Category: University

What is the skills gap?

The skills gap refers to the gap between the skills employers need and the skills individuals have. This gap is growing due to the increasing amount of technology used in the workplace requiring new skills that employees need to learn. The gap is growing as employees, both future and present, are either not learning the skills quickly enough or are learning the wrong skills altogether.

There are four main stakeholders, the businesses that employ people, individuals in or entering the workforce, education providers that prepare people for the work, and governments that can provide an efficient environment for the other three stakeholders to operate effectively.

Work keeps at bay three great evils: boredom, vice, and need.

Voltaire

As an educator, my main focus is on the individuals in or preparing for the workforce. Work is extremely important, most of us find meaning in the work we do, the majority of the socialising and connections to other people is through our jobs, and they allow us to develop mastery. Gaining the right skills to get a good job also provides financial rewards that offer us freedom and independence.

All four stakeholders aim to narrow this gap and provide bridges between people and jobs. The UK Government has recognised that the increase in higher education participation rates to over 50% of the population has not narrowed this gap. They have taken bold steps to address this issue with the apprenticeship levy, postgraduate loans, and the recent technical qualifications. Many university leaders following the Augar report are pushing for lifelong learning credits or similar to support the reskilling in additional to the other changes.

Further increasing participation in higher education is not enough as there needs to be an effort to match the skills required with the ones being taught. There are significant moves from the government towards addressing this issue so it now the turn of educators to take the raw materials we are given and work with employers and students to build the bridges to connect the two.

The SAMR Learning Model

The first digital iteration of technology in any field tends to replicate its analogue predecessor, the next iteration then starts to exploit the possibilities

Kevin Kelly

SAMR is a model of learning and teaching created by Dr R. Puentedura frames the use of technology into four categories based on its impact on the student experience. 

SAMR model

  • Enhancement
    • Substitution – Technology acts as a direct substitute, with no functional change
    • Augmentation – Technology acts as a direct substitute, with functional improvement
  • Transformation
    • Modification – Technology allows for significant task redesign
    • Redefinition – Technology allows for the creation of new tasks, previously inconceivable

The first two categories are where the teaching has been enhanced by technology, and the second two is where it has been transformed by technology. The use of technology in the enhancement categories may bring some benefits, but the real improvements come when technology is used to do something that was not possible or practical previously.

Substitution could be represented by synchronous video calls with all the students and academics present at the same time to replace an in-person seminar or pre-recorded video used to replace lectures. The technology has enabled remote access to learning, but the method of delivery has not really changed. Augmentation then brings some functional improvements such as the students using the chat function to create rich conversations around the seminar topic and answer each other’s questions with higher engagement than in a physical classroom with one person talking at a time and the most confident students taking up much of the dialogue. Lectures might be reproduced in smaller 6-10 minute videos interleaved with automated knowledge checks (self-marking quizzes) that allow all students to test their learning and the academic know which ideas might need revisiting. 

The benefits of digital technologies will come with the modification of teaching and the move from a focus on ‘contact time’ to ‘learning hours’. Academics can be freed from the traditional constraints of the timetable and campus and design teaching around ideas and exploration rather than hour slots and room capacities. Modification might include the mixing of what used to be taught as in-class, such as the presentation of content in a lecture, and independent study, such as reading journal articles or problem sets to create a more natural route through the subject. Modification might be experiencing too by exploiting the interconnected nature of the internet to create new social learning experiences. Redefinition could suggest using technologies to allow students to take greater control of their learning and might include teaching through questions like platforms include Brilliant.org and Smart.ly or practical competency-based methods like Khan Academy that adapt to the strengths, weaknesses, and pace of each student. These digital approaches can free up time for academics to work with small groups of students on problem-based projects and other classroom-based active learning methods. 

Redefinition should be the goal in the redesigning of learning and teaching, using the internet to remove the traditional constraints of in-person instruction and create a richer student experience around the subject narrative.

How to use SAMR

Universities could use the SAMR learning model as a benchmarking exercise to help people understand how technology can transform teaching to help planning or as an audit approach at module, course, and department level to understand the maturity of blended and online learning practice. It could just be used as a framework to help academics think about the use of technology in teaching and remove the pressure of moving too quickly. 

