Case Study 1: Creating Lasting Impact Through the Learning Experience

Sticky Learning Insight #2 - Relevance

Learning designed in the ANZ has been traditionally poor. This has resulted in effort in developing experiential learning opportunities for ANZ staff (see Kolb 1984). Additionally, the new learning development has attempted to customise learning according to the individual need of the learner. Video cameras are located in the roofs of learning spaces and recording of each session is carried out and burned to DVD. The learner is able to take this back to the workplace at the end of the day and re-visit content as needed (just-in-time, reflection).

As a part of the Learning & Breakout Centre, there is a dedicated media centre with four Apple Macintoshes located at the front. Most learning videos are now being developed down here. The making of learning content is getting cheaper and cheaper. All participants in the Graduate Program in the ANZ will be recording a podcast in their first ninety days. This is a critical part in inducting new stuff to the organisation’s learning culture. Additionally, the making of this form of learning content generates timely and relevant content that is accessible to all staff via an internal iTunes system.

The ANZ are taking advantage of the rapidly shifting changes in the technological environment to customise staff learning experiences as frequently as possible. The learning fingerprint thus becomes stronger, more relevant and more likely to ‘stick’.

An ANZ Leadership Experiences program runs over two days. Participants are required to record a one hour personal reflection of the themes from the workshop. Participants are given the space and time to conduct this reflection.

I must honestly say this is one of the best value conferences I have been to in several years.  Firstly, it was aimed at Human Resources and Organisational Development practitioners, so the content was tailored more for workforce development compared to the normal fodder of university, TAFE and school-based educators.  For me, this increased the relevance of the content quantumly.  Secondly, the format was primarlily case-study based.  I tend to get a lot of value from case-study approaches - I am always endlessly fascinated as to how people apply such innovation to their contextual problems.

There is more content from 3 days learning than I can poke a stick at.  In fact I typed 42 pages of notes onto my tablet over this time frame.  I will post a variety of information here over the next few weeks and am more than happy to answer any questions that don’t appear to make sense from my interpretation of events.

 Case Study 1: Creating Lasting Impact Through the Learning Experience

Presenter: Erik Zimmerman, Head of Learning

Organisation: ANZ Banking Group Limited

Overview

The ANZ bank is keen on improving the economic return of learning in today’s environment.  They use the concept of “sticky learning” as their approach to getting learning to stick for employees thus resulting in behavioural change.  Since 2000 the ANZ has had 26 000 staff go through a cultural change program called ‘Breakout’   New CEO Mike Smith has set a bold target of doubling the banks profits within a five year period.  He also wanted the organisation to shift from Australia/New Zealand to a ‘super regional’ one.  The organisation is now staffed and represented in thirty different countries globally with 35 000 staff on the payroll. With this geographic spread a learning infrastructure in thirty countries is required and needs to be able to adapt to change rapidly. Change is not linear it is exponential.  This is a concern as talent and infrastructure is increasing with change in a linear fashion, thus increasing the gap between the increasing change and the ability of organisations and the workforce to be able to adapt to this. Some of this exponential change is significantly affecting the ANZ

• There is rapid consumer change – they have more choice, more sophisticated products and customers are becoming more sophisticated.
• The competition for talent and staffing is continuing to intensify particularly as banking is a niche market.
• The economic outlook is uncertain and tighter credit markets are occurring.
• There is a rise of technology.  Mobile phone banking is the new shift with customised solutions for customers.
• The world is becoming increasingly global hence the shift to the super regional bank concept.

In 2007 the ANZ bank spent $62 million on learning and development.  Their concern is that formal learning processes are not necessarily transferring to be used back in the job.  Looking at measuring the learning transfer six months after the formal learning instance has occurred (see ECU Evaluation Framework)   Current learning “Mega Trends” include:

• The sustainability of learning (less leakage, learning to learn).
• The context of learning (closer to the business).
• Portability of learning (anywhere, anyhow, interactive, collaborative).
• Diversity of learning (diversity of learning styles).
• Convergence of learning (talent, culture).
• Communities of learning (collaboration, bringing thought leadership together).

Many organisations are experiencing a gap on the learning Return on Investment.  If this gap could be resolved, learning budgets may not get slashed so hard.   In the last two years in Australia, companies with greater than five hundred staff, 60% have had one Chief Learning Officer changes; 20% have experienced two changes and 20% had three or more changes.   Given the rapid turnover of key staff, learning needs to be agile.  Content tends to date rapidly – how do we then create a learning environment that can change on demand?

