Note: Education is but one of five major disruptions described in this marvelous paper and TEDx talk.

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Education

The OpenCourseware Movement took hold in 2001 when MIT started recording all their courses and making them available for free online. They currently have over 2080 courses available that have been downloaded 131 million times.

In 2004 the Khan Academy was started with a clear and concise way of teaching science and math. Today they offer over 2,400 courses that have been downloaded 116 million times.

Now, the 8,000 pound gorilla in the OpenCourseware space is Apple’s iTunes U. This platform offers over 500,000 courses from 1,000 universities that have been downloaded over 700 million times. Recently they also started moving into the K-12 space.

All of these courses are free for anyone to take. So how do colleges, that charge steep tuitions, compete with “free”?

As the OpenCourseware Movement has shown us, courses are becoming a commodity. Teachers only need to teach once, record it, and then move on to another topic or something else.

In the middle of all this we are transitioning from a teaching model to a learning model. Why do we need to wait for a teacher to take the stage in the front of the room when we can learn whatever is of interest to us at any moment?

Teaching requires experts. Learning only requires coaches.

With all of the assets in place, we are moving quickly into the new frontier of a teacherless education system.

Jobs Going Away

• Teachers.
• Trainers.
• Professors.

New Jobs Created

• Coaches.
• Course designers.
• Learning camps.

What types of organizations will thrive in 2012?

Agile and resilient organizations – and people – will outperform competitors. They will have the courage and confidence to take bold steps, learn from them, and make corrections quickly. This means that people will be deployed in flexible project teams rather than confined to a single pre-defined job, but at the same time, individual accountabilities will be clear, making the organization results-oriented as well as fast-moving. To make this work requires a culture of shared values and principles and an empowered work force that has permission to take action and a broad network of colleagues working under common standards with shared goals.

#stoos

Oracle acquired the cloud-based talent management solutions provider Taleo for $1.9B including cash and debt. Earlier in December, SAP acquired SuccessFactors for #3.4Bn. Not long ago, Taleo purchased Learn.com – a Learning Management System (LMS) & SuccessFactors purchased Plateau Learning & Performance. In another acquisition, Kenexa purchased OutStart which consolidated the LCMS market itself by purchasing its competitor ForceTen. Saba and SumTotal Systems are the last legacies standing with a few acquisitions themselves.

While everyone is excited about the Cloud Computing and its impact on a customers’ total cost of ownership, and how the market is being redefined – it is indeed a grim moment for Corporate Learning. These acquisitions are going to push the much needed innovation to the corporate learning technology behind by a few years. This blog offers insights on impact of these recent acquisitions on corporate learning innovations.

Integrations are not going to be easy

History has it that when ThinQ was purchased by Saba, a suite of LMS’ were purchased by SumTotal, most of the clients either ended up replacing their systems or going with somebody else. The intentions of these historic acquisitions were to acquire customers. With the latest acquisitions, the big ERP vendors are putting skin in the talent management game, but the integrations are not going to be easy.

SuccessFactors’ integration challenges stem from bringing together their powerful Social Media Platform CubeTree, Learning Platform Plateau, and other talent management systems in the overall suite. In addition, converting those customers who have already made their investments with an in-house infrastructure to cloud & SAAS based environment, sunsetting now duplicate capabilities with Plateau’s performance suite, setting the overall strategy, rationalizing the functionality, and iterating the next version of cloud -based platform is going to take a few years. SAP with its legacy architecture and changing landscape is facing different market pressures. All of this going to challenge the innovation quotient in these systems.

Taleo is stringed together with talent acquisition system and Learn.com platform. In my opinion this was a marriage of lackluster systems to begin with. Taleo and Learn.com’s acquisition is still finding its maturity and that is if Taleo already started integrating these products. Oracle is struggling with increased competitions from a contemporary WorkDay platform on the HR side, SalesForces’s growth on the CRM side, and the constant competition with SAP on the ERP side. It already purchased JDEdwards/PeopleSoft platform and still hasn’t made the mark with its long-promised fusion platform. In addition, the marketplace demands in every domain where Oracle operates is constantly changing.

So where is the time to innovate?

