Liveblog from university to continued professional learning #educon17 #lifelonglearning

Frank Gielen talks on innovation adoption and transformation. This talk is part of the pre-conference talks of the Educon conferencein Athens, Greece. The talk looks at how to organise learning (master, professional, phd…) to gradually move towards lifelong learning.

Skills gap between what the companies want and which human resources and innovations are available.

The human capital is missing frequently, which means that education is increasingly important.

If you want to transform your ‘old’ energy approach to sustainable or renewable energy approach(es).

So education is core in the innovation process, as you need to train all stakeholders (senior management, workforce on the floor, mid-management…).

Education linked to innovation has two main factors impacting it: speed of adoption (graduates need to be skilled), timeliness (skills need to be used within 2 months at least).

So innovation speed is equivalent with training need. Learning needs to be adapted to speed of innovation.

Personalising learning

Starting from the knowledge triangle: education, industry and research as a baseline for higher education goals which needs to be combined in order to create an employable highly trained workforce coming out of higher ed.

What learning trends are important to stay competitive in the market: Continued Professional Development, become power learners. This means that the human factor needs to be continually developing, in order to be on top of a high turn-around field.

No one size fits all, so in education this means personalised learning, the role of the teacher changes that instead of having a lot of lectures, having online resources which students are knowledgeable to use to create a constant base-line, adding mentoring e.g. the Socratic approach where the teachers are in close contact and support learners.

Solving a challenge also includes having an effect on society.

Merging masters with professional learning

Contemporary learning consists on average of: 70 percent informal learning, 20 percent social learning, 10 percent formal training.

MicroMasters (short online format 10-15 ECTS and commonly project based), in many cases complimentary for the campus teaching, but enabling a blended master. This is something we need to consider as InnoEnergy. But in many cases microMasters are linked to deepening learning in a specific field, and is frequently based on a general foundation (so need for clear learning paths). 

We are shifting towards lifelong learning, blurring the boundaries between master schools, doctoral schools and professional schools.

Learning architecture: MOOCs or microMaster, certified microMaster, blended microMaster with coaching, blended-in-house microMaster with coaching and Bring Your Own Program (BYOP).

A new learning paradigm: personalised, just-in-time learning.

Education is going through a digital transformation. This means that more data is available, which we can start using as a means to support learning. Based on this personalised learning will become available, and lacking skill sets can be found. Data driven education comes a bit closer to enabling personalised learning.

Feedback and coaching has the highest learning impact. This means that teachers need to be prepared to become a guide-on-the-side or a good coach.

Learning entrepreneurship

Learners need to learn it. But not all of the students need to be entrepreneurs, but all of the students need to understand an entrepreneurial skill set: see opportunities, motivate people, drive change, find scarce resources, deal with the uncertainty of innovation. But … then how we measure this, and assess it?

This means being an early adopter, and being a catalyst for educational innovation.