Sticky Learning Insight #1 – Relevance

The ANZ conducted an extensive, twelve month benchmarking exercise of their organisational learning environment against global companies and other large Australian organisations.  Whatif, a company located in London, was looked at during the benchmarking process and had a dedicated learning centre.  It was not just a place to learn, but to grow the company and was considered to be a centre for learning and innovation.   After extensive research the ANZ developed the Learning & Breakout Centre.  It was not built on the premises of any existing branch as it was an important consideration of the design to be able to take people into a different space and the physical layout of this centre has been highly customised to provide a stimulating environment.  It is a constant struggle to get the head of learners out of their day-to-day work and hence a different location between three of the major branches was identified for the site (Collins Street, Melbourne).  Of the $7 million set up costs, $2 million of this was invested in the technology in the centre.   Not a single room in the Learning & Breakout Centre has been made into a square room.  It has been designed so that natural daylight comes into all learning rooms while meeting rooms are located in the centre of the building. Interactive whiteboards are located in every room and shared space where created for mingling and the exchange of ideas. In the extensive benchmarking exercise all learning spaces were square rooms.  Facilities for creating podcasts on site are available and are developed in teams and made available to the rest of the organisation.  There is a central area that does the editing.   The centre is currently experiencing an occupancy rate of 77% and some bookings are now occurring several months in advance.   

Next installments include:

Sticky Learning Insight #2 - Uniquely Me

Sticky Learning Insight #3 - Meaning

Sticky Learning Insight #4 - Focus

Sticky Learning Insight #5 - Practise

Where do I find more?

Search my del.icio.us account for the ANZ tag - I have found a few relevant documents of interest

I have developed a fair sized guilt complex of late about how recalcitrant I have been in my blogging. 

 My last post was actually on the 28th of October last year, which makes it just over 5 months ago.  I confess to the fact that work went even insaner than normal after I returned from the mLearn conference last year and hardly had time to scratch myself, let alone keep up with my Google Reader, Twitter, networks and colleagues or let alone have time for reflective thought and blogging.

The last couple of months I have been getting a bit of Twittering happening and even introduced the odd other person to it. It is amazing how just being a part of a social network of like minded individuals can inspire and ignite one’s mind.  The other night, someone on Twitter referred to the fact they were writing down things for their blog that they may never post, and I commented on the fact I had posts rattling around my head I may never even write!  I think the getting of pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) is perhaps half the battle won, and so here I am at 1.10 pm Sunday afternoon when I should be marking assignments.

I am going to a conference next week in Sydney on blended learning.  I am really excited because it is heavily case study based and more about Organisational Development than having a pure educational for educations sake context.  I suspect that may give my ailing brain a jump start also.   Here’s hoping…

I have been stewing for a while over how to apply the use of mLearning and web2.0 in developing our staff at the university. This development context is not a teaching and learning one - that is the realm of another area of the university. The challenges I face are those of developing some 2000 staff in the areas of compliance, quality, core management systems, leadership development and soft skills such as communication, emotional intelligence, conflict management just to mention a few broad areas. I attended the mLearn 2007 conference 2 weeks ago, and this allowed me the time and reflection to pull together a number of ideas that have been solidifying in my head for a while.

The Strategic Imperative

We had a change of Vice-Chancellor 18 months ago at work. With that has come a change of direction, new strategic plan and a new ethos for going about our business at the university. While exemplary customer service has always been a hallmark of operation at ECU (embedded into the brand), the V-C has ramped this up to the point of being almost the driver behind all operations - keeping in mind students as the end point.

We have run a number of customer service offerings over the years, but all have been in a traditional face-to-face format. I have chosen to use customer service training as a pilot/case study for a more blended approach.

The Pedagogy (or Heutagogy?)

Kolb’s experiential learning theory

I intend to model the approach to this learning initiative with Kolb’s model of experiential learning. The model works like this:

1. You have a concrete experience e.g. a customer service experience goes a bit pear shaped
2. You observe the outcomes of that experience e.g. dissatisfied customer, complaints, you are upset etc
3. You reflect about the different/alternative ways in which that experience could have been handled e.g. more empathy, not have a defensive response to the situation
4. Apply the alternative ways next time a similar opportunity arises –> cycle starts again

The Model

Shifting towards a learning organisation

The concept of a learning organisation is really well defined in this paper. I found that it to be a fantastic application of a theory into reality in an Australian organisation.