Corporate Learning challenges are archaic and continuously emerging

Corporate Learning has its own set of archaic and continuously emerging challenges. The following is an illustrative list of challenges and there may be more depending on the organizational maturity.

Corporate Learning functions still struggle with designing and developing courses that grant credit 99% of time. Almost two decades later, the grasp and comprehension of AICC/SCORM, its support in LMS’ varies drastically leaving a rather broken infrastructure. Learning operations, analytics, reporting, and business-driven learning is demanding. The overall learning technology landscape ranging from learning content authoring tools to the more complex virtual collaboration suites such as WebEx and Centra are still far from mature implementations. Companies still have the challenge of running effective learning operations and the constant battle to reduce costs and outsource activities. Learning function is one of the first few to be cut and also the first to be blamed for a lot of different fiascos. All of these are archaic challenges.

On the extreme end of these archaic challenges are emergence of mobile and tablets as a formidable force, multiple delivery methods such as eBooks, Videos, Podcasts, demise of Adobe Flash and emergence of HTML5/CSS3, convergence of learning and knowledge management, blurred definition and high aspiration of social learning, changing IT landscape with increased adoption of Macintosh for corporate use, and the expansion of “tags” used to deploy formal learning to employees to name a few. Most recently, the acquisition spree and the resulting outcomes.

Innovations and solutions are needed now. There is no time for acquisitions to mature.

Finally

It’s not all bad. For long, LMS vendors have done disservice to the very function that fostered their growth. Closed architectures, inability and unwillingness to open the architecture even in today’s age of App Exchanges, lack of investment in R&D, and half-hearted investment to mobile and social have all hurt the innovations. These acquisitions may just change that in a few years. However, in a few years there may be a different need for innovations or a complete overhaul of the platforms. Time will define the evolution…

Dudes, it's not about the technology.

“This is business.” — Vito Corleone, The Godfather

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Business is changing, and the learning function must change along with it.

Rigid, industrial-age corporations are not keeping up with the pace of change. Customer Spring, Shareholder Spring, and Worker Spring may break out any day. Everyone’s mad as hell. They won’t take it any more.

How bad is it? The lifespan of corporations is at an all-time low. The majority of workers are frustrated, unhappy, and disengaged. Shareholders are receiving a lower return on investment than ever before. Customers are fed up with mediocre service. Return on assets has declined every year for the last forty. The only class of people making money are CEOs, and there’s general agreement that their rewards are obscene and inappropriate. We can’t go on like this.

Now what?
Many people have suggested what business needs to do differently.

Social business, Enterprise 2.0, Radical Management, the Connected Company, Living Networks, Management 3.0, and Working Smarter suggest such techniques as putting the customer in charge, harvesting collective intelligence, self-organizing teams, speedy cycle times, collaboration, transparency, openness, agility, trusting one another, responding to feedback, bottom-up organization, peer learning, web 2.0 culture, and optimizing networks. Until now, most of the people working to bring this about were acting independently.

The Stoos Gathering

Last weekend a group of twenty-one people joined forces on a mountain top in Switzerland to collaborate on coming up with ways out of this mess. Our website tells the story.

Our evolving view is that successful future organizations will become learning networks of individuals creating value. They will become stewards of the living. This is a major break from the past — and an opportunity for L&D professionals to become essential contributors to their organizations.

Learning is no longer optional
Continuous improvement and delighting customers require a culture of pervasive learning. We’re not talking classes and workshops here. Creating a new order of business requires learning ecologies — what we’ve been calling Workscapes — that make it simple and enjoyable for people to learn what they need to get the job done. Companies that fail to learn will wither and die.

As all business becomes social business, L&D professionals face a momentous choice. They can remain Chief Training Officers and instructors who get novices up to speed, deliver events required by compliance, and run in-house schools. These folks will be increasingly out of step with the times.

Or they can become business leaders who shape learning cultures, social networks, collaborative practices, information flows, federated content management, just-in-time performance support, customer feedback mechanisms, and structures for continuous improvement.

Working Smarter
Working smarter means embracing complexity and uncertainty. It requires critical thinking and active sense-making. It takes a work environment that supports and encourages learning, sharing, and collaboration.

Integrating Work and Learning
Integrating learning into the work flow requires deep understanding of the business being supported. Faster cycle times and increasing complexity necessitate learning by doing and using frameworks like 70:20:10 to focus on performance and innovation.

