Mindful "Extended Enterprise" Learning at Academic Institutions

I’ve been having a lot of fun over the last few weeks re-thinking how Open Badge eCredentials can enhance lifewide learning through the lens of  Extended Enterprise Learning.
Although this concept originated as a form of “edu-marketing” for private sector producers of products and services, John Leh of Talented Learning has identified five sectors that significantly employ this kind of learning. These are listed below (the linked listings point to my previous posts on the topic):

  1. Private sector producers of products and services
    Improving the product value chain: suppliers, distributors, retailers, customers
  2. Member-based Organizations
    Associations, Unions, Not For Profits
  3. Academic institutions
    Open Education, MOOCs, Work Integrated Learning, vocational education and Apprenticeship
  4. Private Sector Educators and Trainers
    B2B, B2C: independent trainers, ConEd business units
  5. Public Sector organizations
    Emergency/public awareness, voluntary sector support, armed forces, civilian public service

This post explores how academic institutions already deliver Extended Enterprise Learning and how they might do this more deliberately for their own survival in troubled times.
 

How Academic Institutions Align with Extended Enterprise Learning:

Extended Enterprise Learning
Academic Institution
Learning is delivered to non-employees: customers, partners and other stakeholders in the value chain Learners, employers, sector bodies, professional bodies, accreditation bodies, governments, other institutions, contractors, SaaS
Learning is an optional, often paid service
Undergraduate student engagement and retention
ConEd, Contract Training
Delivery is diverse and spans contexts F2F, asynchronous/synchronous online, credentialed/non-credentialed, coaching, mentoring, performance support
Multiple partners
Learner is not necessarily identified MOOCs, OER
Learning is a customer pipeline
MOOCs, Open University’s Badged Open Courses
Learning is an after-market “value add” Continuing Education, Continuing Professional Development
Learning provides added revenue PACE as a revenue centre
Learners are brand advocates Displaying credentials in résumés and on social media

 

Mapping a Vision for Extended Enterprise Learning at Academic Institutions

The fourth diagram, an ugly one thrown together by me, is a conceptual mashup of the first three:

  An Extended Enterprise Map by Jay Cross

An Academic Stakeholder Map

Academic institutions don’t only exist in ecosystems, they are ecosystems in themselves:

A Credentialing Map

This recent post from Carla Casilli, a thought leader in the Open Badge community, demonstrates the notional flexibility and hints at the portability of Open Badges:


 

Don’s Ugly “Shove-It-All-On-One-Page” Map

I’ve taken community colleges as an example key connector and deconstructed them a bit, so that cluster represents a sub-layer – I  could just as easily have done that with universities:
SmallPiecesMap
 

Implication 1: Customer Diversity, Learner Autonomy

Many public sector academic institutions, particularly  universities, are uncomfortable with the notion of learner as customer, preferring to think of them as what I would call “targets for transformation”, if teaching is the goal, or “talent pipelines” if research is the goal. OK, sometimes both.
However, Learners do generally pay for their learning, they generally have a choice of suppliers and do vote with their feet if their needs aren’t being met.
Certainly there are dangers inherent in treating undergraduate students too much like customers; ask any instructor whose performance assessment is based on student evaluations. But Gardner Campbell, Vice Provost for Learning Innovation and Student Success at Virginia Commonwealth University, warns us that there are also dangers inherent in viewing value only in terms of the institution. Student needs can be conflated with institutional needs and real learning can be compromised.
This can have an impact on about society and the concept of “shared private goods” (i.e. the shared learning of learners) contributing to the public good in what Gardner Campbell calls the “digital media commons”. See this recent interview excerpt from Bryan Alexander’s excellent Future Trends Forum series (watch 3m22s – 7m45):
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=br4dJDJkNW4?t=3m22s%20rel=]
So maybe the public is a “customer”.
And there are other customers, such as:

  • Employers
  • Professional bodies
  • Funders

Exploring the first element, “learner as customer” , we have the following examples of the “Extended Enterprise”:

  • “Pre-Sales”: MOOCs as recruitment vehicles
    MOOC consortia are proliferating. We’ve heard of edX, Coursera and even Unizin. Over in Europe, Open University’s multi-institutional multi-national FutureLearn platform has over 3.5 million learners. In the words of its CEO, MOOCs will become “one of the most important recruitment grounds…particularly for international students”, adding that their university partners were discovering that offering free online content was “not just about courses” but also about making institutions “more discoverable” online.
    First sample is free…
  • “Post-Sales”: Continuing Education, Continuing Professional Development, Alumni Associations
    It’s useful to maintain contact with graduates (satisfied customers?), who may want to come back for more learning, or may wish to “pay back” their learning in the form of donations. Institutions can encourage this productive relationship by providing services for alumni such as, oh I don’t know, maybe a lifelong ePortfolio?

