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- These key elements are analysed through analysing its controversial definition, their pedagogical advantages and limitations, the functions of a tutor in a MOOC and their assessment (or accreditation).
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LAC Youth Skills and Entrepreneurship Report
- Changing this reality requires investing in skills and entrepreneurship to improve and facilitate youth transition from school to work and adult life.
- strengthen the education system and promote lifelong skills-enhancing programmes;
- develop skills programmes that are more responsive to the needs of the marketplace;
- collect information on the skills of the population and those demanded by businesses to build better national skills-enhancing strategies;
- support access to broadband services, improving infrastructure and affordability to help youth make the most of opportunities brought about by the digital economy
- knowledge-intensive economic activities
- Fiscal authorities must tread carefully to avoid large spending cuts, particularly on infrastructures and skills.
- Overall, all countries need more efficient and focused allocation of available resources based on improving state capacity to deliver goods and services.
- Skills levels are poor in the region, due to the low quality of primary and secondary education and structural barriers.
- This constitutes an obstacle to further develop more specific skills and, at the same time, the small portion of top performers may hamper innovation and entrepreneurship. It also presents a major challenge for LAC countries that are transitioning into knowledge-based economies where citizens need to innovate, adapt and leverage advanced human capital
- LAC has the widest gap between the pool of available skills and those skills that economies and businesses require.
- Education and skills are widely recognised as key elements to support youth transition from school to work and inclusive development.
- Skills-enhancing programmes for youth that combine classroom teaching, workplace learning and job search services help young Latin Americans transition to employment.
- At the same time, the interaction between design components and programme implementation is important for their effectiveness.
- Training programmes that respond to the needs of the marketplace, thanks to private sector participation in their design and implementation, facilitate youth’s transition into quality jobs and better earnings.
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The elephant in the truck: Retraining low-skilled workers | The Economist
- For people with decades of working life still ahead of them, it is too early to quit but it is also risky to assume that nothing will change.
- governments should be talking to industry bodies about the potential for mass redundancies and identifying trigger points
- This is a boiling-frog problem,” he says
- For lower-skilled workers of this sort the world of MOOCs, General Assembly and LinkedIn is a million miles away.
- The rewards of retraining are highest for computing skills, but there is no natural pathway from trucker to coder
- And even if there were, many of those already in the workforce lack both the confidence and the capability to make the switch
- Moreover, learning is most effective when people are able to practise their new skills.
- Any decent answer will need a co-ordinated effort to bring together individuals, employers and providers of education. That suggests a role for two entities in particular.
- One is trade unions. They have an industry-wide view of trends that may not be available to smaller employers. They can also accompany people throughout their working lives, which may become increasingly important in a world of rising self-employment
- The second entity is government. There is much talk about lifelong learning, though few countries are doing much about it. The Nordics fall into this less populated camp
- SkillsFuture initiative. Employers in the city-state are asked to spell out the changes, industry by industry, that they expect to happen over the next three to five years, and to identify the skills they will need. Their answers are used to create “industry transformation maps” designed to guide individuals on where to head.
- Some programmes cater to the needs of those who lack basic skills.
- Tripartite agreements between unions, employers and government lay out career and skills ladders for those who are trapped in low-wage occupations. Professional-conversion programmes offer subsidised training to people switching to new careers in areas such as health care.
- It makes sense for employers, particularly smaller ones, to club together to signal their skills needs to the workforce at large.
- In June 2016, this newspaper surveyed the realm of artificial intelligence and the adjustments it would require workers to make as jobs changed. “That will mean making education and training flexible enough to teach new skills quickly and efficiently,” we concluded. “It will require a greater emphasis on lifelong learning and on-the-job training, and wider use of online learning and video-game-style simulation.
- What is not in doubt is the need for new and more efficient ways to develop and add workplace skills.
- The outlines of a new ecosystem for connecting employment and education are becoming discernible
- Employers are putting greater emphasis on adaptability, curiosity and learning as desirable attributes for employees. They are working with universities and alternative providers to create and improve their own supply of talent. Shorter courses, lower costs and online delivery are making it easier for people to combine work and training. New credentials are being created to signal skills
- At the same time, new technologies should make learning more effective as well as more necessary. Virtual and augmented reality could radically improve professional training. Big data offer the chance for more personalised education. Platforms make it easier to connect people of differing levels of knowledge, allowing peer-to-peer teaching and mentoring
- But for now this nascent ecosystem is disproportionately likely to benefit those who least need help. It concentrates on advanced technological skills, which offer the clearest returns and are relatively easy to measure. And it assumes that people have the money, time, motivation and basic skills to retrain.
- But it is as easy—indeed, easier—to imagine a future in which the emerging infrastructure of lifelong learning reinforces existing advantages.
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Pathway dependency: Turning qualifications into jobs | The Economist
- But whether the fault lies with the educators or the employers, there is a need for pathways that lead individuals into jobs.
- But pathways are needed to smooth transitions in other countries (America, for example, lacks a tradition of vocational education); in less structured occupations; and when formal education has come to an end.
- That is particularly important in the early stages of people’s careers, which is not just when they lack experience but also when earnings grow fastest.
- it is vital for people to move quickly into work once qualified, and to hold on to jobs once they get them
- Users applying for a job online can click on a link and take a one-hour online training session on how to be a cashier, sales clerk or whatever they are after. Employers pay LearnUp a fixed fee to improve the pool of candidates. Recruitment and retention rates have risen.
- Curriculum designers then use that analysis to create a full-time training programme lasting between four and 12 weeks that covers both technical knowledge and behavioural skills.