There are 8 basic elements to a learning organisation - my university seems to be making shifts towards a number of these elements. The one that I find really interesting and relevant to my job context is that of the Staff Characteristics. In a learning organisation, people learn and it is understood that mistakes as part of the learning process are understood. This concept is implicit in the use of Kolb’s experiential learning theory for developing the capacity of our staff.

Engaging the line managers

It is critical that Line Managers are as involved in the process as the participants. They will need to understand that line staff will need to have maybe 30 minutes on a daily basis to blog and reflect upon the days experiences.

Learning styles

An initial f2f workshop will be run, where staff can go through a variety of instruments such as the VARK, Honey & Mumfords LSQ, and the ILS to name a few. Discussion will then be facilitated around the implications of participants learning styles and their learning in the workplace. What does this look like? Potential challenges on the project? Possibly set up a buddy support system?

Blogging

The perfect way to manage this experiential learning is through the process of blogging. Ideally I will have a number of staff from representative areas across the university participating in this pilot program. will be encouraged to reflect on all aspects of customer service as they encounter it in their lives, not just in their work context. Depending on the level of engagement, technical expertise I may even encourage some mobile logging for experiences/reflections that want to be captured on the fly.

Ning - A community of practice

I intend to pull participants together via the use of Ning (unless I find something better - maybe Vox?) This will allow staff to blog and share their reflections/learnings together. Ning will also be used as a resource repository for adding information on contemporary customer service practice, organisational customer service practice and anything else that participants feel is relevant.

Virtual Classroom - Elluminate

The use of Elluminate, currently on trial at the university will allow me to have any ‘workshops’ or ‘touching base’ sessions as required. A particularly attractive scenario as participants will be pulled from 4 campuses (3 metropolitan) and 1 regional.

Podcasting

Still trying to decide is there is any value in developing simple podcasting skills in the cohort. This may depend on the learning style preferences. Reflective learning via audio may be preferable for some staff. Will discuss this with participants maybe deeper into the program to ascertain the value.

The Evaluation

Kirkpatrick Level 3

As this is not your typical f2f lockstep development scenario, the old happy tick and flick sheet is obviously not applicable. It is possibly best ‘measured’ through a Level 3 Kirkpatrick evaluation, where by the line managers are used as measure of behavioural change in the workplace. Ideally I see this program being run over approximately 6 months to allow any deeper learning to occur and behavioural change to take place. A harder model of evaluation that will require a greater proportion of my time, however it will give a richer picture of what is actually occurring.

I intend to collect a lot of data from this pilot and write a paper and have it published in some form of educational technologies journal.

To this stage I have found it difficult to collect any form of information about the actual application of these kinds of learning technologies for staff, in any other context than teaching and learning. There will obviously need to be development around the use of the tools and technologies, but that is just a means to an end and is not the actual pedagogical approach to this scenario.

Technorati Tags: mLearn07, mLearn2007, web2.0, mlearning, m-learning, blog, blogging, experiential learning, kolb, Kirkpatrick evaluation, kirkpatrick, staff development, professional development, moblogging, moblog, mobile bloggin, elluminate, learning styles

While I have heard some great presenters about a range of topics I am still deriving learning and ideas from, it seems a lot of the work is still around teaching people to use the technology. 

There are have been some cases that have looked at the pedagogical applications, however it seems that there is not the depth yet in the work being done to fill a program to depth with respect to this.

I re-iterate - some great things being done out there, and I am taking a lot of information back to my workplace context that I can draw upon, but I just thought we would be further advanced!

Technorati Tags: mLearn2007, mLearning, mobile learning

High tech stuff at mLearn Hotel mmmm……………….

Can’t help myself have to blog this now - 1.15 am tucked up in hotel room when the fire alarm went off.  Yep really. Frantically dressed, grabbed shoes and mobile (berating myself for leaving tablet, camera and ipod - what was I thinking?)

All the way to the basement level floor via stair case with many bleary eyed half dressed FLLs (oh and other guests) to watch the fire trucks pull up with lights and sirens.  All very exciting.  Except seeing ones colleagues half-dressed of course.

Took a number of pics with mobile (of course!) See pics for for proof! Am thinking FLL’s and mLearners (read addicts) are always prepared! What did I say Alex? ALWAYS have technology with me

Fire Emergency Escape Kit

each night when staying elsewhere I recommend leaving the following in your back pack for a quick grab and run:

1) mobile

2) tablet/laptop

3) ipod

4) camera

5) wallet and sunnies

6) room key (bet there were a few locked out tonight when we were allowed back in)

not a dull night - and looking at some faces, I recommend sleeping in makeup! Oh yeah - don’t forget the shoes!