 

Implication 2: Competition and Coopetition

Yes, institutions compete with each other and the private sector competes with the public sector; I’ll be exploring Extended Enterprises in private sector education in a future post.
But each institution is part of a larger system whose goal is (should be!) to benefit learners as they move through the (more or less) defined stages of learning: K12, post-secondary, professional/post-graduate, workplace and lifelong. As the learner moves through the stages of their learning, the supplier and other stakeholders inter-operate (again, more or less).
Some examples:

  • Articulation agreements and dual credit programs: secondary/post-secondary, college/university
  • Apprenticeship Board agreements with colleges to provide the formal learning component of apprenticeship programs
  • Agreements with employers for Work Integrated Learning and custom programs aligned to industry needs
  • Undergraduate programs designed for professional certification
  • Other external standards and accreditation bodies which help align learning standards and programs and hold providers accountable for quality of delivery. They are themselves accountable to the public and regulated by the governments (who are themselves accountable…)
  • Recognition of Prior Learning enables learners to carry forward more of the human capital they have earned along the way, via credit transfer and prior learning assessment, including recognition of experiential learning. (It’s not always perfect – I went to three institutions before I got my undergraduate degree, leaving several orphaned credits in my wake…)

 

Implication 3: Small Pieces, Loosely Joined – Enabled by Portable Credentials

If the components of a system are smaller and based on common standards they can connect with each other more easily. David Weinberger tells us this is why the Internet is so revolutionary: HTTP, FTP, SMTP…
In this way, simplicity and modularity can support the flexible complexity of an ecosystem, rather than the brittle complications of trying to get vertically integrated information siloes to talk to each other.
Portable micro-credentials (small, standards-based) can help enable this. Here are some quick examples by topic:

  • MOOCs
    Badged Open Courses on OpenLearn, (Open University’s “Home” MOOC platform) are for “learners who are seeking access to study skills and to have their learning recognised.” According to their report, Badging and Employability at the Open University“Evaluation of the OU’s pilot badging projects suggests that badging offers a way of reconciling informal learning and the demands of employers, and that badging content for university students and informal learners alike may become a key widening participation activity for HEIs.”
  • Co-Curricular Records and ePortfolios
    Notre Dame’s E2B2 (ePortfolios with Evidence-Based Badges) initiative  encourages students to showcase their skills and accomplishments visually on their ePortfolios, while establishing a standard system for verifying and quantifying these formal and informal achievements and skills. As students get involved with badges, the goal is that they start to focus on the co-curricular aspects of their education that is, the learning that happens outside of the classroom.
  • Continuing Education and Alumni Professional Development
    University of Central Florida’s Division of Continuing Education delivers both kinds of eCredentials, in addition to a host of others for undergraduates, staff and faculty.
  • Open Assessment
    DeakinDigital‘s modular “Recognition of Professional Practice: micro-credentials for Graduate Learning Outcomes (Communication, etc.) aligned to the Australian Qualification Framework that can add up to 90+% of a Master’s Degree at a fraction of the time and cost. The customers for this “Credential-to-Degree”program can be  Employers, who can cherry-pick for Talent Management programs, or individual Learners, who might never have gone back for traditional Masters degree, for reasons of time or expense.

 

In closing…

 Imagine if this:SmallPiecesMap_crop

… were part of this:


 

 … instead of this:

wisconsin-military-ridge-state-trail-farm-silos-and-barn

Photo via Good Free Photos – PUBLIC DOMAIN


 

Wouldn’t that be a good thing?

Not only for the learner, but for academic institutions seeking new routes to fiscal sustainability.
Current methods aren’t working too well for many institutions: since 2013, Bryan Alexander has been curating a scary list of institutional examples of what he calls the Queen Sacrifice: “the combination of self-destructive sacrifice and hope for gain” – otherwise known as cutting core programs to make ends meet and stay in business.