It is at this point in the year that university leaders and academics are starting to think about next year. Do we move back to predominantly in-person teaching, continue with our enhanced approaches or learn from emerging transformational practice that will deliver a step-change in the student experience? The more important question might be, how fast do we change? Do we push ahead with improvements and push academics too far or risk losing some momentum to protect teaching staff? 

If possible, we need to maintain the progress we have made this year and allow the majority of academics to evolve their practice with some incremental enhancements while supporting those that want to go faster to create transformational approach. Redefine learning and teaching and can then be seen as a direction of travel with speed controlled by individuals as they become comfortable with the benefits different technologies can bring. 

Watch a six-minute video with Dr Ruben Puentedura describe his model. Get in touch on Twitter if you are thinking about using the SAMR model or are starting to plan what the 2021/22 academic year and beyond might look like.

Can Hyflex save us?

Most universities are currently delivering via blended learning with social distancing. Students get a mix of in-person teaching supported by synchronous sessions via Microsoft Teams or Zoom and asynchronous online learning through pre-recorded video and digital activities. In most situations, academics have curated the mix by keeping collaborative learning in-person and moving content delivery online.

Many academics have struggled to adapt to this new mode of teaching that requires a skill set that they have had to pick up over the summer break and have not had a chance to explore and test with student groups to learn what works. There are varying views from students too; many students want more in-person teaching, whereas others want to stay away from campus to feel safe.

The Hyflex module of course design as started to be discussed as a possible solution to the rapid move to blended learning. In Hyflex, both online and in-person modes are developed for the same cohort, with multiple paths of equal quality through the content. Students have the choice on a session by session basis which mode is most suitable for them and building in shared comprehension checks, and discussion threads can bring the modes together.

This approach is different from a blended course where academics choose which parts are best delivered online and which are best delivered in-person. Also different from providing video feed of an in-person session for people who can’t attend. Hyflex puts the mode of learning entirely in the control of the student.

“You want to be able to create a fully online version and a fully face-to-face version and find ways to bring them together into a single course experience that has multiple participation paths … And the student gets to control whether they’re doing it online or in the classroom.” 

Brian Beatty, creator of the Hyflex model

The Hyflex course design model was created by Brian Beatty and colleagues at San Fransisco State University and first introduced in 2006 to make their campus-based Masters course more accessible to their students, many of whom were working adults. It has been continually developed since and detailed in an ebook written by Beatty that he gives away for free. 

I am interested in reading the book to understand the model fully. My first reaction was scepticism to the idea when an American university administrator raised it in a conversation at a conference. High-quality online learning and high-quality in-person teaching are hard to design and develop, so asking academics to do both for the same cohort was expecting a lot. Expecting them to have a cohesive thread running through the course to track engagement and maintain a community within a cohort when each student is continuously moving between modes seems like a high-level skill developed over many course iterations. To deliver at scale would present a challenge for staff new to online learning and require significant investment in training, support, and set up time. 

For term one this academic year it was impractical to expect staff to develop fantastic blended courses in a short period due to workload. But many students feel they have not had enough in-person or quality online learning for their needs or preferences. Perhaps Hyflex development as an exolving approach where the course gets better over time might solve many of the problems we currently face and deliver authentic student-centred flexible learning.

Let me know what you think on Twitter.

Online programme Management (OPM): what are they good for?

Core competencies are the resources and skills that give an institution its unique place in the market. It is a management theory created by Prahalad and Hamel and published in the HBR in 1990. An institution should never outsource its core competencies.

An Online Programme Manager (OPM) company in the Higher Education sector is a private company that provides core services to a University to get them delivering online courses. These services typically come as a package for a percentage of the student fee with the University providing the academics and the degree awarding powers. The OPM may provide individual services such as marketing and recruitment with the institution doing the rest.

