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CORPORATE UNIVERSITIES: Corporate Universities continue to offer an exciting array of potential benefits to organizations. They also continue to have their detractors – along with their champions. Perhaps a major part of the debate about Corporate Universities (CUs) is that the phrase instantly conjures up the mental image of a bricks and mortar institution which aim to emulate the likes of Harvard or Oxford; whereas the vast majority of CUs are inevitably much humbler institutions, often not ha...

Digging behind the shiny claims for online learning reveals some worrying trends
Online schools are proliferating, but a new US report from the National Education Policy Center in Colorado warns that they "continue to have serious problems with respect to education quality, diversity, accountability, and funding".

“Full-time K-12 online learning is growing exponentially, many policymakers praise it, and taxpayer money supports it,” says the report’s editor, Professor Alex Molnar of the University of Colorado Boulder, “And yet there has been little high-quality research to support the claims that justify its rapid expansion.”

“To have the teacher be the sage and fount of all knowledge is an antiquated way of thinking. I love the idea of being able to have resources like BLOSSOMS that go outside of my expertise as a teacher and outside my classroom.”

During a visit to a rural school in China, BLOSSOMS founders Richard Larson and Elizabeth Murray watched as a videotaped lecture enlivened an otherwise cold, bleak classroom. The teacher paused the lecture from time to time to engage with the class. The interruptions worked, but awkwardly, prompting Larson and Murray to wonder what would happen if they created video lessons that were designed to be interactive. They envisioned video lessons dovetailed with engaging activities for teachers to do with their students.

So inspired, Murray and Larson set out to create MIT BLOSSOMS (Blended Learning Open Source Science or Math Studies), a free, online library of interactive video lessons designed to supplement high school science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) courses. BLOSSOMS partners with teachers from around the United States and the world in a novel approach to STEM education with the following goals:

• Development of critical thinking and problem-solving skills.
• Demonstration of how mathematicians, scientists and engineers think.
• Connection of abstract concepts to the real world.
• Confirmation of how exciting STEM can be.
• Encouragement of cross-cultural understanding.

With videos designed in segments that allow for teacher and classroom participation, all MIT BLOSSOMS lessons are comprehensive in nature, with downloadable handouts, teaching guides, and a listing of additional online resources relevant to the day’s lesson. The high school teacher, in tandem with the online video, participates in a “teaching duet” pedagogy, one that promotes critical thinking, builds greater interest among students in their STEM classes, and provides engaging, hands-on, cross-disciplinary learning.

With MIT BLOSSOMS, a teacher maintains full control of the class while co-teaching with content experts from secondary or higher education. Above all, a BLOSSOMS lesson is not a lecture, but requires teachers to engage and involve students in their learning. Many teachers value these lessons as professional development, since they offer a new approach to inquiry-based teaching and active learning.

MIT BLOSSOMS is an “Open Educational Resource,” a web-based collection of materials offered freely and openly for re-use in teaching, learning and research. OERs such as BLOSSOMS help make education a right rather than a privilege by providing schools around the world with access to quality educational tools. One important goal of MIT BLOSSOMS is to encourage teachers around the world to explore and sample the many excellent teaching and learning resources that are today available for free online.  While it may be difficult for a busy teacher to spend time sorting through these myriad websites to identify those of quality, BLOSSOMS feels strongly that bringing these resources into the classroom can deepen and strengthen a curriculum.

http://blossoms.mit.edu/home
http://blossoms.mit.edu/videos/alpha
 

Public libraries in the United Kingdom are set to play a role in expanding public access to academic research via the recently announced “Access to Research” plan. Thousands of research journal articles will be made available for free: but only on computers located physically within a public library, not remotely.

The plan implements one of the key recommendations of the Finch Group, which was commissioned by the U.K. government to investigate how access to publicly funded research could be expanded. The group recommended providing walk-in access to “the majority of journals in public libraries across the UK.” As the report observed:

“At a time when public libraries are under severe pressure such a move will help to strengthen their position in the communities they serve, and lead to increased usage and value. It would have an immediate effect in extending access to the great majority of journals for the benefit of everyone in the country.”

Many U.K. public libraries are experiencing a crisis of funding leading to closures and severe reductions in service.