Informal Learning
Only 10% of workplace learning needs are addressed through formal instruction, while the remaining are done informally. Informal learning support can include approaches such as timely reinforcement, peer coaching, respect for reflection, setting standards, cognitive apprenticeship and so on.

Next Practices
Next practices are new, practical methods for integrating learning into the workflow. They are in perpetual Beta, changing as we learn, but may be useful for a time. All models are flawed, but some are useful.

Non Training Alternatives
Too often, training is a solution looking for a problem. Non-training approaches to training include performance support, knowledge management, social networks, collaboration tools and activity streams, among many others.

Communities of Practice
Communities of Practice help us work smarter in networks. They are cooperative spaces for people with shared interest to connect and help each other. COP’s bridge the gap between doing complex work and randomly exploring social networks.

Mobile Learning Strategy
The world is going mobile and so will learning and development, but mLearning is about more than courses on the phone. Mobile learning is focused on deepening our understanding, making our interactions richer and augmenting work performance.

Personal Knowledge Management
Personal knowledge management (PKM) refers to a collection of processes to seek, make sense of, and share knowledge, as part of our daily activities, and how these processes support work activities.

Unmanagement and Social Business
Unmanagement is how to get things done in the 21st century. Forget planning (the world’s unpredictable), organizing (self-organization’s better), directing (people are self-directed ), and controlling (control is an illusion).

Governance
Learning governance includes the structures, systems, practices and processes that are put in place to ensure the overall strategy, effectiveness and accountability of the Learning & Development function.

Metrics
Business metrics, not learning outcomes, are all that matters. Networked organizations are reaping rewards for connecting people, know-how and ideas at an ever-faster pace. Today’s metrics need to measure value creation, which has migrated from physical assets to intangibles (ideas).

Curtis Ogden at The Interaction Institute for Social Change provides a very good summary of the differences between network-centric and hierarchy-centric thinking, called Network Thinking:

1. Adaptability instead of control
2. Emergence instead of predictability
3. Resilience and redundancy instead of rock stardom
4. Contributions before credentials
5. Diversity and divergence

One major challenge in helping organizations improve collaboration and knowledge-sharing is getting people to see themselves as nodes in various networks, with different types of relationships between them. Network thinking can fundamentally change our view of hierarchical relationships. For example, using value network analysis, I helped a steering group see their community of practice in a new light, mapped as a network. They immediately realized that they were pushing solutions to their community, instead of listening to what was happening. Thinking in terms of networks, networks, networks lets us see with new eyes.

1. Adaptability instead of Control. Here are some recommendations for moving to a new social contract for creative work:

• Abolish the organization chart and replace it with a network diagram (some new tech companies have done this).
• Move away from counting hours, to a results only work environment (with distributed work, this is becoming more common).
• Encourage outside work that doesn’t directly interfere with paid work, as it will strengthen the network (such as Google’s 20% time for engineers).
• Provide options for workers to come and go and give them ways to stay connected when they’re not employed (like Ericsson’s Stay Connected Facebook group). Build an ecosystem, not a monolith.

2. Emergence instead of predictability. As we learn in digital networks, stock (content) loses significance, while flow (conversation) becomes more important – the challenge becomes how to continuously weave the many bits of information and knowledge that pass by us each day. Conversations help us make sense. But we need diversity in our conversations or we become insular. We cannot predict what will emerge from continuous learning, co-creating & sharing at the individual, organizational and market level but we do know it will make for more resilient organizations.

3. Resilience and redundancy. A professional learning network, with its redundant connections, repetition of information and indirect communications, is a much more resilient system than any designed development program can be. Redundancy is also a good principal for supporting social learning diffusion. There is always more than one way to communicate or find something and just because something was blogged, tweeted or posted does not mean it will be understood and eventually internalized as actionable knowledge. The more complex or novel the idea, the more time it will take to be understood.

4. Contributions before credentials. Programmers might call this, “you are only as good as your code”. Credentials and certifications often act as blinders and stop us from recognizing the complexity of a situation. As Henry Mencken wrote, “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.”

