Reflections on using Curation for Designing Learning Programmes

Rachel Burnham writes:  This week the topic of using curation for design has been much on my mind.  Partly because I have been doing an update and refresh of a programme I work on that makes use of curated resources.  Partly because I have been thinking through how to further improve another programme I work on to make most effective use of the resources within it.   Partly because of conversations I have been having around this topic, through #LDInsight and particularly with Michelle Ockers (@MichelleOckers) and also with my regular collaborator, Mike Shaw (@MikeShawLD) as he puts the finishing touches to a presentation on this same topic for the World of Learning Conference in Birmingham.  

So the topic has been circling around my head and I have been reflecting on my own experience of curating resources when designing programmes.   Looking back I can see that I have been doing this for some time, though it is only in the last few years that I have consciously thought of it as curation.  It is now just a part of how I do things. 

What is curation for designing learning programmes?

What I mean by curating resources when designing programmes, is using existing resources, typically publicly available, as a substantial part of the triggering material for a learning programme.   It involves seeking out relevant materials, selecting carefully which to use, explaining the reasons for your choices so that they are put in context for the intended user, possibly sequencing and combining materials and then making them accessible to the intended user.  I make use of Harold Jarche’s Seek, Sense, Share model to support this.  This repurposing doesn’t stop there, as it also needs to include some tasks or activities that challenge the user to make sense of the material and identify what and how they can apply this to their own work.  It is this latter part that turns this from a collection of resources into a learning programme.

I know that the issue of whether simply using resources could lead to learning, was something that was bothering some of the participants in the recent #LDInsight chat that took place on 5/10/18.  For me, it is the addition of reflection, practical tasks and social and collaborative elements that transmutes these resources into rich and rewarding learning experiences.

Whilst conversations about using curation for designing learning programmes, often focus on the use of existing external resources, these are not the only elements that can be made use of.  Ben Betts in a chapter of ‘Ready, Set, Curate’ describes on pg 58  ‘thinking in thirds’:

• ·       Making use of existing material within the organisation – this could be learning material, performance support material or other useful stuff.  This allows you to make best use of what you already have and also to include material that is highly specific and particular to your organisation and its way of doing things. 
• ·       Secondly, is the external, already existing material.  This is great for subject areas that are in common across many organisations or where you want to bring in particular expertise from outside of your organisation.
• ·       The final element is newly created resources.   There may be somethings that you simply can’t find ready-made or where you want to tailor some content to be particularly specific to the needs of your intended users. 

Why use a curated approach?

For me, there are three main reasons for using a curated approach when designing learning programmes:

• ·       Abundance - there are already a lot of existing resources, either in-house or externally, around the topic and it therefore makes sense to build with these existing building blocks.   So this is about using resources wisely – time, effort, energy and of course finances.
• ·       Agility – this links to the first, but places more emphasis on the ability to meet learning needs in a timely fashion, creating a minimum, viable product or solution and possibly building on this in subsequent iterations.
• ·       Access to different voices, perspectives and expertise – I think this one is often the most compelling reason. Using curation allows you to give access to material from different sources that can lead to a wider and richer learning experience.   Michael Bhaskar in his book ‘Curation: The power of selection in a world of excess’  makes the point that we can search to find things that we know exist, but what curation adds value by giving us access to things we don’t know about.  So curation can enable us to introduce users to a topic and directly to experts in that field, enabling them to more quickly build foundation knowledge and understanding.  It also enables us to help users to stretch by encountering different perspectives and emergent expertise, because curation can allow you to easily update and refresh a programme.   Actually, if the programme stimulates and supports social and collaborative learning, it may well be the participants in the programme, who identify and share that emergent thinking either through their own work or by sharing other resources that they uncover.  

Three reflections from my experience

A.  Using a curation approach when designing a learning programme alters how you design.   When designing traditionally, broadly speaking, you identify needs, specify aim & objectives and gradually get more and more specific about what is required in the design.  And you can be as specific as you like. 

When designing using curation, again you identify needs, specify aims & objectives, but you then need to search and see what is available already both in-house and externally.   And you need to be rather more open-minded about what you are looking for, because if you are over-specific you may not find it or spend so long looking that this is a poor use of time.   Once you have identified what is available, then you can fill in gaps with material that you create.

So, the traditional design approach is a bit like commissioning a tailor-made outfit in a particular colour combination to your specific measurements.  Whereas a curated approach is more like looking through your wardrobe, reviewing what you have, then going shopping to see what is available that combines with what you have, and recognising that you may not be able to find exactly what you picture in your mind’s eye in the shade you want.

It is a change in mindset.

