Empowering self-directed learners: Practical strategies and tools for L&D

Editor's Notes

• #2: Good morning, thank you all for dialling into this webinar. My name is Caroline Freeman, I am the Director of Design here at Brightwave. We’re a learning services company based in Brighton. For those of you not familiar with Brighton, it is a town on the South Coast of England. We have one pier, plus the ruined remains of another pier, a newly built strange 360 viewing platform that polite people say looks like a doughnut on a stick and an aspiring football team. Today I want to talk about how we can create environments in which self directed learning and self directed learners can thrive. Given the subject matter I want to make this as discursive as possible, so we’ll start with the logical question
• #3: What is self directed learning? At first glance SDL might appear like something solitary, without the need for instructors or other people and it might include those things, but I hope I will show it is a much wider initiative Thanks for all your contributions there, let’s delve into some of the descriptions in more detail throughout the course of this webinar. So what are we going to cover?
• #4: We’ve already started to discuss the definition of Self directed learning, we’ll look briefly at its history and why it’s such a hot topic now Then we’ll look at what are the blockers within organisations, how we can overcome these and support communities of self directed learners. Once we’ve covered some of the theory I want to show you some practical examples of how we’ve supported this kind of learning and will be very interested to hear your examples. Finally, we always like to do something a little bit different with every webinar and this one is no exception. We’re going to invite you to continue the conversation
• #5: The research and theories surrounding Self-directed learning have quite a long history and have been widespread within formal education circles for many years. This quote is by Malcolm Knowles who many of you will know as the author of books looking at adult learning and adult learners. What I hope this quote shows is that the process of self-directed learning is not just about choosing between individual learning objects or experiences. It is deeper than that and measn the invidual needs to identiify the gap between where they are now and where they want to be, they have to identify how they are going to
• #6: In fact ideas about the role of the instructor or teacher as an enabler rather So if these theories about the most effective ways of engaging particulalry adult learners have been around for over 50 years, why has there been a revival in interest now? but there has been a revived interest in the concept of self directed learning in the last couple of years. Why is this?
• #7: Undoubtedly one of the drivers has been the sheer amount of information that is now available online, so its easy for me to find out anything from Mooc based university courses in astrophysics to some lovely man or woman in minnesota showing me how to mend my lawnmower. In the workplace, businesses are trying to cope with ever increasing rate of change. As they seek to become more responsive and adaptaive to the change they just don’t have the time to create static repositories of knowledge. You can see how it might be tempting to think that we can solve every leanring problem with a Google search, but leanring and life isn’t quite as simple as the man from minnesota For one thing, those people in minnesota always seem to have huge yards and a well stocked toolshed. But anyway
• #8: As we’ve seen the word ‘self’ in self directed learning doesn’t mean its necessarily a singular or lonely activity. Some of the best self-directed learning happens is social and occurs in groups. It’s also
• #9: Recently we commissioned some research into Digital Transformation within the professional services and this is one of the slides based on the findings of our research partners Learner Lab. This slide really stood out for me because it shows some interesting gaps between reality and ambition in terms of readiness for self directed learning. I’m going to show you a simplified version in a minute, but for now, I should just explain that the grey lines represent the percentage of people who think the element is very bor extremely important and the pink line is the percnetage who are currently using it We’ll be sharing the presentation of the findings in our learning comunnity
• #10: So I’ve taken that data and presented it slightly differently here to highlight the biggest gaps between vision or aspiration and reality. At the bottom end you can see that, amongst this audience at least, there is a feeling that things like external curated content, learner pathways and user generated content are adequately provided for. The biggest gaps are in the top end around technology, a real understanding of the user expereince, the culture within the organisation and the skills of the learners themselves Frictionless user experience Personalisation Wider cultural change User research and analytics Skills for self directed learning Justin time Improved search and… Marketing campaigns User generated content Learning pathways External curated content
• #11: The truth about self directed learning is that it is not a quick fix in times of tight budgets and ever more manic change. You can’t just provide a library of resources, no matter how good they might be. SDL fundamentally changes the way we look at responsibility and accountability in learning. It requires a significant change in the infrastructure and environment for that learning But I’m interested to hear from you all...
• #12: Thanks for all those interstsing points. After we had completed our research we invited all the people who had helped us to a breakfast at the Ivy. Very nice it was too. Then we worked them some more
• #13: AfBreakfast at the Ivy We aksed them the questions we’ve asked you we all worked in groups to share stories, these are some of the recurring themes from that day Access - Finding the right content – where is it stored / how do people know where to find it? Too many locations – LMS, Intranet, Server Lack of consistency in content Culture – used to be told what to do Time – no permission to spend time on learning Disconnect between individual and organisation Technology architecture not designed for autonomous learning I
• #15: educational systems typically continue to employ fairly structured approaches to teaching, and In building a new learning infrastructure, L&D could train and teach the managers and supervisors to be facilitators, coaches, and guides in learning
• #16: Metacognition in simplest terms as “thinking about your own thinking." Specifically, this means that it covers the processes of planning, tracking, and evaluating your performance. The phrase was termed by American developmental psychologist John H. Flavell in 1979, and the theory developed throughout the 1980s among researchers working with young children Lots of research in eductaion points to the success of strategies related to metacognition and that they are usually more successful when taught in groups
• #17: As I said earlier, I don't want to suggest that self directed learning is a silver bullet. It doesn’t work for everyone. If you’re in a team that prioritises relaibility over adaptablity, or a highly regulated area, you may need a more traditional model Ifa part of the business that needs to be innovating and adapting quickly, this form of learning can help you meet the needs of your customers and your business But ultimately it doesn’t have to be the only mode of leanring, you can create a balance of traditional and newer ways of structuring learning which mitigates the risks and costs of trial and error.