5. Diversity and Divergence. My approach to working smarter starts by organizing to embrace diversity and manage complexity.  Diversity is a key factor in innovation and I’ve yet to find an organization that does not want to improve innovation.

* Content from jarche.com is protected under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License

Filed under: complexity, NetworkedLearning, Work

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Best of Working Smarter Daily

January 1, 2011 to December 17, 2011

Working smarter draws upon ideas from design thinking, network optimization, brain science, user experience design, learning theory, organizational development, social business, technology, collaboration, web 2.0 patterns, social psychology, value network analysis, anthropology, complexity theory, and more. Working smarter embraces the spirit of agile software, action learning, social networks, and parallel developments in many disciplines. Here’s how we choose the crème de la crème for your enjoyment.

The following are the top items from featured sources based on social signals.

1. Network thinking- Harold Jarche, December 15, 2011
2. 5 Stages of Workplace Learning (Revisited)- Jane Hart, December 6, 2011
3. 12 Themes for 2012: what we can expect in the year ahead- Ross Dawson, December 4, 2011
4. Open Learning Analytics: A proposal- George Siemens, December 10, 2011
5. The connected company- Dave Gray, February 8, 2011
6. Flip the classroom – every teacher should do this- Donald Clark Plan B, March 17, 2011
7. What if Flickr fails?- Doc Searls , January 12, 2011
8. Losing interest in social media: there is no there there- George Siemens, July 30, 2011
9. A sense of bewronging- Doc Searls , April 2, 2011
10. 2011 Top 100 Tools List and Presentation finalised- Jane Hart, November 14, 2011
11. The Fallacy of Digital Natives- Dan Pontefract, October 17, 2011
12. Recording can improve a bad lecture! 7 surprising facts about recorded lectures- Donald Clark Plan B, September 17, 2011
13. Ten ways to create a knowledge ecology- Euen Semple, June 27, 2011
14. 7 objections to social media in learning (and answers)- Donald Clark Plan B, June 11, 2011
15. “Alone Together”: An MIT Professor’s New Book Urges Us to Unplug- Marcia Conner (FC), January 19, 2011
16. E-portfolios – 7 reasons why I don’t want my life in a shoebox- Donald Clark Plan B, March 31, 2011
17. The “Big Five” IT trends of the next half decade: Mobile, social, cloud, consumerization, and big data- Dion Hinchcliffe, October 2, 2011
18. Review: The Edupunks’ Guide, by Anya Kamenetz- Stephen Downes: Half an Hour, August 8, 2011
19. We are the medium- David Weinberger, January 31, 2011
20. Earthquake turns TV networks into print- Doc Searls , March 11, 2011
21. 5 Reasons Why Activity Streams Will Save You From Information Overload- Luis Suarez, May 4, 2011
22. Anticipating the Next Wave of Experience Design- John Hagel, March 28, 2011
23. Reddit and community journalism- David Weinberger, August 13, 2011
24. Agile eLearning – 27 Great Articles- Tony Karrer, April 6, 2011
25. Gladwell proves too much- David Weinberger, February 4, 2011
26. Social media & learning – note taking on steroids- Donald Clark Plan B, June 20, 2011
27. Social Learning doesn’t mean what you think it does!- Jane Hart, September 12, 2011
28. World wide puddle- Doc Searls , April 1, 2011
29. Resolving the Trust Paradox- John Hagel, June 27, 2011
30. A big question- David Weinberger, May 1, 2011
31. SEC opens the gates to crowdfunding and a new structure of capitalism- Ross Dawson, April 9, 2011
32. Introducing the Digital Learning Quadrants- Dan Pontefract, October 20, 2011
33. The top 10 reasons your mobile learning strategy will fail | Dawn.- Dawn of Learning, April 13, 2011
34. The Pull of Narrative – In Search of Persistent Context- John Hagel, May 23, 2011
35. Examples of eLearning–Ten Great Resources- Tony Karrer, January 11, 2011
36. Social learning for business- Harold Jarche, January 20, 2011
37. Why E2.0 and Social Business Initiatives Are Likely to Remain Difficult- Jon Husband, September 12, 2011
38. Abandon lectures: increase attendance, attitudes and attainment- Donald Clark Plan B, May 15, 2011
39. Time’s Up – Learning Will Forever Be Part Formal, Part Informal and Part Social- Dan Pontefract, February 6, 2011
40. This will be fun: Mother of all MOOCs- George Siemens, May 19, 2011
41. The Social Learning Handbook is now available- Jane Hart, January 24, 2011
42. Google+ – fundamental misunderstanding of networks?- George Siemens, July 10, 2011
43. Avoiding Half-baked Personas- Adaptive Path, January 11, 2011
44. Learning With and From Others: Restructuring Budgets for Social Learning- Dan Pontefract, January 6, 2011
45. Enterprise 2.0 the Indian Way- Andy McAfee, April 7, 2011
46. The Horizon Report 2011- Jane Hart, February 9, 2011
47. You are the Collective Wisdom of both Strong & Weak Ties- Dan Pontefract, April 24, 2011
48. It is the structure of social networks that shapes influence… and the structure is changing- Ross Dawson, February 5, 2011
49. Alternate Pedagogies and Experiences- Clark Quinn, May 18, 2011
50. The Networked Workplace- Harold Jarche, May 22, 2011
51. Learning 2.0 is Dumb: Use ‘Connected Learning’ Instead- Dan Pontefract, May 23, 2011
52. Reinventing Management: Part 4: Coordination: From bureaucracy to.- Steve Denning, January 23, 2011
53. What is Google+ for?- David Weinberger, July 8, 2011
54. Fresh Made Biz Card for FlasyYourVGadget [Flickr]- Nancy White, June 5, 2011