Recognizing Learning in Associations with Open Badge eCredentials

Today’s post explores Extended Enterprise Learning for Member-based Organizations, one of five sectors that significantly employ this kind of learning, according to John Leh of Talented Learning:

  1. Corporate
    Improving the product value chain: suppliers, distributors, retailers, customers
  2. Member-based Organizations
    Associations, Unions, Not For Profits
  3. For Profit Training
    B2B, B2C: independent trainers, ConEd business units
  4. Academic
    Open Education, MOOCs, Work Integrated Learning, vocational education and Apprenticeship
  5. Public Sector
    Emergency/public awareness, voluntary sector support, armed forces, civilian public service

Common characteristics of Extended Enterprise Learning include:

  • A “partner cluster” approach to delivery and reception of learning
  • Voluntary enrolment, often paid, so the learning experience must be engaging
  • A mix of marketing and education, with layering of commitment
  • A focus on measurement and impact analysis

 

About Associations – Statistics


Associations play an important role in our society, bringing people together around shared interests, whether those are professional, commercial, cultural, or just about anything people can be interested in.
According to the Associations Canada 2015 index, there are 20,127 associations and related organizations in Canada*, broken down in the following sub-sectors:

  • Professional: 11%
  • Trade: 27%
  • Special interest: 62%
    This includes everything from AA (Alcoholics Anonymous) to Zoroastrianism. It’s hard to segment, though I’m working on it.

They’re typically not all that rich: 65% of associations in Canada have a budget of less that $500K.
* A similar index for the US lists only 40,000, but I think this is due to more exclusive criteria. I suspect over 100,000 similar organizations in the US, if not more.
 

Purposes and Needs of Associations


These play out differently in different sub-sectors. For example,  industry organizations are more concerned with Advocacy and Marketing, whereas professional organizations are naturally more concerned with Professionalization.

  • Advocacy and marketing
    • Public Relations, communications
    • Policy development, influence
  • Professionalization and professional learning
    Credentialing and certification of learning are trending upward in the sector.

    • From “soft” credentialing to “hard” certification and mandatory Continuing Professional Development (CPD)
    • Usually focuses on the 10% of 70:20:10 learning: courses, workshops, webinars
  • Networking
    This is a form of social learning, the 20% of 70:20:10. It includes events, online communities and social media. It can be useful for member engagement, mentoring, expertise and opportunity identification and ad hoc learning.
  • Change, issue management
    This can include research, trend analysis, tool development and other resources to support the 70% of 70:20:10 – the “doing”, problem solving, continuous improvement part of learning.
  • Organizational Survival
    Associations have internal needs that must be met, in order to keep the lights on and the future secure:

    • Membership maintenance, growth (delivering value)
    • Sponsorship, other revenue
    • Volunteer service: recruitment and avoiding “burnout”
    • Leadership Development, Succession

 

Association Learning: Think Beyond the LMS

Learning is more than courses; it’s lifewide:


I like this report card about the 70:20:10 performance of typical LMSs from another presentation by John Leh:

An LMS is a learning “batch processor” and generally measures what’s easy to measure, which is biased to the 10%: online courses, typically delivered to cohorts, or automated if delivered to individuals.
Unless sophisticated processes are in place, LMSs measure the delivery of bulk “learning inputs” with assessment based on the internal activities and content of the course rather than real world impact, or ROI.
I say that we should measure personalized learning outcomes across the 70:20:10 spectrum of learning. Open Badge eCredentials make this possible.
 

Some Benefits of eCredentials for Associations

As an open, human and machine-readable technology standard, Open Badges have huge potential for associations in bridging needs and solutions across sectors and regions, for personal and organizational purposes.
Here are some examples:

