This one is from my friend Jay Cross @ Internet Time. It’s a take on flipping the corporate class that I totally agree with. Flipping the educational process has now been proven to work across the board especially among financially challenged schools. A combination of flipping and going back to the dream we all had with elearning when it was first introduced could ‘flip’ the equation and move the dial in corporate learning from disabling to enabling. Maybe this time I’ll use a more permanent glue to keep my fingers crossed.  

Thanks to Jay for your insights as always!

Flipping learning is big in education. It will be big in corporate learning. Let’s not blow it.

How do you flip learning?

Khan Academy is the poster child for flipped learning. Sal Khan has produced more than 3,000 short videos on a variety of topics. Students watch the videos before coming to class. In the classroom, they sort out what they’ve learned and do what used to be called homework. Millions of students are learning this way. Recently, Stanford professors offered a couple of courses in this fashion and were surprised when a third of a million people enrolled.

Flipping makes a ton a sense. The learner can watch the mini-lectures when it’s convenient to do so. The learner controls the pace by pausing, replaying, or fast-forwarding. In all likelihood, the presentation by the enthusiastic Salmaan Khan or a popular Stanford prof is going to be more engaging than your local school teacher or grad student teaching assistant. The video can provide content in small, digestible pieces. Once it’s in the can, the video can be replayed again and again. And of course, video delivered online scales without an increase in cost.

More important for learning outcomes, the time spent in class can be put to more productive use. Learners convene to get answers to questions, discuss examples, put what they’ve learned in context, debate, explore, and extend their knowledge. Instead of passively listening to an instructor, they actively engage the material. Instructors, freed of the need to mouth the words of lessons, focus on helping learners understand things and coaching individuals. These activities can take place online, and people can learn from one another in virtual communities and support groups.

Flipping Stanford

In a Science Times essay, “Death Knell for the Lecture: Technology as a Passport to Personalized Education,” Daphne Koller described how Stanford University has flipped traditional courses:

At Stanford, we recently placed three computer science courses online, using a similar format. Remarkably, in the first four weeks, 300,000 students registered for these courses, with millions of video views and hundreds of thousands of submitted assignments.

What can we learn from these successes? First, we see that video content is engaging to students — many of whom grew up on YouTube — and easy for instructors to produce.

Second, presenting content in short, bite-size chunks, rather than monolithic hourlong lectures, is better suited to students’ attention spans, and provides the flexibility to tailor instruction to individual students. Those with less preparation can dwell longer on background material without feeling uncomfortable about how they might be perceived by classmates or the instructor.

Conversely, students with an aptitude for the topic can move ahead rapidly, avoiding boredom and disengagement. In short, everyone has access to a personalized experience that resembles individual tutoring.

Watching passively is not enough. Engagement through exercises and assessments is a critical component of learning. These exercises are designed not just to evaluate the student’s learning, but also, more important, to enhance understanding by prompting recall and placing ideas in context.

Moreover, testing allows students to move ahead when they master a concept, rather than when they have spent a stipulated amount of time staring at the teacher who is explaining it.

An article in Wired, The Stanford Educational Experiment Could Change Higher Learning Forever, describes the wildly popular course on artificial intelligence taught by Stanford professors Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig:

Does it make any sense that school is generally a place where people come together to sit and listen to the person at the front of the room?  It generally doesn’t make the most sense to get a group of people together to sit and stare.  What if instead, educators spent class time doing and homework time for the watching of lessons/lectures.  The other benefit of this is that these can be viewed and reviewed anytime/anywhere.  The result is a lively bustling classroom where students can spend their time learning, talking, doing.

I fear that flipping learning in corporations may meet the same nasty fate as eLearning.

In the early days, 1999-2000, many of us believed that eLearning was the forefront of a renaissance in learning. Not only could people learn at their own pace, whenever they wanted, they’d also be able to ask questions, learn with peers, join communities, access job aids, contact mentors, and create personal learning paths. Workers could attend virtual classes without leaving the workplace. Software would create personalized learning experiences by assembling custom configurations of learning objects.

The eLearning dream didn’t last long. Companies proved more interested in reducing instructor head-count and facilities costs than in improving learning outcomes.  Training departments put PowerPoint presentations on their intranets and acted as if people could learn from them. Vendors put deadly-dull page-turner courses online and called it eLearning.

When times were tough, training departments slashed budgets by replacing face-to-face instruction with online reading. They failed to follow through with the discussions, practice, social processing, and reinforcement that makes lessons stick. It didn’t work. Most eLearning is ineffective drudgery.

