Today and on Monday we’re going to examine issues surrounding the two major tracks for a post-high school education. Each is important and both are vital to our country but each has a different overriding purpose. One is focused on skills development (and, in our case, that means industrial skills) while the other should be focused on the historically proven goals associated with a liberal arts education. We’ll start with issues relating...
Several years ago, along with then-ITC’s Adam Kovic, I had the privilege of co-presenting at a SALT (Society of Applied Learning Technology) Conference in Orlando. The title of our presentation was “Instructional Designers Have Failed E-Learning.” In sum, too many of our current e-Learning courses are being designed by individuals who apparently have forgotten the keys to successful learning. Instead, the e-Learning courseware world is populated by far too many re-purposed PowerPoint...
In a couple of previous blogs, you’ve read some of my opinions regarding Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. In sum, I am not impressed with her ideas and believe her to be a threat to America’s public education system. In a column by Valerie Strauss, “Venture capitalist visits 200 schools in 50 states and says DeVos is wrong: ‘If choice and competition improve schools, I found no sign of it,” published in the...
Without something resembling a liberal arts education, combined with an extensive vocabulary, in-depth thinking becomes restricted. Without the skills training one receives in high school and college, as well as from corporate training departments, the ability to excel in one’s chosen career becomes limited. In terms of the former, most individuals are on their own as a liberal arts education becomes more and more de-emphasized. No worry, however, for those motivated individuals...
From a Money Magazine interview with Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen and reported by CNN, we find our first definition: You apply a lot of business-school thinking to life. What’s one example? “In organizations, once you articulate how success will be measured, everybody tries to game the system so that they are measured in the best possible way. If you judge schools based on test scores, every school will start teaching...
“Workplace training initiatives are specific actions and procedures implemented in the workplace that allow employers to train employees in a way that maximizes their skills to the fullest.” (the nest) So, what do you want to accomplish with your training initiatives? If you are charged with the industrial skills training initiatives, do your objectives include minimizing downtime, reducing scrap, cross training your workforce? Or, are those objectives really tied to a “CYA”...
Jane Bozarth writing in Learning Solutions Magazine (“Nuts and Bolts: The 10-Minute Instructional Design Degree”) quotes Étienne Charles Wenger (best known today for his work in the field of communities of practice): “Instruction does not cause learning; it creates a context in which learning takes place, as do other contexts. Learning and teaching are not inherently linked. Much learning takes place without teaching, and indeed much teaching takes place without learning.” Bozarth...
“Blended courses (also known as hybrid or mixed-mode courses) are classes where a portion of the traditional face-to-face instruction is replaced by web-based online learning.” (BlendedLearningToolkit) However, the concept of a blended approach in both education and training is not new. It goes back almost to the beginning of the 20th Century where, instead of technology, classrooms provided students with, “The Weekly Reader,” and similar “outside the textbook/lecture day” materials in order...