  • Personal learning pathways
    This is about delivering value to individual members.
    EDUCAUSE, the “foremost community of higher education IT leaders and professionals”, with a membership of over 2,300 organizations (over 300 private sector), talks about Signals for yourself: gaining new knowledge, developing your brand, and “wayfinding” to make your career path more visible.
  • Modularity and stackability
    Learning opportunities don’t always have to be ponderously packaged in courses, but can be delivered and assessed at a smaller scale:Microcredentials are natural territory for associations and logically connect to microlearning. Learners increasingly appreciate and seek out ways to demonstrate their ongoing learning in what we term “the other 50 years”—the typical lifespan after adults leave higher education.
    Tagoras: ASSOCIATION LEARNING TECHNOLOGY 2016 p23Geeky people are now exploring how xAPI learning events can be stacked into Open Badge eCredentials:
  • Diversity of expression
    With a flexible eCredentialing system, learning doesn’t have to be locked up inside a single LMS silo. Learning can be online or offline, course-based or event-based, automatically or  manually assessed. And recognition can encompass a broader scope: Recognition of experiential learning, professional achievements, development interests, volunteer service, certification…
    For example, the Canadian Public Relations Society “Accredited in Public Relations” eCredential is based on years of service, work samples, an oral interview and a proctored exam.
  • Diversity of sourcing
    Organizations, especially smaller ones, don’t have to expensively reinvent the wheel: they can choose to recognize credentialed learning from other educators and trainers who support the Open Badge eCredential standard. For example, project management or leadership may be better delivered by an external organization, with its own industry-recognized credential.
  • Demonstration of Impact
    Once you start focusing on outcomes rather than inputs, you can start curating these in skills passports and skills inventories across contexts, reporting on organizations and regions, ideally linked to performance changes. Expertise mapping can help with planning and member development and performance support.Educause calls this signals for others
  • Emergent learning and innovation
    Learners in a community don’t have to just be learners – they can teach too, spreading the learning, bringing in new learning from outside as teachers. Skills ecosystems can develop.
  • Social Media Reach
    Your members and learners become brand advocates, on LinkedIn and other social media sites:
    SocialMedia_2016-04-17_14-05-35

    LinkedIn

Most of these benefits have a bottom line impact or at least a measureable ROI:

  • Increasing value for members
  • Attracting new members
  • Increasing revenues from members and external clients

Last year, I mapped some of these benefits for Doctors Without Borders (MSF) in the  Humanitarian sector. I’ve tweaked that a bit to create a more generic version for Extended Enterprises, although I need to work the revenue part in better:

PLEforEE

Don Presant 2016-04-17 CC-BY


 

Closing Words

I’m enjoying my exploration of Extended Enterprise Learning, it’s been a real threshold concept for me, opening up new vistas for my ongoing obsession with Open Badge eCredentials for recognizing lifelong, lifewide learning and achievement.
I plan to explore the Public Sector in an upcoming post.
 

Closing plug: join us at the 2016 Digital Badge Summit

I’m looking forward to participating and speaking at the Digital Badge Summit on June 24th, just before the massive ISTE 2016 conference. There’ll be something for everybody there: K12, Higher Ed, Teacher PD, Extended Enterprise…

Open Badge eCredentials for Extended Enterprise Learning

Frequent readers of this blog know that I’m obsessed with Open Badge eCredentials. I think they provide a fantastic lens to analyze and improve the quality of lifelong, lifewide learning: for delivery, for recognition or “valorization” and for use as a skills currency.
But I now have a new lens: Extended Enterprise Learning (also called Extended Enterprise Training or EET). I think it’s a great way to engage pragmatic private sector companies about the benefits of Open Badge eCredentials. IBM is just one example of early adopting companies who are beginning to see the benefits.
For me, Extended Enterprise Learning is a threshold concept: it opens up new vistas and reframes previous insights. I’m currently refactoring my thinking with this concept explicitly in mind.
It comes with a twist, focusing not on employee development, but on partner development in the value chain, with the goal of measurably improving customer satisfaction and sales growth. It’s mostly about supporting products: improving quality and system efficiency, growing sales and developing informed users who will fuel future demand and development. For-profit companies tend to care about these metrics a lot, so it’s easier to get their attention with solutions that help them with their measurables.
And credentials already play a big part in this kind of learning. We’re just talking about making them digital and portable.
We need to do a better job of getting into the private sector with Open Badge eCredentials and I suggest that we start where these bottom-liners care the most and move on from there.
 

What is the Extended Enterprise?