- The trainees pay nothing; the hope is that employers will fund the programme, or embed it in their own training programmes, when they see how useful it is
- And in a world of continuous reskilling and greater self-employment, people may need help with repeatedly moving from one type of job to another
- Vocational education is good at getting school-leavers into work, but does nothing to help people adapt to changes in the world of work
- But many workers will need outside help in deciding which routes to take
- That suggests a big opportunity for firms that can act, in effect, as careers advisers
- launched a programme called MyPath that is based on the idea of an iterative process of learning and working
- earn a degree from Western International University at no financial cost to them
- The degree is structured as a series of three or four episodes of education followed by periods in work, in the expectation that Manpower has a good overview of the skills leading to well-paid jobs
- LinkedIn is another organisation with a decent understanding of wider trends. The professional-networking site likes to call the data it sits on “the economic graph”, a digital map of the global economy. Its candidate data, and its recruitment platform, give it information on where demand from employers is greatest and what skills jobseekers need. And with LinkedIn Learning it can now also deliver training itself.
- The difficulty with offering mass-market careers advice is finding a business model that will pay for it. LinkedIn solves this problem by aiming itself primarily at professionals who either pay for services themselves or who are of interest to recruiters. But that raises a much bigger question. “There is no shortage of options for folks of means,” says Adam Newman of Tyton Partners, an education consultancy. “But what about LinkedIn for the linked-out?”
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The return of the MOOC: Established education providers v new contenders | The Economist
- Education, like health care, is a complex and fragmented industry, which makes it hard to gain scale. Despite those drop-out rates, the MOOCs have shown it can be done quickly and comparatively cheaply.
- In their search for a business model, some platforms are now focusing much more squarely on employment (though others, like the Khan Academy, are not for profit)
- shifted its emphasis to employability.
- It has found that when money is changing hands, completion rates rise from 10% to 60%
- It is increasingly working with companies, too. Firms can now integrate Coursera into their own learning portals, track employees’ participation and provide their desired menu of courses.
- Whatever the arithmetic, the reinvented MOOCs matter because they are solving two problems they share with every provider of later-life education.
- The first of these is the cost of learning, not just in money but also in time
- balancing learning, working and family life can cause enormous pressures
- Moreover, the world of work increasingly demands a quick response from the education system to provide people with the desired qualifications.
- In response, the MOOCs have tried to make their content as digestible and flexible as possible. Degrees are broken into modules; modules into courses; courses into short segments. The MOOCs test for optimal length to ensure people complete the course; six minutes is thought to be the sweet spot for online video and four weeks for a course
- The on-campus degree also needs to mark itself out as a premium experience, he says
- But according to Joshua Goodman of Harvard University, who has studied the programme, the decision was proved right
- The campus degree continued to recruit students in their early 20s whereas the online degree attracted people with a median age of 34 who did not want to leave their jobs. Mr Goodman reckons this one programme could boost the numbers of computer-science masters produced in America each year by 7-8%
- Universities can become more modular, too. EdX has a micromasters in supply-chain management that can either be taken on its own or count towards a full masters at MIT.
- Enthusiasts talk of a world of “stackable credentials” in which qualifications can be fitted together like bits of Lego
- Degrees are still highly regarded, and increased emphasis on critical thinking and social skills raises their value in many ways
- Pluralsight uses a model similar to that of book publishing by employing a network of 1,000 experts to produce and refresh its library of videos on IT and creative skills. These experts get royalties based on how often their content is viewed; its highest earner pulled in $2m last year, according to Aaron Skonnard, the firm’s boss. Such rewards provide an incentive for authors to keep updating their content
- Beside costs, the second problem for MOOCs to solve is credentials
- The MOOCs’ answer is to offer microcredentials like nanodegrees and specialisations.
- But employers still need to be confident that the skills these credentials vouchsafe are for real
- Credentials require just the right amount of friction: enough to be trusted, not so much as to block career transitions
- Even if these problems can be overcome, however, there is something faintly regressive about the world of microcredentials. Like a university degree, it still involves a stamp of approval from a recognised provider after a proprietary process. Yet lots of learning happens in informal and experiential settings, and lots of workplace skills cannot be acquired in a course.
- One way of dealing with that is to divide the currency of knowledge into smaller denominations by issuing “digital badges” to recognise less formal achievements.
- The trouble with digital badges is that they tend to proliferate. Illinois State University alone created 110 badges when it launched a programme with Credly in 2016. Add in MOOC certificates, LinkedIn Learning courses, competency-based education, General Assembly and the like, and the idea of creating new currencies of knowledge starts to look more like a recipe for hyperinflation
- He wants to issue a standardised assessment of skill levels, irrespective of how people got there. The plan is to create a network of subject-matter experts to assess employees’ skills (copy-editing, say, or credit analysis), and a standardised grading language that means the same thing to everyone, everywhere
- Using experts to grade ability raises recursive questions about the credentials of those experts
- However it is done, the credentialling problem has to be solved. People are much more likely to invest in training if it confers a qualification that others will recognise. But they also need to know which skills are useful in the first place
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Learning and earning: Lifelong learning is becoming an economic imperative | The Economist
"A college degree at the start of a working career does not answer the need for the continuous acquisition of new skills, especially as career spans are lengthening. Vocational training is good at giving people job-specific skills, but those, too, will need to be updated over and over again during a career lasting decades."
- To remain competitive, and to give low- and high-skilled workers alike the best chance of success, economies need to offer training and career-focused education throughout people’s working lives.
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Mozilla releases Web Literacy Map v2.0 (with ‘21st century skills’)
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Knowing the Difference Between Digital Skills and Digital Literacies, and Teaching Both
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The relation between 21st-century skills and digital skills: A systematic literature review
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How digital connectivity is transforming Latin America | World Economic Forum
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Digital Badges: Principles and standards of Quality for Recognizing Learning
Saturday, April 8, 2017
Weekly Sporto bookmarks (weekly)
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