Access to Research provides access to more than 8,000 journals from around the world, on topics such as health, biological research, engineering, and social sciences. It is a result of collaboration between publishers, through the Publishers Association, Publishers Licensing Society, and Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers; and librarians, through the Society of Chief Librarians (SCL). The search delivery software, Summon, was provided for free by ProQuest.

When she announced the initiative at the beginning of February, Janene Cox, president of the SCL, said that approximately 75 library authorities (which serve similar purposes to public library systems in the U.S.) had expressed an interest in joining the pilot. According to LJ‘s infoDOCKET, that’s over half of all local authorities are already in the process of signing up, the technology was tested in 2013 by 250 public libraries, and the service will now be rolled out as a two-year pilot. (For more and a list of participating publishers, see infoDOCKET.com.)

Cox added that “it re-affirms the important role that public libraries have in supporting learning, promoting research and encouraging greater access and use of digital space and technologies…the access to research project is evidence that as a sector we are prepared to think innovatively act collaboratively and seek creative solutions to ensure our library offer continues to innovate, improve and deliver real outcomes for our communities.”

Librarians respond

The announcement was welcomed by public librarians, who saw this as an opportunity to open access to research materials that were otherwise out of reach for the vast majority of the public, as well as to encourage more people to visit their local public library. Claire Back, a Development Officer (Digital) at Plymouth City Council, said the scheme would have a positive impact on the local community. “Our library users will be able to search for and read over one and half million journal articles,” she said, :enhancing the collections we already have and strengthening our position in the community as a space for education and learning.”

She went on to add that “the library I work in has already had enquiries as a result of the launch publicity. It’s now up to us to make sure that people (including library staff) know about it.”

Back argued that the restrictions to walk-in visitors only will not necessarily be an issue of concern as “this is also the case with the family history websites, Ancestry and Find My Past”, two of the more popular resources made available by her library to the general public.

However, this view was not shared by David Prosser, Executive Director of Research Libraries UK (a consortium representing 34 university and other research libraries in the UK). While he welcomed the increased access to research findings, he raised concerns about the initiative being restricted to walk-in visitors. Said Prosser, “…the Access to Research scheme is oddly limiting in its vision, insisting on constraining online electronic information to specific locations at specific times. The Internet and mobile revolution gives the intellectually curious access to information when they want it, where they want it. Access to Research curtails these freedoms by requiring the curious to visit a library during opening times to gain access to online material.”

He added, “In a time of public library closures and reduced opening times these restrictions do nothing to ease the path to knowledge for the reader, but are entirely for the convenience of publishers.”

Open access advocate Penny Andrews, who is one of the Open Access Button student leadership team, said that while the increased access for the public was “a good thing”, she had some concerns about the implementation of the project and the lack of information about alternatives, which she described as “disappointing.”

Limitless Libraries, an ongoing partnership between Nashville Public Library (NPL) and Metro Nashville Public Schools (MNPS), is planning a move to a shared ILS system, and has requested funding for the transition from the office of Nashville’s mayor.

Launched in 2009 as a pilot test involving NPL and four local schools, Limitless Libraries has grown into a comprehensive program fostering resource sharing between NPL and all 128 MNPS schools. MNPS student IDs are recognized as library cards at all of NPL’s 21 branches and three special services libraries, and students can access NPL’s online subscription resources, or use NPL’s OPAC to have books, CDs, DVDs, and other materials delivered to their school for convenient pickup. Collaboration between the two institutions also led to a weeding and centralized procurement program which enhanced and modernized MNPS school library collections, and included the launch of a new collection of Common Core ebooks.

The program has become a much-watched success, demonstrating how partnerships between school libraries and public libraries can help boost usage of both systems. In fact, a steady, significant increase in demand for books and other materials has posed a bit of a challenge for NPL, according to NPL Associate Director and 2012 LJ Mover & Shaker Tricia Racke Bengel.

Growing demand “is a really good problem to have,” she told LJ. “We didn’t expect our own circulation to go up so much, especially in juvenile nonfiction and juvenile materials, where circulation had been dwindling over the past several years. We really had to beef up our own collection, so that’s been a great thing.” Donations from the Dollar General Literacy Foundation, based in nearby Goodlettsville, TN, helped Limitless Libraries shore up its materials budget as the project got started, she added.