Wikipedia calls the Extended Enterprise “a loosely coupled, self-organizing network of firms that combine their economic output to provide products and services offerings to the market.” Wikipedia describes it as a multi-stakeholder view of Michael Porter’s value chain. Or maybe an ecosystem of ecosystems? Whatever, it’s an increasing reality as organizations in different sectors realize that they can’t do it all by themselves and that there’s power in organizational clusters.
The IT sector has latched on to the concept, using it as a framework  loosely coupled, agile enterprise architectures – modular, pluggable systems.This short presentation from 2009 does a great job of laying out the concept and its implications:


In his analysis above, Graves lists the”three distinct economies of the enterprise”, which got my attention in this era of social media and Serge Ravets’s notions of  badges as networks of trust:

  • transaction economy : things, money, profit
  • attention economy : conversation, the bully pulpit, or ‘right to be heard’
  • trust economy : willingness to engage, or lack of it

Instructure’s Canvas LMS, with its open architecture, GitHub code sharing,  EduApp plug-in sharing and Canvas Network course sharing centre is a stellar example of an extended enterprise approach to LMSs.
But a fit-for-purpose LMS can also be a key enabler for Extended Enterprise Learning.
 

What is Extended Enterprise Learning?

According to a 2015 Elearning! magazine article, titled Extended Enterprise Training Trends, Extended Enterprise Learning is:

the delivery of training, certification programs and knowledge assets not only to employees but also to customers, partners, suppliers, channel and distributor networks, franchisers and franchisees, association members, independent agents, contractors and volunteers — in short, any stakeholder who does not work directly for the organization.

Although this graphic came from an article focused on eLearning and LMSs, I like the way it segments the markets:


 

Why is Extended Enterprise Learning Important?

Because that’s where private sector organizations will spend money for training first. They’re business people before they’re employers and  they often have trouble seeing a direct bottom line benefit to employee training. But they will pay for training that measurably shrinks their costs or grows their profits.
I love this quote from an interview with John Leh of Talented Learning, a consultancy in the field:

Employee development is good, but it is hard to prove progress, so less innovation happens there and budgets are tighter. For the extended enterprise, it is all about building a community of voluntary learners, keeping them engaged, giving them paths to content and credentials they want and need. You want them to buy content, contribute content, and do it again and again….

John makes his living recommending fit-for-purpose LMSs for Extended Enterprise Learning needs. He also wrote a great article about developing an ROI framework for extended enterprise learning that will help EEL make the case and sustain the initiative. I actually think it could teach a few things to people seeking to justify employee training.
The LMS world has certainly picked up on the notion and the more agile LMSs are reconfiguring to accommodate. Here’s TotaraLMS in 2015, but there are lots of other examples:


 

Adding Value to Extended Enterprise Learning with

Open Badge eCredentials

I think Open Badges have exciting potential for supporting this kind of diverse learning, with its multiple contexts and roles and the often volatile, emergent nature of learning objectives. I’ve summarized my thoughts below.
The left column comes from these sources:

BenefitsChart04_crop
 

Notes about the Chart

Standards-based technology portability*
Jeff Walter in Training Magazine: Employee Training vs. Extended Enterprise Training:

In extended enterprise training, the student isn’t necessary known or identified.

NB: Open Badges are the perfect solution for this situation, since they don’t require that you register in a learning management system in order to learn and be recognized for it.
Open Badge Communities*
John Leh, Talented Learning: The Business Case for Customer Learning:

You can create communities of interest and encourage participants to develop skills, share their success stories and help answer others’ questions. You can wrap contests and awards around your learning programs to engage and motivate participants. The possibilities are endless.  Ideally, you can build a growing global community of customers who are committed to your brand and help others learn about it too.

Recognized Social Media Champions**
Skilljar: How to Measure the ROI of Customer Training

Innovative marketers are experimenting with the next evolution of content marketing –  offering on-demand training. This strategy provides your prospects with demonstrated value from the time they spend with your company, even prior to entering a buying cycle. Increase your brand awareness by offering industry thought leadership content that is scalable, convenient, and interactive. You can even offer certifications and accredited professional development hours.

NB: eCredentialing is great, but too many of the solutions offered rely on LMS silos, offering only the ability to post your credential on LinkedIn. There’s more to social media and learning ecosystems than the ability to post your LMS credential on LinkedIn. LMS siloes are all about the vendor and vendor lock-in. Open Badges can be elements of a standards-based, loosely coupled ecosystem where learning and recognition can travel easily across LMSs and other technology systems.
 