B.  The importance of building in regular maintenance and refreshing.

As with any learning programme, it is important to keep a curated programme up-to-date and current.  What can be different is that links to particularly external resources can stop working and resources can be withdrawn or move behind a firewall and so no longer be available.  This means that there is a need to build in regular maintenance of the programme and it may be necessary to replace links to materials with alternatives.  As ‘like for like’ replacements may not be available (see point A), this requires a flexible approach.

It is tempting to think that the answer to this issue, is to ensure that you include full copies of the material you have curated within your programme, but that of course will bring problems of copyright.   Stick to links, but be alert to the need to update.   You may find this helpful guidance from Ben Betts at HT2 Labs of assistance in relation to these issues around copyright. 

My conversation with Michelle Ockers reminded me that this maintenance review, is also an opportunity to refresh a programme and that ideas for this may well come from recent participants and what they have shared within the social and collaborative elements of the programme. 

C. My third reflection comes from working as an external contributor to curated programmes and realising that pricing work for curated programmes is an interesting challenge.   Often we have experience to base the pricing of creating content and this is well understood by clients.  Pricing the curation of content can be a bit more tricky - the product of a link to a resource seems like the work of a moment, but like many other roles involving professional expertise, it is the underlying expertise, skills and judgement that have led to you finding and selecting that particular link, that is being paid for.  

I would be very interested in hearing your experience of curating resources for learning programmes and in your response to the points I have shared.

Rachel Burnham

14/10/18

Burnham L & D works with individuals and organisations to help them learn and work more effectively.  As part of this I help L&D professionals to be even more effective through updating their skills and know-how.  I have a particular interest in curation and the use of digital technologies in learning.  I frequently Sketchnote at events and offer workshops in Sketchnoting.  

Review of the OU 'Trends in Learning' Report 2018

Rachel Burnham writes: Whilst at the CIPD L&D Show 2018 on Wednesday, I picked up a copy of the Open University’s ‘Trends in Learning Report’ for this year.  This annual report was launched at the show that day and is based on research from the OU’s Institute of Educational Technology, which gives it credibility and a sound basis.   Today I have been reading through the report and reflecting on its contents and the topics it highlights – I think it is well worth a read - here is a link to download a copy.  You might also be interested in this 12 min podcast from Mike Shaw,part of the CIPD Blogsquad for the event, on the report.

The report is concise and well produced, making it very easy to read.  It focuses on five key topics:

·       Spaced learning

·       Post-truth learning

·       Immersive learning

·       Learner-led analytics

·       Humanistic knowledge building communities

Each section explores one of these topics, includes an example/perspective from an L&D practitioner, plus some links to some further resources related to the topic and some practical and well-focused tips for L&D.  This makes the report very accessible, relevant and useful.   All this and only 15 pages long!

Spaced Learning

The first topic explored is the well-researched finding that people learn better through a series of learning sessions with gaps in-between them, rather than a long intense one-off exposure to learning content.   This approach can be used both for gaining knowledge and developing skills.

This is often a factor in the effectiveness of blended learning programmes or in shorter-bite-sized learning programmes.  

I think this is a really valuable approach for developing knowledge, however, I would first caution that it is worth questioning whether we really need employees to learn such knowledge at all.  For some aspects of work it is essential for employees to have key pieces of knowledge embedded, but there are lots of aspects of work where a more effective approach is for employees to simply know where to easily access the information as and when they need it.  We need to be able to distinguish which knowledge is which and therefore which is the most effective approach to take to enable people to do their jobs well.  A great resource for thinking this through is Cathy Moore’s ‘Ask the flowchart’, which I am constantly recommending to people.

If knowledge or skills need to be built, then let’s invest in spaced learning.  If not, let’s use a resources-led approach.

If you would like to find out more about Spaced Learning and also how it can be used alongside other well-researched approaches such as 'retrieval practice’ – I recommend listening to ‘The Learning Scientists’ Podcast’.  This series of short podcasts provides an excellent introduction to these and other techniques, with examples of both use of these techniques and the research upon which they are based.  

Post-truth Learning

For me this was the most intriguing of the topics identified and is about the need that we all have to be able to distinguish credible, accurate and current information, theories, models, from those that are ‘fake’ or otherwise unreliable.  It also links to the move to an evidence-based practice approach. 

This need to distinguish helpful information is becoming increasing challenging with the sheer abundance of information available to us and the ease of access directly to it ourselves – now we need to act as our own ‘gate-keepers’ and ‘quality-assessors’.  This is something that is a key part of the work I do around curation, whether curation for myself, supporting others in developing their personal curation approaches and when curating for others, perhaps as part of the design of a programme.