Currently, MNPS uses Library.Solution for Schools by The Library Corporation (TLC) while NPL uses Millennium by Innovative Interfaces Inc. (III), and running the program with ILS systems from two separate vendors requires workarounds. Directing users to each catalog from a school library site or from the Limitless Libraries homepage is simple enough. But, students still have to search their school catalog and the NPL catalog separately to find materials. Once a student checks out an item from NPL and requests for it to be sent to his or her school, NPL has a provisional workflow system in which NPL staff use self-check stations at an NPL branch to assign those items to that student’s account before shipping them.

Students must log in separately to each system to find their account information. And, there is also no way for school librarians to check and see if students have overdue materials or fines from NPL, which poses a particular challenge for both systems, since MNPS students are a highly transitory population. About 70 percent of student families move and switch schools within a given year, according to Racke Bengel.

“We really want to go to a single [ILS] system,” said Racke Bengel. “It truly would be the last barrier between us…. It will make Limitless Libraries not just a program that we’ve been running separate and outside of both of our institutions.”

Since the 2010-2011 academic year, MNPS has worked with NPL to update student account information in NPL’s Millennium system on a nightly basis, enabling NPL to keep track of where students are enrolled and where checked out materials are. If the city approves this next phase of Limitless Libraries, MNPS libraries will be fully merged into the Millennium ILS, greatly simplifying the management of account and circulation information, as well as collection development and other project initiatives.

A single ILS “will just make things so much easier,” said Racke Bengel.

The library systems have built “a really compelling case” for the ILS merger, and they hope to learn soon whether the city is willing to fund the project. Other recent developments would seem to indicate that the mayor’s office remains committed to Limitless Libraries and has been pleased with its results. Notably, Limitless Libraries was recently asked to take the reins of another successful city initiative, the Nashville After Zone Alliance (NAZA), which offers after-school enrichment activities at school libraries and community centers.

Asked whether the prospect of the ILS merger had raised concerns at MNPS regarding job redundancies or whether school libraries would play a diminished role in a more fully merged system, Racke Bengel said that most of these concerns were resolved during earlier stages of the project. It is clear that usage is continuing to rise for both systems, and there is plenty of work for everyone.

“This program would not be successful without local school librarians,” she said. “It is a true partnership…. Without the school librarians teaching the kids the digital literacy skills they need and the library skills that they have always taught, without them promoting the program to their students and teachers, we would not be successful. Whenever we’ve been able to take back-of-house work off their plate, they are able to spend more of their time teaching.”

Responsibility for London’s Tech City will be handed over to London & Partners from the next financial year, Tech City News can exclusively reveal.

Following the departure of Joanna Shields earlier today, the future for the Tech City UK quango is looking increasingly bleak.

Responsibility moves to London & Partners

Government sources have confirmed as of the next financial year responsibility for the London part of Tech City will fall to London & Partners, the Mayor’s official promotional organisation for London.

London & Partners is a not for profit body designed to promote London on the world stage and is funded by the Mayor’s office and commercial partners.

Their activities include promoting investment, business partnerships and more recently supporting London Technology Week.

Rebrand to Tech City UK

Tech City UK was originally launched as the Tech City Investment Organisation (TCIO), with a clear focus on attracting foreign direct investment and putting East London’s fast-growing tech scene on the map.

Early wins included Google Campus setting up in Shoreditch and Facebook opening its first engineering hub outside the US near Covent Garden in the heart of London.

Since rebranding as Tech City UK, many have wondered if this represented a shift in strategy towards Tech Britain, with Shields hinting at connecting clusters across the country in a recent speech.

Political tug of war

But from the very beginning of its inception, Tech City UK’s remit has crossed over many other public organisations leading to quiet grumbles from behind the corridors of power.

Despite having a relatively small budget (for instance, less than 0.4% of the Technology Strategy Board’s whopping £440m annual budget), their annual reports have been criticised for claiming credit for things that also come under the remit of other bodies including the Mayor’s office, local councils in the area and private sector led initiatives.

Understandably other politicians have been keen to be seen as part of the energy and attention around the Tech City project.

More recently Boris Johnson has championed a number of initiatives including Canary Wharf Group’s Level39 and a new £100m fund for tech ventures in the Middle East.

What’s next? Changes for Old Street roundabout

In an interview with Tech City News Kit Malthouse, Deputy Mayor for Business & Enterprise, confirmed the Mayor’s immediate plans for the regeneration of the Old Street (also known as Silicon) roundabout.

The original £50m plans have been canned for now due to technical complications with building on the existing tube and rail stations.

