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Fast learners

Beverley Head, Information Age

13/06/2008 14:22:53

By some estimates, although demand for skilled workers in Australia will grow by 5.6 percent by 2012, the workforce itself will grow just 1.2 percent in the same period. As a consequence older people will be needed in the workforce longer than ever, and will have to regularly reinvent themselves and refresh their skills, keeping up with new technology and techniques.

Nowhere is this ageing workforce clearer than in the halls of learning themselves. According to a recent presentation by Peter James, UTS' infrastructure and operations director, 54 percent of Australia's academics are already 45 and older. By 2020 fewer than a third will be under the age of 60. If you really can't teach old dogs new tricks, we're in a whole heap of trouble.

ICT professionals are well versed in the need to keep skills current, but in today's economy just about every employee needs to regularly refresh their ICT skills, understanding of regulatory issues and grasp of corporate policy.

Academics have already recognised that traditional chalk and talk needs to be supplemented with new learning approaches in order to remain relevant and competitive, and in the corporate world old fashioned learning approaches simply can't keep up with the technical and regulatory changes. A learning revolution is now under way that is reforming the way people teach and the way people learn.

Wikis

In Hawaii, wiki means quick. In the online world, wikis are fast gaining a reputation as a quick, and not necessarily dirty, way of gathering and sharing information. While Wikipedia is probably the best known example of learning by wiki, its rigour is regularly challenged. However the use of wikis as a learning platform is being legitimised by their adoption in the tertiary sector as information radiators. Early this year, for example, Charles Sturt University set up 3000 wiki learning sites which can be used by academics to radiate information out to students.

Companies are also experimenting with wikis as a learning tool. Cochlear for example has a wiki developed using Confluence. According to Victor Rodrigues, the firm's software development manager, the wiki was originally designed for Cochlear's digital signal processing team which used it for project management and to share information. Rodrigues says that the wiki was introduced four years ago, but has gained real traction in the organisation in the last ten months, with about 350 active users.

"Technologists have turned to the wiki, they live in it day in and day out, for project plans, as a daily task manager and use the wiki's social bookmarking as a way to share information," according to Rodrigues.

Meanwhile wikis are also being adopted to support broader learning initiatives. "There is one person I know who uses wikis to support the global training initiative - she uses the wiki as a way to extract what is needed in terms of training, and then uses the wiki to get that information out." Although Cochlear itself is not expressly using the wiki as a formal training tool, Rodrigues expects this will happen over time.

e-learning

ICT professionals need access to current and quick learning. The days of "long courses where you sit in front of a computer for several days are tending to fade", according to Mickey Clark, chief executive officer of The Learning Group, which develops e-learning applications.

"IT workers learn experientially - the best learning is through butting in and mentoring and that can be done online through an online coach," says Clark.

While such an environment can be generated through formally developed internal e-learning systems, Clark says a lot of informal online coaching can be sourced through simple online searches or participating in e-mail listserv communities. He has recently observed the rise of user-generated learning systems as more people and companies embrace blogs, social networks and wikis and start using them as learning tools.

"The companies we are dealing with are thinking about learning as something that is pushed down to the staff." However according to Clark, "If you give them the tools to allow them [staff] to develop learning systems, then if Joe Blow learns about an applet you can give him a learning template which can then be sent out to a group of people."

While in the past much of the company's business has come from developing e-learning applications to meet compliance and regulatory requirements, Clark says it is now working on an expert capture system. "We are trying to interview experts (over Skype or via video) about what makes them good and then capture that and teach it" by creating bespoke learning systems. "We are doing that with companies that are starting to lose people."

So far it's the traditional training and compliance e-learning applications that appeal to TSA Telco Group. A national organisation with 300 employees and about 1200 contractors, the company increasingly relies on e-learning systems to keep its people up to date on occupational health and safety and equal employment opportunity issues according to national human relations manager Sue Lawrence. In the future she also hopes to put more of the company's induction material onto an e-learning platform, but remains sceptical about having purely e-learning technical training saying that the speed of change might make it too hard to develop up-to-date e-learning modules.

For now most organisations are adopting a blended learning approach, harnessing both e-learning and traditional chalk and talk, in order to cover all the bases.

Online universities

While the physical university campus isn't disappearing any time soon, it is being nudged by the virtual campus. A number of universities have already contributed to the Open Courseware (OCW) initiatives pioneered by MIT in 2003. Intended to provide access to university grade courseware from tertiary institutions around the world, so far the only Australian university to participate is the University of Southern Queensland, which has contributed 10 of its courses available for free through the OCW Web site. According to some, OCW is the first step toward democratising education and putting it within reach of anyone with Internet access.

Also, because courseware on the OCW is published under a creative commons licence agreement, the content may be reused and mixed (with proper attribution) allowing education mashups to be constructed.

While there is at present no opportunity for people studying the online courses to be examined, or get in touch with academic staff, there is a wide variety of content freely available online. For ICT professionals the courseware available can provide useful, and free, updates.

So, for example, a USQ course in C++ programming is available for free, as is an MIT Course in computer system engineering, or a network security course from the Open University in the UK. While the OCW initiative has courseware from established and respected tertiary institutions, there are other virtual campus initiatives underway. Wikipedia for example is in the process of establishing an online campus called Wikiversity.

Virtual worlds

Late last year IBM built itself a virtual environment and hosted an internal conference on learning designs for virtual worlds. Built behind IBM's firewall using Activeworld, the virtual conference attracted 300 IBMers, according to Jasmin Tragas, managing consultant for learning, knowledge and collaboration for IBM Australia.

"You can't just take a course and dump it into a virtual world," according to Tragas. Instead, whole new frameworks for learning need to be developed.

IBM already hosts training applications, including induction courses for new employees in India, China and Brazil, on its islands in Linden Labs' Second Life. The expert who is actually training the new staff can be located anywhere in IBM's network, says Tragas, and attendees are rewarded with an IBM T-shirt for their Second Life avatar at the end of the training program.

Much of what IBM learns through its own use of virtual world learning is then fed through to clients who are starting to explore the area says Tragas. (While she declines to name clients, Westpac has used Second Life as a staff training venue.) According to Tragas virtual training is particularly attractive to organisations with a widely spread workforce, where the cost of bringing together employees and expert trainers in a single venue for a period of time can be prohibitively expensive and environmentally unfriendly. More organisations therefore are exploring virtual alternatives, not just for the savings, but because of their immersive and engaging nature.

This is also making virtual worlds an interesting approach for scenario planning. IBM for example has constructed a Rehearsal Studio on Second Life where employees "can go and rehearse different scenarios - for example different ways to role play on project management or with team building". While she does not envisage virtual world learning program completely eclipsing traditional chalk and talk, Tragas does think more organisations will move toward blended learning environments, mixing virtual worlds with classroom sessions, and wikis and social networks.

"The whole thing with the virtual worlds and the way the Internet is developing is that it is becoming more social. People talk of the social virtual world where we will see the intersection of wikis, blogs and social worlds."

IBM meanwhile is developing a virtual world dubbed Metaverse for its own staff which is intended to be a social and immersive environment where information and knowledge can be shared, and people can go to learn "whether technical or managerial".

At the same time the rising population of social networks is driving learning to such networks. At IBM, for example, a knowledge sharing social network called Pass it On has been established where people are rewarded with virtual dollars for sharing their ideas.

"It is beyond a fad," says Tragas, who claims that Generation Y and millennials are already comfortable in virtual environments, and social networks. "I hear of people coming to IBM who don't use e-mail - they use Facebook and instant messaging."