One of the conference sessions by Martin Couzins focused on ‘How to curate learning for performance support’ – here is a Wakelet with the tweets from this session – and in the session participants were encouraged to have a go at selecting which resources they would use in a particular context.  This process of ‘filtering’ or the ‘sense’ part of Harold Jarche’s ‘Seek, Sense, Share’ model, includes the need to careful sift material to pick out what is valuable.

The need for us to develop our skills in doing this and to support the managers and other employees we work with in doing this was also something brought out in the Good Practice report ‘Google It’ from 2016, which identified that ‘managers will benefit from guidance about how to evaluate the content they find’ when using search engine’s such as Google.

I am particular impressed with one of the resources referred to in this section, which is a E-book guide to evaluating information on social media – do take a look at this.

Immersive Learning

The third topic identified is something that I have been learning about over the last 18 months, along with my collaborator Niall Gavin @niallgavinuk, by exploring the fast developing fields of Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) and how they can be used effectively to aid learning.  You can find out about our learning journey through these links to blogs and resources lists.

The practitioner comments here are clear about the need for us to build our awareness of the potential for this kind of approach before jumping in. I particularly rated the tips of L&D in this section and especially the final one ‘Start small, test it, learn, refine and build’.

Learner-led Analytics

We have been hearing a lot about how we need to be making more use of the data available through our use of technology to support learning and in particular of data analytics for a few years.  During the Show, I attended an excellent session on the exhibition floor presented by Ben Betts @bbetts of HT2 Labs about how data analytics can be used to assess the impact of learning programmes – he presented two very interesting case studies from HT2 Labs work with clients.   Here is my Sketchnote of this session:

And the Open University has itself shared in previous L&D Shows its experience of using data analytics in 2016 talking about ‘the virtuous circle of learning design and learning analytics’ - here is a link to my Sketchnote from this session.

However, the report focuses on the slightly different topic of how analytical information can aid learners be more effective learners and how learning can become more targeted and personalized.   Again, there is some great guidance in the tips about the need to be ‘cynically curious’ when finding out more about this topic.

Humanistic knowledge building communities

I think this is about building social and collaborative learning communities – this is the only place in the report, where I felt that there was a use of unnecessary jargon.    This section explores how technology can be used to support these communities and links to ideas of communities of practice and working out loud (WOL).  The practitioner input in this section is from Mike Collins @Community_Mike, well known for his interest and experience in developing and supporting online communities.  He includes some helpful tips about what is involved in doing this.  

I think this report is a great introduction to these topics and the addition of further resources and the tips gives this report additional practical value.   I encourage you to get hold of a copy and make use of it. 

Rachel Burnham

29/4/18

Burnham L & D works with individuals and organisations to help them learn and work more effectively.  As part of this I help L&D professionals to be even more effective through updating their skills and know-how.  I have a particular interest in curation and the use of digital technologies in learning.  I frequently Sketchnote at events and offer workshops in Sketchnoting.  

Sketchnotes from CIPD L&D Show 2018

Sketchnotes from CIPD L&D Show 2018

Rachel Burnham writes: Yesterday I visited the Exhibition for this year’s CIPD L&D Show at Olympia in London.  I had some great conversations with people that I know from Twitter, with exhibitors and with people I just got chatting to – Sketchnoting is a great icebreaker!   And it was particularly lovely to get to meet some ‘readers’ of my Sketchnotes, who I hadn’t met before - many thanks to you for introducing yourselves. 

I participated in a number of the free sessions taking place on the exhibition floor.  I had made a careful selection to avoid straight-forward sales pitches and was delighted with my picks there was something interesting, thought-provoking and worthwhile in each of them.   Here are my Sketchnotes from those sessions:

Rachel Burnham

26/4/18

Burnham L & D works with individuals and organisations to help them learn and work more effectively.  As part of this I help L&D professionals to be even more effective through updating their skills and know-how.  I have a particular interest in curation and the use of digital technologies in learning.  I frequently Sketchnote at events and offer workshops in Sketchnoting.  

Curation - What's in a name?

Rachel Burnham writes: I have been thinking a lot about curation over the last few months.  This has been partly because I have been reviewing my own personal curation practice, partly because I have been engaged in some collaborative learning around this, with my regular learning partner, Mike Shaw (@MikeShawLD), and partly because of a line of enquiry started by Martin Couzins, which has got me thinking.   Martin asked ‘What is the state of curation in learning?’ in blog post in August. 