The typical services include: 

  • Market research for which courses to develop
  • Marketing these courses
  • ‘Active’ recruitment
  • Learning Design and development
  • A virtual learning environment ecosystem and other technologies to deliver the courses through
  • Student engagement & retention services

The question is, what are a university’s core competencies and, with an OMP deal, are we outsourcing these to a third party? It is clear the quality of the institutions academics are one, and the degree-awarding powers and how they maintain the rigour of these are another, but Learning design, and student engagement and retention services must be others? 

For institutions that are starting in the online learning area, OPM deals can help them learn how to do online learning properly. However, it could be argued that the services OPMs provide are becoming core competencies. Universities that have not been developing these skills for the last few years will have found themselves with a vast skills gap this academic year with blended learning with social distancing delivery.

For those institutions looking to partner with an OPM:

  1. Approach the partnership and the contract as an opportunity to learn how to do high-quality online learning not to outsource a future core competency.
  2. Make sure the agreement provides opportunities to terminate the contract if the OPM does not deliver the required student numbers or quality promised.
  3. Get the OPM to demonstrate, with examples, how they define quality online learning and make sure the team that build those examples are the team you will be getting.
  4. Have a solid financial model for income and expenditure over the first three years and get evidence that the OMP can deliver this.

Get in contact with me on Twitter if you want to share experiences of working with OPMs or if you are thinking of partnering with one and want to talk it through. 

Happiness Delivered: Tony Hsieh

I am listening to Tony Hsieh’s book Delivering Happiness: A path to profits, passion, and purpose today after the sad news of his passing. Hsieh sold his first big company LinkExchange to Microsoft for $265 million, and then Zappos to Amazon for over $1 billion. There are two things I remember about his work; The first is Zappos’s relentless and genuine focus on excellent customer service, the second is his project to revitalise downtown Las Vagas into a thriving tech centre.

DTP is a $350 million privately funded regeneration project of downtown Las Vagas. Hsieh started the project to support the area around the Zappos HQ and provide an environment for his employees to live and work. The project has since grown to support an extensive network of new businesses and tech start-ups. The DTP website states the project was inspired but Triumph of the city by Edward Glaeser, and that ‘…the best way to accelerate learning and innovation is to maximize serendipitous interactions…’ through the three C’s: Collisions, Co-learning, and Connectedness. 

We believe the best way to accelerate learning and innovation is to maximize serendipitous interactions, density in the office, density in the city, and to prioritize collisions over convenience.

dtplv.com

Like Google and other Silicon Valley companies campuses, you can draw many similarities between the ideas of the DTP community building with the set up of universities. We make a lot of effort to maximise ‘collisional hours’ when students are on or around the campus to increase students interactions with each other. We design modern courses around co-learning, with active learning, group work and small group seminars, student mentorship schemes, a variety of talks and workshops from external speakers, shared study spaces, and opportunities to support student start-ups. We also try to build a strong sense of connectedness, belonging, and emotional connection to the university outside of courses through activities with the Student Union, clubs, and sports.

There are some great communities of learning on cohort-based university course studied online, but with the mass move to blended learning at universities across the world, what more can do more to increase serendipitous interactions? Contact me on Twitter if you have ideas.

You should read Delivering Happiness, or better, listen to the audio version that read by Tony Hsieh himself.

HE teaching staff want more Edtech

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio on Pexels.com

Jisc, a not-for-profit organisation for educational digital services and solutions in the UK, released its annual Digital experience insights survey on 23 November. The 2020 survey received 2,677 responses from teaching staff from 14 universities between October 2019 and July 2020. 48% of submissions came after the UK went into lockdown on 23 March 2020.

Results I found interesting:

  • 95% said they either enjoyed trying out new and innovative technologies or were comfortable using mainstream technologies, but 4% preferred not to use technology unless they had to. 
  • 72% were either ‘very’ or ‘quite’ confident at trying out new technologies and 12% were either ‘not very’ or ‘not at all’ confident
  • 79% are motivated to use it in their teaching, and 6% were not very or not at all motivated.
  • 43% rated the quality of support to develop digital skills provided as either ‘excellent’, ‘best imaginable’ or ‘good’.
  • 33% of staff asked for more training, and 25% asked for an organisation strategy, recognition, and culture when asked what one thing could be done to help you develop your digital skills
  • Only 7% agree they receive reward and recognition for digital skills developed.
  • Since lockdown, there has been an increase in staff discussing their digital skills informally with managers (+5%), in meetings with colleagues (+7), and staff meetings and CPD sessions (5+).