That’s my nightmare about flipping learning in the corporation, that organizations will once again confuse exposure to content with learning. It’s great to replace lectures with video clips — IF you retain the opportunity for people to ask questions, interact with the material, practice what they’ve learned, collaborate with others, and periodically refresh their memories. This takes a sound learning ecosystem, a workscape.

Dan Pink thinks we should flip not only schooling but also publishing, the movie business, human resources, and office space. I agree. Business has changed. There’s hardly any business model left that couldn’t benefit from a flip. Break the processes into pieces and see if there’s not a better way to put them back together.

The short history of the training or education department within corporate organizations is an interesting mirror of the shift in economic paradigms from the Industrial Economy to the Knowledge Economy. These departments have moved from the operational level as cost centers to profit centers with their own “C” level leadership that in many cases reports directly to the CEO. It’s a glimpse into the future of where these “Departments of Learning” will be in the corporate hierarchy and how they will be perceived.

Let me back up a bit. The global economy has undergone three major and notable economic paradigms each with an attendant educational system. They can be summed up simple in the following list:

Agricultural Economy: We managed backs – we basically learned on-the-job.

Industrial Economy: We managed hands – we primarily learned in the formal classroom.

Knowledge Economy: We manage minds – we learn continuously in an ever-growing variety of ways.

Here’s a story that sums up the changes:

In 2007,  I gave a presentation to the annual gathering of CIO’s at Boeing in Southern California. As the top CIO was leading me into the conference room, she told me that the building itself has an interesting history. Originally an orchard grove for oranges, the building was first used as a giant manufacturing facility for the production of airplanes. When the demand for planes was reduced, the building was cut up into floors, offices and cubicles and people spent their workdays in front of computers producing, refining, defining, revising, discussing, an communicating ideas. Ideas for new planes. Ideas for improving production of planes. Ideas about related projects that had something to do with planes. One piece of land, three economic paradigms.

The point is all they did all day was produce ideas, work with ideas, think about ideas, write and talk about ideas. There were still a small group of people who ultimately made those ideas into things – planes. But they were followed by the people who had more ideas about how to market it, sell it, teach people to fly it and so on and so on. So the Knowledge Economy is all about the mass production of ideas. Success in the Knowledge Economy is the ability to sift through all those ideas to come up with the ones that can be produced and sold. Turning ideas into money.

These workers are literally the corporate brain. In a flat digitally-interconnected world where 24×7 marketplaces are open to all and as a result  are hypercompetitve, the Corporate IQ separates the winners from the losers, the successes from the failures. So making sure that all the employers can learn as much as they need to know and know-how to do, anytime and anyplace, become a strategic fact. Learning has become the most critical differentiator in this newest Knowledge Economy. And the “Department of Learning” is at the center of it all.

In a recent report by SABA Transforming Learning into a Strategic Business Enabler, the following facts emerged from interviews with over 612 leaders from the Director level and above:

• Overall 52.7% of respondents report that the learning function at their organization is seen as a strategic enabler for the business
• Only 13.7% report that the learning function at their organization is seen as a cost center.

With regard to the way these newly perceived strategic organizations are operating, here are some vital statistics:

• 4-6% more likely to deliver training to customers.
• 8-9% more likely to deliver training to partners/channels.
• 4-6% more likely to deliver training to suppliers.
• 25-42% more likely to report that training is aligned with business strategy.
• Twice as likely to use objective measures of employee performance to align their learning to the business strategy.
• Twice as likely to do formal learning requirements planning.
• Four times more likely to have a learning advisory board with members from the business and the learning function.
• 26-43% more likely to have an annual process of mapping the learning strategy to the business strategy for the year.
• 39% more likely to have been demonstrating the impact that training has on the core business.

The study goes into much greater depth if you’re interested in getting into the weeds. The point for me was that the training department in which I started only 30 years ago has moved from a cost center focusing on operational training that often was the first to be cut during a downsizing, rightsizing or capsizing, to being viewed as a critical strategic component to the core business. All those early discussions about ‘getting a seat at the table’ are finally being realized.

Other people around the world pray

for what we take for granted.

From the article:

“As the recent Taliban assassination attempt on Malala Yousafzai, the 15-year-old Pakistani champion of girls’ education, shows: The Taliban are most scared of books, not bombs. Establishing an educational infrastructure in Afghanistan is the most cost effective long-term strategy for grassroots change.

The cost effectiveness could be shown in multiple ways. “For the cost of just one soldier in Afghanistan for one year, we could start about 20 schools,” said Nicholas Kristoff in a July 2010 column in the New York Times.”

Education is the most powerful weapon

which you can use to change the world. 
                                                   Nelson Mandela 

Education is a better safeguard of liberty

than a standing army. 
                                                     Edward Everett