the refining of the proposal should identify the end-user and their existing skill-sets, agree the technologies, assign a budget, give a timeline and agree the required learning outcomes. That will require conversations with:

• Accounts
• IT/IS
• Line managers and potential end-users
• HR, Quality and Internal Communications departments (where they exist).

Discussions may lead to the inclusion of external suppliers, lawyers, the marketing department, customers and the customer’s quality control department.  That’s just some of the people that need to be included before that contract line can be crossed and the design and development begin.  Every project is different and the full learning design map that shows who gets involved at which stage can be both enormous and complicated – but keeping an eye on where everything fits saves much professional grief.

Yesterday’s excellent BILD Connect event and AGM was held in the Birmingham Conservatoire and that gave the chance to reflect on the question of how useful a university degree should be or, in other words, is employability everything?  The recent Vitae09 conference (that I could only follow online) spent much energy discussing the funding and training of research students in the UK and the associated Twitter conversation (#vitae09) again raised the question of whether there should be ‘academic’ degrees and ’supertech’ degrees.  This argument has been raging for many years and variant terms are ‘real’ or ‘research’ degrees versus ‘applied’ or even ‘Mickey Mouse’.  Feelings run high and research, not blessed with hundred per cent foresight, is necessarily historical so what does a potential student believe or do?  The Birmingham Conservatoire under George Caird has gone a long way to providing a curricular model for a way forward.

As we listened to the superb playing of Di Xiao (if you are in that market, do book her for a recital as piano is not my favourite instrument and she just makes it paint pictures in the mind), we witnessed what students can and should expect from universities in terms of usefulness.  The Conservatoire degree understandably has a very large instrumental/vocal element but the scheduled thirty per cent of  ‘other’ splits into specialisms for performance, teaching, community and ‘academic’.  There are even talks on funding PG study (for the more academic route) or (for performers) dealing with tax.  Each post-graduate route is given  respect and support and the core curriculum is the same.  The aim is to foster skills and interests, not to pigeon-hole them and choke them off.

On Friday I was asked to take a quick look at a piece of elearning and see what I thought of it.  ‘Pedagogically dire’ and ‘Ladybird book online’ were just two of the more repeatable phrases that came to mind.  If that is the quality of corporate elearning, I’m not surprised I find people who say it is boring.  There is no excuse for it as some superb interactive, interesting learning can be done for almost free using a file that is little more than a well-chosen set of hyperlinks.

In the corporate world, you may have little choice but to endure programs that leap from cartoon characters wondering if a topic is important to slides where the content does not fit on the screen but if you are going to a university or college where elearning is part of the course, you do have a choice: you can go elsewhere.  If you cannot see examples of your intended university programme’s elearning on YouTube or in an open wiki or on the departmental (not university) website, ask the Course Director for a preview. If you find yourself thinking ‘boring’ or ‘pretty pictures’ or ‘how do I stop this thing?’, try elsewhere.  You should feel like an intelligent adult involved in finding out and in charge of your own learning.  You should also get to the end feeling you have learned more about your subject area than you have about computer programs or educational pyrotechnics.