Opportunity

The forced move to blended learning with social distancing in the UK has increased online delivery at universities. There has been massive investment from both institutions and technology companies to support academic staff to develop their digital skills and improve the technologies they use. The survey report suggests that staff need now to be given time to innovate and be creative to build their digital teaching. In response to only 7% of staff feeling any recognition for digital skills they have developed, Jisc also suggested that creating an organisational culture that recognises and rewards these endeavours is a priority. The commitment and time staff have dedicated over the last six months to adapt their teaching practice to use technology has moved the sector forward many years. However, organisations still have a lot to do to consolidate this progress and support the 4-12% of academics that are either not confident or prefer not to use technology. 

“Moving forward, we need a stronger focus on supporting staff to gain and nurture the skills to embed digital within curriculum design and redesign. This will help students to develop a preparedness for remote teaching and learning, supporting their digital capabilities and increasing their confidence in the digital workplace.”

Sarah Knight, Jisc’s head of data and digital capability

key challenges:

Jisc suggests three priorities for future developments:

  • Strategic leadership is vital in driving digital transformation.
  • More resource is needed to support staff to develop pedagogically informed digital practices.
  • The digital environment and infrastructure require further investment.

Successful digital transformations require the organisation’s leadership team to make a clear signal of the digital vision and its purpose. It could be argued that the reason for the successful large scale adoption of digital learning this academic year has been due to a critical mission to provide students with the best possible educational experience in a time when they need it most. The next step is for leadership is to evolve this from a message of necessity to an aspirational one. This strategy needs to be underpinned with a robust implementation plan and investment. 

Teaching online or blending online and campus-based delivery requires new skills and practices. More resource is needed to support staff to develop high-quality teaching. Jisc’s survey suggests that academics are motivated to use technology, and most have confidence, but they want more support and guidance. Universities need to create more opportunities to discuss digital skills in informal settings such as meetings and embedding them into formal ones, including recruitment, induction, and appraisals. Demand is high for regular, continuous professional development (CPD) and ongoing support, in a variety of formats, on effective teaching with digital technology. Staff want this CPD to be collaborative with other academics to learn, share, and develop practices specific to their context or subject area.  

Finally, for digital learning and teaching to be successful in the long term, Universities digital infrastructure will require significant ongoing investment. The quality of available technologies and teaching spaces are highly variable across universities in the UK. The more emerging digital practice is shared, and technology is used at home becomes more seamless, student and staff expectations will continue to rise. Staff tend to be less satisfied than students with University technology, wanting good quality and consistent provision across all their teaching environments and a suitable personal device that works reliably with university systems. Virtual learning environments need to continue to updated and improve, become more usable, be better integrated, and be appropriately implemented with staff.

UK universities have invested heavily in resource and infrastructure over the last six months to support staff and students in the move to blended learning. They have provided clear leadership in the rapid move online. This leadership will need to work even harder and be backed up with resource and infrastructure to maintain staff motivation and goodwill towards digital learning once social distancing rules are removed.

Get the full report here on Jisc’s website, and get in touch with me on Twitter if you want to talk about what happens next in digital learning. 

Initial mapping of Learning Designer competencies

Photo by Startup Stock Photos on Pexels.com

I spent some time a few months ago mapping the knowledge, skills, and behaviours of a Learning Designer. I separated the role into three areas; learning, technology, and design. The learning competencies cover having a clear definition of quality and what good learning and teaching look like. The technology competencies focus on the development of learning materials and the use of multimedia. The design competencies cover the process of working with subject matter experts, usually academics, to co-design learning with an understanding of the other two areas.

This list is not exclusive, and I sure it has changed since my team has taken my rough workings and corrected it based on their practice.