Curation is one of those terms that seems to be used in different ways by different people.   As Martin mentions in his piece, curation in learning was all the talk of the conference circuit about four or five years ago, but is less mentioned now. But it has seeped into L&D conversation and I hear it used all over the place.   Sometimes, I get why this term is being used for example in the broader context of ‘resources rather than context’, or when contrasting ‘curation and creation’ in the design of L&D materials, or in Jonathan Marshall’s excellent blog ‘Getting to grips with MOOCs’, but increasingly I feel rather confused about why this term is being used.  It is a bit like what’s happened with the term ‘agile’ in the context of learning and development, where it went from being used in a very specific way to be stretched to encompass a whole range of meanings and situations – in my view unhelpfully.  I think the same is happening with curation. 

So, I notice individuals talking about curating articles, videos, infographics etc in the context of what they share via social media.   Or I hear someone referring to curating a collection of music.  Or recently, I read an otherwise excellent article which referred to L&Ders as ‘helping to curate change’ – I really have no idea what this means! 

I think one of the reasons for this confusion over the term is that ‘curation’ as a term and as a practice has migrated from museums and art galleries over into other fields.  So we have ‘cherry picked’ some aspects of curation from these fields and the rest is emerging practice, which is being interpreted and developed by different people in different ways. 

 

Another factor is that L&D is only one of the fields that has adopted the use of this term.   Much of what is written about ‘content curation’ or ‘digital curation’ is actually written from a marketing perspective, which is rather different to how we might want to use curation in the context of learning.  There is of course much to learn about curation from its use in marketing, but it is worth highlighting that it is different and so there may be a different emphasis in purpose or in practice. 

  

In a recent sessionby Stephen Walsh, from Anders Pink at Learning Live 2017, the following definition of curation was offered from Rohit Bhargava ‘A content curator is someone who continually finds, groups and organizes and shares the best and most relevant content on a specific issue online.  The most important component of this job is the word continually.’ Most of this definition fits with my understanding of curation for learning, but I don’t place the same emphasis on ‘continually’ nor do I think that it curation has to be around a specific issue – for me some of the most effective curation is done by people who bring together diverse issues and who link and relate topics to bring deeper or fresh understandings to light.   This definition seems to me to relate more to a content curation role in the context of marketing – and that is what Rohit Bhargava’s background is.  

The identification, careful selection and sharing of individual pieces however relevant, interesting and enlightening those pieces are, is also not curation in my view.   I think curation involves bringing together pieces, that build on one another, or perhaps with different perspectives.   This could be done over time in the pattern of materials shared, but I think it is more effective and valuable, when the curator in some way brings together the resources and presents them in a single, more easily accessible place.   This could take many different forms: a Storify of diverse materials produced through the backchannel of a conference (Ian Pettigrew @KingfisherCoach is an exemplar of this aspect of curation); through materials linked in a blog; through materials stored on an accessible platform; or through resources curated to form a learning programme, perhaps held in a VLE.    Even this on its own is not curation, but aggregation – grouping materials together – curation also involves sense-making and sharing this through some narration, editorializing, labelling & sequencing to put the disparate resources into context and to highlight the relevance for the intended users.  

Sketchnote of 'Content Creation: Your New Learning SuperPower' session by Ben Betts

So curating for learning involves - searching out materials, selecting the most relevant, grouping them, making sense of them, narration and sharing.  This can be summed up through Harold Jarche’s ‘Seek, Sense and Share’ model.

One aspect of curation in the context of museums and art galleries, that we in L&D often overlook, is the role of curators in caring for and maintaining the artifacts and works of art in their care.   As we know most museums and art galleries have far more objects in their care, than they have room to display.  So as well as the work of selecting, creating and putting on displays, another aspect of the role of a curator is safely storing all the material not currently in use, ensuring that it can be found when needed for research or display and making sure it is kept in good condition.   A recent article by Helen Blunden on the issue of ‘link-rot’ brought home to me the parallels with this latter aspect of the museum curator’s role.

This is what I think curation for learning is:

‘It involves searching out and selecting credible, relevant content to aid either your own or other’s learning or performance needs.   It involves explaining the thinking behind your choices and putting it into context for your intended recipients.  It involves making your selections available in an easily accessible format and storing material in a safe and searchable way. Relevance of materials includes content, level, type of resource, diversity of viewpoints, accuracy and currency.’

I would be very interested in hearing your views on this.  What does ‘curation for learning’ mean to you?

I plan to return to this topic in future posts to share my experiences of reviewing my personal curation practice and some reflections on my experiences of designing learning programmes using curation. 

Rachel Burnham

30 October 2017

Burnham L & D Consultancy helps L&D professionals update and refresh their skills.  I am particularly interested in blended learning, the use of digital skills for learning, evaluation and anything that improves the impact of learning on performance.