Early traction: Open Badges in Extended Enterprise Learning

I’ve quoted IBM’s David Leaser before. A slide from his February 2016 presentation does a great job of reviewing my points and adding a few more:


Early results for IBM’s initiative are very promising:

  • 129% increase in enrolments for badged courses
  • 226% increase in course completions
  • 694% increase in successful end-of-course assessments

Other private sector ICT sector companies who have jumped on the Open Badges bandwagon include Adobe, Oracle, Autodesk, Microsoft, Citrix, Linux Professional Institute (LPI), Juniper Networks, Cisco, Red Hat Linux, Hortonworks and Lenovo.
 

Moving Beyond ICT

It’s only natural that ICT be a key early adopter with its focus on technology, but technology has had an transformative impact on the entire World of Work and Open Badges can be a great fit for other sectors too.
This graph from the Elearning!  article cited above could provide a useful roadmap for Open Badges over the next year or two:


It’s interesting to see that Education is listed as the most active EET. I’m trying to wrap my head around that. If it’s product learning, what’s the product: the learning or the credential? How is the use of that product being supported by external learning? Who’s the customer? Who’s the upstream supplier? Downstream distributor? I can see some room for discussion of  Professional and Continuing Education, adjunct faculty, online consortia, government and private sector relationships, but still… I see Education as more of a supplier to other EETs.  On the other hand, Education is the most actively engaged with Open Badges, so that’s a strategy for them to better engage EETs with modular education and training supported by recognition pathways.
Let’s take a quick look at some of the others in declining order:

  • Non-profit organizations
    Current examples: Scottish Social Services Council, DisasterReady.Org, and hopefully MSF, as I advocated last year at ePIC 2015…more on this in future posts:
  • Manufacturing
    Current example: the Manufacturing Institute has Project Lead the Way for youth talent pipelines and its M-List, a Skills Certification System which brokers college training aligned to industry quality standards, but I don’t know of any product training programs that are credentialed with Open badges. Watch this space. I’ll continue to dig.
  • Healthcare/pharmaceutical
    Not much yet; regulatory issues could be a barrier, but there is a lot of potential here. Another space to watch.
  • Software/web/development/services
    The bulk of the early action, as described above
  • Financial/banking/insurance/real estate/legal
    Some glimmers – not much. This would makes sense for distributed financial products such as mutual funds that require a diverse multi-channel salesforce.
  • Government
    There is the so-called Belgian Backpack, but not much else that I know of, other than some interesting early experimentation in Ottawa related to a government-wide change initiative called Blueprint 2020. This is an area of potential significant growth. What if GovLoop understood the power of Open Badges to recognize learning across sectors and jurisdictions?
  • Associations
    Lots of potential here and some early action. I’ll be looking at this sector in more depth in a future post.

It’ll be interesting to see how all this plays out over the next 12-24 months.
 

Coda

Although I never met him, I miss Jay Cross, who died last November:


In a 2012 post on the Internet Time Alliance blog, titled  Customer Learning, a largely unexploited marketing strategy, Jay quoted retailer Sy Syms:

The best customer is an educated customer.

To this I would add “and the best partner is an educated partner”, whether that be a supplier, distributor or another stakeholder whose success is linked to yours.
I’ve focused on private sector extended enterprises in this post but as mentioned above, I’ll be looking the concept more closely in the public and not-for-profit sectors in the future.

eCredential Pathways for Immigrants and Refugees

I was an Immigration brat: my dad served for 20 years, much of it overseas. So I have a soft spot for this topic.

1968_JandM_Celebration0048

A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away…with my German Wookie friend


As an adult, I’ve also worked on immigration projects over the years at the community, provincial and federal level.
So naturally I speculate how Open Badges and ePortfolios can help immigrants and refugees gain traction in this country Canada, where we depend so much on immigration and where our new government has taken such dramatic steps to welcome refugees from Syria.
Why Open Badge eCredentials and ePortfolios? Well, for me they go together like pictures and galleries, medals and showcases, stamps and passports, evidence and arguments. Together, they support the mapping, emergence and recognition of learning.
I hope to be presenting a version of these ideas at a conference in May, so consider this as a draft.
 