Learning (Quality)

  • Learning theory/models 
    • Kolbs learning cycle 
    • Blooms [Digital] Taxonomy
    • Spaced learning and the forgetting curve
    • SAMR 
    • Active Learning inc. SCALE-UP
    • The PAR model (Presentation, Activity, Review
    • Merrill’s First Principles of Instruction
    • eTivities (G.Salmon) 
  • Accessibility (WCAG 2.1)  
  • Quality frameworks
    • Quality Matters 
    • Online Learning Consortium Scorecard 

Technology (Development)

  • Typography 
  • Images/photography 
  • Audio 
  • Video – hardware and software, production process 
  • HTML & CSS (Javascript?)
  • Theory 
    • Dual coding  
    • Mayer’s principles for multimedia learning

Design

  • Design thinking 
  • Student centered design 
  • Personas 
  • ADDIE (Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, Evaluation) 
  • Rapid Prototyping (agile) 
  • Kirkpatrick’s levels of evaluation 
  • Design workshop structure 
  • Design workshop facilitation 
  • Module Storyboard/map 
  • Scheduling & Project Management 
  • Good practice examples 

Scholarship and continuous improvement

On top of these three skillsets, it is essential that a Learning Designer working in higher education maintains personal scholarship and operates in continuous improvement cycles. Scholarship is a set of principles and practices that allow a practitioner to ensure their methods are valid and trustworthy through rigorous enquiry. This may be through applying published research or carrying out structured research on their outputs. Continuous improvement cycles ensure that the Learning Designer gets better from every course they develop through reflecting on what has worked, what hasn’t, learning from this and then experimenting with new and emerging practices. 

Let me know what I have missed via my Twitter account.

Micro-credentials

The need for higher education and ongoing skills development is increasing. People are living longer, working longer, and many of the traditional middle-income jobs are being replaced by higher-skilled, higher-paid roles that take advantage of automation and computer power. Existing qualifications work well for those that are lucky enough to get them at the right time but there are many poeple that need an easier entry point and more flexible delivery to take advantage of what universities can offer.

Higher education participation for 18-year-olds is at an all-time high in the UK and set to grow in line with the increasing numbers of young people. Three-year full-time Undergraduate and one year full-time Postgraduate degrees have worked to prepare students for the workplace and as signals of capability that employers understand and trust. Most universities have worked hard over the last five to ten years to work closely with employers to make qualifications more relevant and invested in training staff to improve the quality of instruction to make the courses more accessible to a broader set of students. 

Still, many people in the workforce need knowledge, skills, and behaviours as well and qualifications that signal these capabilities. This need may be to maintain high paid positions as they are digitally transformed or to transition from middle-income roles to higher-income ones that require a greater level of specific knowledge. More importantly, study is needed to get out of low-income positions into more profitable and fulfilling careers. Once working full-time and starting a family, barriers to full-time qualifications including money, time, energy, ability, and insufficient entry criteria stop people from taking the first step to get on existing part-time programmes with 5-8 year commitments.

Smaller qualifications more flexibly delivered 

In the Higher Education National Credit Framework for England, one credit is equal to 10 notional learning hours. Notional learning hours includes all the time a student would spend working towards achieving the credit from the contact time, activities, essential and recommended reading, and working on assessments. 

An undergraduate degree is worth 360 credits or 3600 notional hours of learning at Level 4,5, and 6 and can be achieved in a maximum of 8 years. A masters degree is 180 credits at level 7 and can be completed in a maximum of 5 years. These can currently be further broken down into certificates (60 credits at Masters level and 120 credits at Undergraduate level) and Diploma (120 credits at Masters level and 240 credits at Undergraduate level)

The full qualifications at Undergraduate and Postgraduate level are still needed, and demand for these delivered as full-time campus-based courses continues to grow. Something additional is required for those that do not take this traditional route.

Micro-credential: A Sub-unit of a credential or credentials (could be micro, meso, mini, etc.) that could accumulate into larger credentials or be part of a portfolio

https://microcredentials.eu/

New, smaller, and more flexibility delivered qualifications are needed that are interoperable with the established larger awards. These micro-credentials should take advantage of the long-established and trusted existing signals of achievement and provide the opportunity to stack them into full Undergraduate or Postgraduate qualifications. Micro-credentials should be delivered in a way that removes current barriers and where possible awards credit for prior knowledge and skills.