The day after arriving home from Berlin, I took part in a two-day knowledge exchange hosted by iventiv and moderated by my colleague Charles Jennings.

Charles

We played by Chatham House Rules, which state that “participants are free to use the information received but neither the identity nor the affiliation of any of the speakers nor that of any participant may be revealed.” So I can’t show you photos of the CLOs of a major athletic shoe manufacturer, a prominent Japanese automobile manufacturer, an up-and-coming telecom, a big-box consumer electronics retailer, a trendy clothing retailer, a couple of high-tech heavy hitters, and a few others. Instead, I’ll show you the major topics we discussed:

I prefer small sessions like this, with 20 people as opposed to Educa’s 2000+.

One of the great difficulties in shifting an organization from a hierarchical, command and control structure to a more networked wirearchical one is that you have to work both ends at once. Strategic guidance and high level models are rather abundant; for instance we generally know that organizations should be flatter, information should be democratized and risk & failure should be made more acceptable. Examining a business and looking at how it can be more social, innovative and agile is not really that difficult. From both inside and outside the organizations, most gaps are easy to identify. But the main challenge is what to do about them. Consultants, and even key internal staff, can often identify the problem (at the time) but then they move on to the next problem before much change has happened.

Complexity theory tells us that complex problems need to be probed through action before any sense can be made of them. Changing to a social business is complex. Dave Snowden has operationalized this with the Cynefin framework (Probe-Sense-Respond in complex environments).

But, as Dave has reminded me, over half of our probes will fail. That means we cannot create a plan for the organizational shift and then implement it. It has to be designed as a work in progress, or really a series of works in progress.

My experience, especially this past year, is that social business is just a different organizational culture. But you cannot directly change it or implement it. Culture is an emergent property of the many practices that happen every day. Change the practices and a new culture will emerge.

Communities of practice are often where work practices get developed. Even without formal approval, communities of practice exist and have a great influence on the organization. They can be a bunch of workers in the lunchroom or the CEO’s inner circle. They learn from each other by modelling behaviour. We may not even realize we’re modelling (and adopting) behaviours, but it happens all the time; like keeping your mouth shut when an executive says something really stupid.

So how would you re-focus an existing organization? First you need the frameworks and new ways of talking about business in place. These are based on the concepts Steve Denning, Gary Hamel, John Hagel and others talk about (radical management, management innovation, edge perspectives). Then you need to identify Probes, or what Dave Snowden calls safe-fail experiments. These are designed to be not so large that failure would seriously damage the company.

Next comes the trickier part. These probes have to be supported. How do you take a team that has never narrated its work and tell it to “be more transparent” or “share knowledge with customers”. New ways of doing things have to be practised, modelled and developed in a non-confrontational environment. It takes time. Not an inordinate amount of time with good support, but it doesn’t happen in a matter of week; more usually months.