The Mayor’s team will now focus on alternative funding for a new landmark building on a nearby site.

More positively, the immediate area around the roundabout will be cleaned up and regenerated as part of a London-wide project led by Transport for London in early 2014.

It’s not yet clear what will come of Tech City UK following the changes in April, but a spokesperson did insist that London & Partners would not be absorbing their entire national remit and “…will continue a close partnership with them in the next fiscal year.”

A London & Partners spokesman praised the work done with colleagues at Tech City UK to date and told Tech City News:

“Tech City is an integral part of the London proposition and we look forward to continuing to highlight its unique strengths as we promote the whole of London across the world.”

The post Exclusive: Is this the end for Tech City London? appeared first on Tech City News.

Any professional eLearning designer would agree that users are always at the heart of what they do. The bulk of our articles last year focused on users. But what about designers themselves? Who are they? What impressive feats do they perform? What skills do they possess? How crucial is their role in developing educational materials for a new generation of learners? Let’s not forget about these oft-overlooked professionals who help make eLearning possible, personal, effective and immediately applicable.

That’s why we’re going to start the year with this quick list of super powers every excellent instructional designer has:

1. Passion for Learning that Borders on Obsession

Instructional designers share a passion for learning. But the great ones are obsessed with learning everything and anything that has to do with learning.  

They constantly seek new topics to learn and teach, no matter which area or industry. They make time for reading—from studying the latest research in scholarly journals to checking out eLearning blogs and technology websites. And when they read, they’re also actively applying techniques and tricks they learn in their everyday instructional design work.

2. Deep Understanding of How People Learn

Non-professionals might have an idea of how people learn. Good instructional designers might know a set of strategies that aid students in recalling facts. Great IDs, however, go beyond the basics and not only rely on tactics and strategies. They clearly understand how people learn and have well-tested ideas on how to help them learn more effectively. 

In sum, they design for how people learn. They don’t assume but rely instead on the contribution of experts and trained professionals even in other fields—psychology, neurology, usability, information technology and communications.

3. Strong Visualization Skills

The human brain, take note, is primarily visual. And it’s no longer a secret that we’re all visual learners. Great instructional designers know this. They know that people take in more information through the eye than in any other sense organs. But that’s not all. They also know the importance of seeing the big picture, of asking themselves “what’s the learning goal here?” They visualize it and see it from the perspective of a designer and a learner. They’re avid learners, remember?

4. Ability to Write Well

The ability to write well, they say, reflects the ability to think well. Great IDs, not surprisingly, are able to think and write way better than the others. They can craft a well-structured sentence, one that conveys ideas coherently and effectively.  And they know which tone to use depending on the context too. 

That’s why people should seriously consider their writing abilities before they begin a career as an instructional designer. It’s a rewarding yet tough career choice. There are ways to improve one’s writing skill, though, and potential designers can learn a lot from pros.

5. Creative and Analytical Problem-Solving Skills

Most of the time, super-powerful instructional designers are tasked to solve learning issues. And there are countless days when they’re compelled to come up with something new. The ability to tackle problems creatively and analytically is key here. That’s why the best IDs can quickly spot a problem, generate options and alternatives, and test them out to discover a solution. 

6. Organizational Skills

Exceptional IDs have an eye for detail. They do, in fact, pay careful attention to every teeny bit of detail that goes into every learning material. Because they’re detail-oriented, these designers constantly organize, move, select, synthesize, summarize and edit information to make it effective.

7. Active Listening Skills

The International Board of Standards for Training, Performance and Instruction (IBSTPI) recognized the critical importance of active listening for a reason. Such a skill allows industry professionals to better understand a subject. 

It also shows care and let others, especially learners, know that you are willing to see things from their perspective and are focusing on their needs. Asking relevant and well-timed questions is part of this active listening skill as well. Doing so helps clarify and define situations and statements, and eventually contribute to learning outcomes.

8. Technology-Based Skills

Exceptional IDs share a deep understanding of how technology can aid the field of instructional design and learning. They don’t blindly follow trends. They can, however, take a look at a piece of software, and see how it’s going to benefit their workflow or not. They can pick up almost any tool and learn how to use it without needing a month or two of formal training.

9. Innovation and Creativity

The hyper-connected and dynamic environment demands instructional designers to innovate and think of creative ways to keep the learner engaged.  Such call for innovation, however, must consider the limitations of budget and client requirements. High-performing IDs know how to balance these. They know how to go beyond just providing interactivity, they know how to present the content intelligently.