I have watched Guild leadership in Everquest II with growing interest over the last  couple of years.  With my recent interest in the use of Second Life as an educational tool, i have reflected on the learnings inherent in EQ2 that occur without the tacit knowledge of the gamer.

The Autocratic Leader 

The role of Guild leader is a pivotal one for any guilded gamer.  The leader sets the vision and direction of the guild and should embody the values and behaviours that are expected by members.

 I spent the full 70 levels when I started this game with a Guild on Najena server (dominantly Australian membership).  I joined a guild that had a number of real life friends and was in a state of turmoil.  The previous leader had left the guild leaving a variety of logistical and social issues behind him. 

In context of leadership style (while I never met him) this particular leader was from all accounts highly autocratic and dictatorial about how people should spend their game time.  His interpersonal skills were lacking and frequently the cause of tensions and friction within the guild community.  It turned out that several senior members left the guild to join others.  This is a clear example of a very strong and abrasive leadership style, lacking in emotional intelligence and empathy almost singularly being responsible for the dismantling of a previously stable community.

The directionless leader - without influence or strategy

One individual who remained in the guild offered to take over leadership.  His leadership style could not have been more different.  Very relaxed and laid back.  He appointed a couple of officers to assist, whom, did not take on a lot of operational responsibility.

While some players came back to the guild during this period, the leadership was not strong, decisive, and setting direction and having goals for players and members.  This was a continual source of frustration for remaining and new members to the guild.  The leader began creating other characters and playing them regularly.  Several of these were guilded with his leader character, and thus leadership became less and less visible.

 Attrition grew to such a point that earlier this year, I went 2 entire weeks spending a lot of time online and did not see a single other guild member log in.  A very lonely place indeed to be, when community involvement is more than half the attraction of the game. 

The Shift 

 With reluctance about 9 months ago I shifted to another guild. 

The Emotionally Intelligent Leader with Personal Influence

 Wow - some difference.  A 25 year old guild leader with interpersonal and social skills,  The difference in leadership style and the resultant impact on the guild community was noticeable.

There was a large number of guild members whom would walk over hot coals for their leader and everyone wanted to be involved with him at some level.  A vibrant and thriving period.

 Over a 6 week period however  a remarkable thing happened.  He was unavailable to be online due to family crisis and in this period, instead of stepping up to the plate to assist, many officers and senior guild members overtly left the guild, to the point where it was a shell of its formal vibrant self.  The removal of the presence of that single person had a devastatingly negative impact, to the point of few people logging on regularly.

 I had numerous discussions with him out of game during this period and he as a burnt out, tired and jaded young man, to the point where he was considering either leaving the game altogether or moving to another server more appropriate to his time zone.

Distributive Leadership

He came up with a model of making 3 of us guild leaders in the interim.   What he was doing without realising was creating a distributive leadership model.  As well as having 3 guild leaders, we also have a large number of officers that have very clear and accountable responsibilities.  There is now generally always a guild leader on (one on each continent of Australia, America and Europe) and a raft of officers.

 A communication system between the leaders and officers has been set up and the burden of leadership and administration is now shared between approx 8 -9 individuals who are all committed. 

The guild is growing weekly by about 10 players who go through a formal probation process, and our guild community is bigger and more vibrant than ever. Why?  Clear leadership; setting direction; clear values and behavioural expectations; emotional intelligence; willingness to take advice; empathy; and the creation of a fun place to be.

Conclusion

 To conclude: the success of a guild in EQ2 is pivotal around the leadership model.

 I am not entirely sure this young man really understands the leadership behaviours he models or if they translate into his real life.

In desperation, I asked James from Edublogs if he could fix the problem.

Such a simple thing!

Mike Temple has a great site with step-by-step instructions for inserting video’s which really does work.

But - traps for young players!

The URL I was trying to insert was THIS http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=zMwuOUYxN6o

Apparently the problem is the uk at the front of the URL.

So:

If you are trying to insert a YouTube url into Edublogs, remove the uk from the front of the url to get this http://youtube.com/watch?v=zMwuOUYxN6o and then cut and paste into the Embed media icon and bingo!

Want to show your friends your deeper geekier bloggy side?

Import your blog into Facebook.

1) You will need to add the Notes Application into your Facebook account first.

2) Go into Notes >Settings >Edit Import Settings

3) You can only import one blog at a time, so if you have more than one, you have to choose!

4) If your friends are importing their feeds, you can also see theirs via Facebook at the same time

This really works - I know have friends reading my posts that never even knew I blogged! Go figure