The Transition Penalty for Newcomers

I’m borrowing this term from a 2004 Canadian Labor and Business Centre handbook, which found that it took more than ten years before the unemployment level for immigrants dropped below that of the Canadian-born population. Many remedial steps have been taken since, but many of the barriers persist.
CLBC_p17
Newcomers are at a disadvantage when they arrive in Canada:

  • They may lack sufficient language skills
    Needs in this area have increased with the increasing diversity of our newcomers. Language is often the most obvious deficit and there are many programs in place to improve language skills, increasingly starting overseas.
  • Their learning and professional qualifications are often not fully recognized
    Immigrants with academic credentials and professional qualifications must have their documents examined and evaluated by third party services. Where there are gaps in documentation, it’s often difficult to resolve back in their home country.In many cases their qualifications are devalued compared to their home country and they must work to fill the gap. This is particularly true for regulated professions.
  • Their work experience is often not recognized
    Canadian employers often have no knowledge of the organizations that the immigrants and refugees may have worked for. Guess whose problem that is? Canadian employers often specify 1-2 years Canadian work experience in their postings, which makes it hard to get started back in your field. Many are forced to take service jobs just to get Canadian experience (and make a living) and risk losing touch with their field of expertise. This is called “skills fossilization”.
  • They lack social capital
    In a new country they lack the social connections that can often lead to good jobs. They must build these over again. If they find support in a community from their home country, that can have both positive and negative effects on their adaptation.
  • Their soft skills may not fit Canadian norms
    I call it “meta-social skills” and it’s a big issue, related to language skills and the lack of social capital. The implicit language of interpersonal relations can vary a lot between countries. For example, most Canadians don’t jump to their feet when their boss walks into the room. Self-awareness is part of the learning. Many language programs are actually “language and culture” programs.
  • It’s a long, difficult journey to full integration
    It takes determination and often a bit of luck to succeed: get the language, get the first Canadian job, get the first job in your field, advance up the ladder to your previous level….
    Many give up along the way, resigning themselves to preparing the way for the next generation, whose education can be completed here in Canada, with no transition penalty. Others transfer skills into alternative occupations related to their original field, and this can be a good strategy.
    Regardless, it can be a long multi-year slog, and it’s sometimes difficult to feel that you’re making progress. In language training for example, progress through the lower skill levels can be steep, but it flattens in the mid-high skill levels, frustrating those who need that final 10-20% to get into their target occupation. They often feel stuck.
  • The journey needs a more personal approach with better mapping and recognition of progress
    Migrants have individualized assets and gaps, but they are typically trained in cohorts. If tracking of learning occurs, it’s typically tracking of inputs not outcomes. There are sometimes hand-off gaps between service providers. Employers can be  at a loss in evaluating the skills of immigrants and can reactively add unfair criteria that increase the barriers.

 
 

How Can Open Badge eCredentials and ePortfolios help?

Have a quick look at these examples which I’ll summarize below:
 

ePortfolios for Newcomers at ISSofBC

ISSofBC is a large immigrant serving agency in BC’s Lower Mainland.
This very short (1m40s) video does a good job of describing how ePortfolios enhance their Language Instruction for Newcomers (LINC) for Employment Program:

 
I helped ISSofBC set up this ePortfolio program with a Train the Trainer series of workshops that leveraged effective practices from projects around the world and showed them how to get the most out of Mahara ePortfolio.
This is an example of an immigrant ePortfolio, following ISSofBC’s method:


 
 

Open Badges for Migrant Professionals at Beuth University

This presentation from a Nordplus adult educators project webinar last November discusses approaches to improving the soft employability skills of professional migrants in Germany:


 

 
 

Open Badges for ESL/EAL Professionals

English Online is a nonprofit service English e-learning service based in Winnipeg.  Since 2014, they’ve hosted an annual virtual conference for English teachers. They recognize different forms of participation with different Open Badges, each with its own distinct criteria and evidence:


 
In a similar way, TESOL Arabia’s Education Technology Special Interest Group (TAEDTECH sig) “aims to promote good practice in the use of technology in EFL instruction throughout the Arab Gulf Region.”
TESOL_2016-04-03_13-06-06
 
 