For example, we’ve worked with distributed groups who are focused on improving collaboration. Everyone is onboard at the onset. But after an initial week or two we notice that nobody is sharing information. They say there’s no time to do it, but this is not a lack of motivation, it’s a lack of skills. However, these types of social skills require much more practice than theory.

During one of these probes, there can be lengthy periods of time coaching, cajoling and modelling, but at some point, things click with someone. This person sees how these new ways of working are really helping get work done. Someone else gets positive feedback from people outside the team. After a period of time there is no more need for outside help and the team becomes a model for the new business behaviours such as taking initiative in delighting customers. Ideas are supported, not shot down. People build on others’ ideas. One other thing; the end result of a probe is never what we thought it would be.

Like learning a new language, getting access to the right knowledge is only a small part of the solution. The best curriculum and best designed courses will have no effect if people do not practice. Formal instruction, or lecturing, is minimal in any of these probes. People need to do in order to understand. It’s social. Individuals practising on their own will not get the entire organization functioning in the new language either. It has to happen cooperatively. Getting feedback from experienced people, while engaging in peer learning, will help develop next practices in social business. But it requires time, effort and patience.

I’ve been told that you know you’re in a real community of practice when it changes your practice. It’s a good measuring stick.

There is no doubt in my mind that you need to work both ends at once: develop a flexible, contextual strategy but also practice new behaviours through a continuing series of probes. Supporting these probes and learning by doing are essential. Engaging in probes where failure is an option can be an extremely valuable learning process. It can even be transformational. Developing a strategy and then following the plan is just another 20th century “change management” process. It is backward looking, based on a plan that is outdated the moment it is published. In the 21st century, the aim is not to manage change, but understand and embrace change. It’s shifting to an acceptance of life in perpetual Beta.

* Content from jarche.com is protected under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License

Filed under: InternetTime, Wirearchy

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In a buzz session at DevLearn this year, I described how Working Smarter Daily uses social signals to choose and display a fresh selection of relevant articles every morning. It’s also a dynamite research tool; you can search articles by topic, author, and/or timeframe.

What’s Under the Hood

Internet Time Alliance selects the sources from which the articles for Working Smarter Daily will be chosen. Currently, it’s tracking these blogs:

• Adaptive Path
• Andy McAfee
• Charles Jennings
• Clark Quinn
• Dan Pontefract
• Dave Gray
• Dave Snowden
• David Gurteen
• David Weinberger
• Dawn of Learning
• Dion Hinchcliffe
• Doc Searls
• Donald Clark Plan B
• Ed Bourdeaux
• Eide Neurolearning
• Ellen Wagner
• Euen Semple
• George Siemens
• Harold Jarche
• Internet Time Alliance
• Irving Wladawsky-Berger
• Jane Hart
• Jay Cross
• Jay Cross’s Informal Learning
• Jerry Michalski
• John Hagel
• Jon Husband
• Kevin Wheeler
• Lee LeFever
• Luis Suarez
• Marcia Conner (FC)
• Martijn Linssen
• Nancy White
• Nine Shift
• Ross Dawson
• Social Media for Working & Learning
• Stephen Downes: Half an Hour
• Steve Denning
• Steven Berlin Johnson
• The Smart Work Company
• Tony Karrer
• Tony O’Driscoll

Next Year

We’re updating our sources for the coming year and we’d like your suggestions. We are after quality, not quantity.

Our interest is working smarter, not training or HR or technology. Working smarter draws upon design thinking, network optimization, brain science, user experience design, learning theory, organizational development, social business, technology, collaboration, web 2.0 patterns, social psychology, value network analysis, anthropology, and complexity theory. Working smarter embraces the spirit of agile software, action learning, social networks, and parallel developments.

What blogs do you find enlightening in these areas? Are there any of these you don’t find valuable?

If you are interest in a similar take on eLearning, visit eLearning Learning. Or check out Nancy White’s Communities and Network Connection.

These sites run on Tony Karrer’s Aggregage software. We’ve recommended the approach to Internet Time Alliance clients. It’s a worry-free way to provide targeted content on whatever subjects you deem important.

Working Smarter Daily is sponsored through the generosity of Xyleme.