What is needed?

Microcredentials need to be credit-bearing for the signal to employers of their value, smaller than an existing qualification, and flexibly delivered to fit around existing barriers and commitments. It must be possible to stack several micro-credentials together to gain a current, recognisable, formal qualification or used as entry criteria for full degrees or Masters degrees. 

Many universities have started to deliver ten credit micro-credentials over ten weeks for a total of ten hours per week of study. Two of these short courses could be put together to form the first module of a full qualification or six of these at level 7 could be used to gain a Certificate at Masters level. 

Professor Beverley Oliver in the paper ‘Making micro-credentials work‘ recommends requirements for students and providers to implement micro-credentials.

  • Learners require:
    • Certification of new and prior learning
    • Consultation about future work and education
    • The facility to stack and bank lifelong learning credit
  • Employers, policymakers, and providers require:
    • Definitions. standards, credit framework
    • Partnerships for learning-integrated work
    • A sustainable system of funding and incentives
    • Well-planned national strategies created in partnership

There is an enormous opportunity for providers to create some inspiring opportunities for students that do not have the knowledge, skills, or behaviours they need. This might be due to not getting the chance to study a traditionally delivered HE qualification at 18 or to improve their abilities to get more out of their career. The question of whether these qualifications sit within existing Universities alongside traditionally delivery or in new purpose build specialist providers remains.

Get in touch with me on Twitter if you have any questions or want to discuss any of the ideas presented here.

Universities in the UK

Universities UK, the ‘collective voice’ of universities in the United Kingdom states three core areas of impact to the country from the 165 registered higher education institutions:

  1. Training people for the key jobs communities rely on including teachers, doctors, dentists, and nurses. 
  2. Creating jobs and investment directly and indirectly by students spending including £7.3 billion per year from international students. 
  3. Producing world-leading research that positively impacts peoples lives.

Graduate employment

2.38 million students were studying at University in the Uk in 2018-18. In 2016-17 over 90% of graduates were in work or full-time study within six months of leaving university and in 2019 the median graduate salary in England was £10,000 more than that for non-graduates. In 2018-19 almost 4,000 new graduate start-ups were created, and 131 new university-owned companies were created.

Investment

Universities in the UK employ 440,000 staff, with 49% of these on academic contracts and support a total of more than 940,000 jobs. In 2014-15 they generated £95 billion in output for the UK economy with a total income of £38.2 billion, £18.9 Billion from tuition fees and education contracts. 

Research

The 2014 Research Excellence Framework or the REF, rated UK academic research productivity as 3.6 times that of the world average, with just 4.1% of the world’s researcher but 15.2% of the worlds most highly-cited articles. Research grants and contracts create an income of £6.2 billion annually.

Participation rates in the UK are at 49% of all 18-year-olds. Universities are becoming more inclusive, increasing the proportion of 18-year-olds from low participation neighbourhoods from 13.2% in 2010 to 21% in 2019. The proportion of students from the lowest-income households, judged by those who receive free school meals, has risen from 11.7% to 18.9% in the same period.

More investigation needed

These are all official figures published by the UK government and are provided on the Universities UK website. Many of the numbers sound very impressive and do not seem to warrant the public criticism that the HE sector regularly gets from politicians and the mainstream media. I am particularly interested in the ‘graduate premium’ on incomes and how variable this number is based on the university attended and subject area the student studied. 

I find the order in which the impacts are ordered interesting. Preparing students for jobs is first, the economic impact of the universities as employers second and research third. This order appears to be based on the size of the impact for the UK, but it is at odds with the way that most academics think, based on my experience, with research seen as the most crucial reason a university exists and the cultural impact to students second. 

Future posts are coming looking into the details of these observations. Check out the Universities UK website to dig into the details from this post or contact me on Twitter if you want to talk about the impact of Universities in the UK or the country you are based in.