What’s more, their creative minds find inspiration everywhere, from the books they read to a commercial they just saw on TV.

10. People Skills

It’s obvious why IDs need to possess strong people skills. They constantly work in collaboration with others. They simply cannot work alone. Great IDs who are able to create effective instructional systems have overcome objections from people and have worked closely with knowledge experts and students. They also have resolved an unbelievable number of issues and conflicts, and persuaded people into working with them toward their designed project goals.

 

A head teacher is arrested and bailed in connection with suspected fraud at a free school in Bradford.

By Daniel Hunter KPMG, the professional services firm providing audit, tax and advisory services, has announced a large increase in profits from £358m to £455m (27%) for the financial year ending...

Social media management has become impossible for today’s business owner to ignore. With case study after case study depicting the benefits of being “social” and building a “community” many companies now find themselves in a mad scramble to add a new employee to their payroll — the Community Manager. However, before you hire a Community […]

The post Before You Hire A Community Manager – Here’s a 7-Step Check LIst appeared first on Curatti.

When making the case for implementation of a project/program management office (PMO) that provides better reporting, standardizes processes that were once willy-nilly, and boost project profitability overall, it’s perfectly natural to lead with the internal benefits. Resources are used more efficiently. Projects are chosen with strategy and impact on business performance in mind. But in the end, why do we really want to hard-wire the project governance process? Who are we really doing all this for? Let’s consider the customer-centric side argument for your PMO.
This is no way suggesting that you shouldn’t consider all aspects of ROI, but merely to highlight that the customer-side benefits are truly compelling in and of themselves. By helping your organization develop project governance standards that enable repeatable successes, better resource usage and more projects coming in on time, you’re a lap ahead in creating a customer (and even partner) satisfaction powerhouse.
Three Customer Satisfaction Benefits of the Well-Run PMO
•    Better project delivery means higher customer satisfaction and confidence Running projects with a high-performing PMO means more projects come in on time, on budget and with their objectives achieved. There’s no better argument for repeat business than being the company that consistently does what they say they can do, does it when they agree to have it done, and hits the budget marks.
•    Higher customer trust and support means better collaboration and more predictable results Consistently executing better project delivery and earning customer trust creates a virtuous cycle of collaborative harmony. With your team delivering like a well-oiled machine, your customers learn depend on your rhythm, gain confidence from your credibility, and become more responsive to your requests. This, in turn, creates even more project success.
•    Improve performance and confidence of vendors and third parties Because your PMO has improved your reporting standards and tactical project management, vendors and third parties know where they stand and share your perspective of the project landscape. This means less confusion, less milestones missed, and less panic. Panic is contagious. But by the same token, so is confidence. These intangibles shouldn’t be undervalued with vendors whose performance is critical to the project overall.
While a good PMO excels at creating the reporting standards that make your company a font of trusted project information, one of the biggest benefits can’t be quantified: The likelihood that your client-side contact will spread the word with his or her colleagues and superiors about how well you ran the project. The numbers are good, but building confidence and reputation around your name makes your participation in the next project more of a foregone conclusion and less a matter of argument and analysis. At the end of the day, happy customers equal recurring profit. That alone is enough to justify a PMO.

One of the most hotly debated issues around deploying social collaboration technologies inside an organisation is the question of whether to allow the creation of personal groups alongside business-focused groups. For many senior execs, this issue represents their greatest fear from allowing social collaboration into their organisation - that it is effectively encouraging the same time-wasting behaviour from staff during working hours as they spend in their own time on public social networking sites like Facebook or Twitter. How can this possibly be good for business productivity and employee engagement?

One of the best arguments in favour of personal groups is that they offer a fantastic "training ground" for employees, particularly in organisations where the culture is very traditional and non-collaborative, or where a significant proportion of staff are not  familiar with using social technologies in personal context. In the same way as games like Minesweeper helped to "train" users how to use the computer mouse in the early days of the PC, so personal groups offer a way for employees to become familiar with the new social collaboration platform in a less pressurised and confrontational way, helping them work out how to navigate around the site, how to post questions or comments, and the value of people profiles and connections, for example. Personal groups can also help to start breaking down the organisational barriers associated with departments and roles by enabling everyone to go back to being just a person - not a trainee in the marketing department, or a senior manager in IT, for example. By encouraging staff to connect with others across the organisation who might have similar interests or hobbies, you start to open people's eyes up to the possibilities that a more open, networked organisation can bring, and you are effectively laying the groundwork for replicating this same mindset in a business context. A great example of this came up in a case study that I am currently working on for a global office equipment manufacturing firm, where an acquaintance made through a personal interest group on the  social intranet gave an employee the opportunity to get help on a business problem that had been an issue for some time, purely through making a friendly contact in the marketing department.