Reasons why ePortfolios and Open Badge eCredentials Can Help Newcomers

  • ePortfolios and Open Badges Support Personal Learning Pathways
    These pathways can be modular, flexible, diverse, portable and shareable.  They can visualize goals and progress toward those goals,  building confidence for newcomers and providing formative information for their advisors.
    Learning from multiple sources can be aggregated and blended in skills passports & ePortfolios, with holistic curation and reflection. For example, I’m currently exploring with others how Kiron Open Higher Education’s innovative MOOC-to-University-Degree strategy for refugees can be enhanced with Recognition of Prior Learning for academic credit through ePortfolios and Open Badges.
    eCredentials can support personalized learning, learning contracts and recognition of learning and performance achievements.
    Recognizing progress and achievement with Open Badge eCredentials can dramatically increase learner retention, as IBM has found out to its delight:

    (see details in my post: Open Badge eCredentials: Good Business for Higher Ed (Part 1)) .
  • ePortfolios and Open Badge eCredentials Provide Transparent Evidence of Skills and Abilities
    Higher level, more summative “milestone” badges can validate  language skills, technical skills or even soft skills and “work readiness”, if they’re backed by rigorous criteria and assessment from reputable issuers. Embedded evidence can add to authenticity. These can become skills currency for employers and academic institutions.
  • Newcomers are social media savvy
    According to this 2009 study, newcomers have decent ICT skills and tend to be more engaged with social media than native-born Canadians. Even many refugees, which proved controversial last year, according to the CBC story below:

    The CBC story is worth a read: examples of smartphone use by savvy refugees include relaying important survival information to others following behind,  language learning and orientation to their new environment.
    Once they arrive here, newcomers are also often trained in ICT applications (e.g. Office, AutoCAD) and how to use LinkedIn for networking. LinkedIn can be a great destination for your more impressive Open Badges, or you may want to consider an ePortfolio. An ePortfolio is a bit like LinkedIn, but with better storage, more flexible display, better alignment to specific criteria and gosh, your data still belongs to you, not LinkedIn. If you can make a LinkedIn profile, you can make an ePortfolio.

 

Reasons why ePortfolios and Open Badge eCredentials Can Help Other Stakeholders

  • Enhanced Online Profile Using Social Media
    IBM reports significant social media benefit with thousands of IBM-branded eCredentials making their way onto LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, blogs and company websites. OK, IBM is a global enterprise and its training has great cachet, but smaller software and leadership trainers are already seeing benefits also. I have examples from Canada, like this one:

    Demonstration of Impact
    Just as IBM can report their outcomes, so too can immigrant service providers better enumerate and communicate the impact of their services to their funders by counting badges issued, accepted, displayed, endorsed, etc.
  • Talent Pipelines, Candidate Assessment and Employee Development
    We’re already starting to see this happen, not only with IBM, but with the Belgian public service, the US Manufacturing Institute and a multi-stakeholder regional initiative in Colorado.
  • Professional Development for Service Providers
    In addition to the ESL examples above, I’ve previously blogged about the Scottish Social Services Council’s early steps with Open Badges to recognize the informal learning of its 200,000 care workers.Here in Canada, I’m exploring how we might adapt that model with a  non-profit sector council which includes immigrant service providers.

 
 

Where to start?

 

  • Employers
    Employer awareness is still a limit to the growth of eCredentials, but I’d say it’s mostly due to lack of engagement on the part of most issuers. When employers are approached to participate in the process they can become quite enthusiastic, as the Manufacturing Institute and Colorado experiences show, as does this one from a Wisconsin College:

    But you actually need to pick up the phone and reach out to them, to build their awareness and give them a chance to endorse the ideas and even some of the eCredentials themselves. It doesn’t take long – a breakfast meeting, maybe?
    In the meantime, immigrant serving organizations are employers too, and that fits with the PD suggestion. As employers, what skills and behaviours do they want to encourage? The Scottish Social Services Council model can help here.
  • Newcomer Learners
    As you work the channels above, It’s worthwhile to experiment with informal, low-risk forms of recognition with your learners, such as completion of a collections of tasks such as resume/cover preparation, employer research, language tasks, etc. This will give you a chance to test the idea with them and see what works and doesn’t work.

 
 

Final Word

I do hope to find some traction in this area over the coming months. I think it’s ripe, particularly on the PD side.
If anyone has ideas and wants to work with me, please let me know.