• #24: groups consist of five to eight GPs who meet in rotation at members’ homes to engage in a variety of learning activities. Communities of Practices – virtual and face to face “members share and co-create knowledge in online discussions and other forms of knowledge exchange
• #25: Just recently we’ve been working with a number of volunteer organisations and so Ive been refelcting on the power of volunteersother organisations can learn a lot from the. In particular we’ve had some real successes with learning communities in volunteer organisations. In an organisation of volunteers, you cannot assume the same positional authority. Wihout the baked-in hierarchy, the group will only work if it orientates around its shared vision and mission. The xample I want to share with you here is
• #26: To pick up on the theme of what we can learn from organisations that contain volunteers, this is an example of a platform we have developed Activists – Union reps distributed all over the country Reason for set up – remote workers – for example there is someone in Stornoway There is a leader board which is reset every month and this was important in the intial launch phase
• #29: Monica Hirst – her role is to support unuion reps so one of the things she’s done is to set up and manage the organising space. Can contribute but also just follow conversations, very organic, grows with the people.
• #30: This is a theme I’ve touched on before in a previous webinar about social learning 17th and 18th centruty e English coffeehouses, during the 17th and 18th centuries, This environment attracted an eclectic group of people who met and mingled with each other. In a society that placed such a high importance on class and economic status, the coffeehouses were unique because the patrons were people from all levels of society. Anyone who had a penny could come inside – impact on intellectual and cultural history of the Age of Enlightenment- alternate sphere, supplementary to the university. At Lloyd's Coffee House, frequented by merchants and sailors, deals in the shipping industry were conducted. As a result, it became the major insurer Lloyd's of London. pixar building is in Emeryville, CA Steve Jobs. As Pixar’s CEO Jobs was fanatic about these unplanned collaborations, he envisioned a campus where these encounters could take place, and his design included a great atrium space that acts as a central hub for the campus. The atrium initially might seem like a waste of space…But Steve realized that when people run into each other, when they make eye contact, things happen. We can learn from these real life experiences when we’re designing spaces for virtual collaboration
• #31: So, to summarise, how can we best support people to manage their own learning? What I think these examples show is that you can take some small practical steps towards creating a leanring culture that will support self directed learning if Firstly you are clear about the vision of the organisation and how each team and contributes to that vision Secondly you provide a framework, whether that’s helping people structure their understanding of how they are leanring, or assessing their skills gaps, or managing a platform for social learning and thirdly you give them permission to find their own routes to achieving the goals
• #32: REMEMBER TO CLICK FOR THE ANIMATION I want to finish on a couple of images which I think illustrate the process of supporting ecosystems. It’s also a good news story, which I feel I need after the last Blue Planet episode on Sunday. These are coral frames – artificial structures that are lowered onto the sea bed floor in areas where there has been damage to the natural coral reefs. Small coral fragments are transplanted and attached onto the frame –– to boost existing reef habitats and generate new ones. These ones are in the Maldives and some of the oldest coral frame colonies are so well established now that they are now themselves spawning, contributing new baby corals to the surrounding natural reefs. The teams monitor them carefully so they can idenitify which specis are more resistant to coral bleaching events. By increasing the reproduction of the most successful ones, the team are helping the development of ever more resistant coral offspring, better adapted to withstand higher seawater temperatures and so help the corals in their fight against global warming. So this is us all working away developing structures to support the leanring ecosystems within our organisations and hopefully helping our learners become more adaptive and resilient to change.
• #33: That’s the end of the webinar, but when we were designing it, it seemed a shame to cut off the conversation at this point, so we’ve set up a virtual community of practice to share all the references and resources mentioned in the slides and also to continue the converstaions. It will continue until the 31st of January, which is coincidentally, well not at atll coincidentally in fact – it is strageically the date of the next Learning Technologies confernece We’ll have all the Brightwave learning experts in there and Don has promised to join too. WE hope you’ll join us and share your experiences so we can all learn from each other. So what do you have to do? Just email enquiries @brightwavegroup.com with SDL in the subject line, you can spell it out if you prefer we'll work out what it means.‘ and we’ll send you the link to join within 24 hours. Do feel free to invite your colleagues   Also: stress we will not use your email address or other details for marketing messages. 'Like all of you we are very GDPR aware at the moment and will follow its letter -  your personal data is safe with us.')
• #35: DONE