If you are trying to improve the collaborative culture across your organisation, trust is an essential part of this, including trusting your employees to behave in an appropriate way while they are at work. You can reinforce this through the creation of a set of usage guidelines for your social collaboration environment, but these inherently need to stem from your organisation's existing HR policies around the business conduct expected from staff; they must be worded carefully to avoid being seen as a list of "Don't"s. In practice, introducing new social collaboration tools in this way is not going to suddenly prompt your employees to start behaving inappropriately and taking advantage; I might argue that it will simply bring to light any existing poor behaviour, and surely it's better to be aware of this so you can address it appropriately. But, in all seriousness, among all the organisations that I've spoken to about their social collaboration initiatives, not one has complained of an issue here - it is a false concern in my opinion. Guidelines are important - as much for the benefit of employees to clarify the boundaries of what is acceptable, as for the benefit of the organisation - but personal groups offer a way to demonstrate trust in your employees to know what is appropriate.

Do you allow personal groups in your organisation's social collaboration platform? I'd love to hear whether you have found them to be beneficial to adoption, or - perhaps even more interestingly - not. You can leave a comment here, or contact me via email at angela@mwdadvisors.com or on Twitter @aashenden.

After months of hard work, we are ready to give our existing users early access to Jolicloud 2 and the awesome new features we have prepared for you.

Jolicloud 2 lives entirely in the browser. It’s been designed mainly for Chrome and Chromebook users, but it should also work with other modern browsers.

If you have used one of our previous products, you should be familiar with the interface. We have kept all the best parts like the Joli OS desktop and the Jolidrive layout, but we have reorganized everything under two roofs.

Home and Drive

Jolicloud has now two sections: Home which gathers all your content in one place, and Drive which unifies all your online storage.
You can switch between Home and Drive at any time, and both services have been designed to work well together.

If you are still using the Jolicloud app launcher, no worries: it’s now under the Drive section. You can make it appear or disappear in the settings.

What’s New: Don’t miss out on what’s happening

With all the services that we follow out there, it’s hard to keep track of all the things that matter. With What’s New, everything is in one place, organized in categories.

Library: Keep the important stuff in one place

Library is your time machine that keeps an organized history of all the things you’ve liked across the Internet. Anything you’ve liked elsewhere will automagically appear there. And when you like something in Jolicloud, it automatically adds it to your Library and sends a like to the original service.

Feedly: Bring the news!

Because news is an important part of our cloud life, we have worked with Feedly to bring you one of the simplest RSS experiences available. And we’ve fully integrated it with other cloud services.

Google Reader users, Jolicloud is now officially your new Home!

Drive: All your online storages

Our storage interface is one of the best available in a browser. With Drive, you can manage all your storage services online in one place. And you can do much more with your files than you could in the original web interface of the service: play music and video, edit text, share files and folders in one click.

Try it, you will love it!

Tech companies are better than other industries at creating company culture, at least according to Glassdoor.

Glassdoor released the findings of its “50 best places to work in 2014″ survey, and 22 of them are tech companies (ranking below).

Twitter ranks as the number one tech company to work for, and this is the first time Twitter made the list. It came in second overall after consulting firm Bain.

LinkedIn followed Twitter on both lists, coming in second in tech and third overall.

Interestingly, Facebook fell in the rankings. The social network was voted the #1 tech company to work for over the past three years, but fell to third place in tech and fifth overall. This is the first time Facebook is out of the top three overall in four years.

Google came in sixth amongst the tech companies and eighth overall. Google has consistently been on the list for the past six years, along with Apple and Qualcomm.

Also on the top ten list for tech are Guidewire, Interactive Intelligence, Orbitz, Riverbed, and Intuit. Salesforce just barely made the list, coming in 22nd for tech and 50th overall.

Glassdoor provides an inside look into jobs and companies. Employees provide anonymous data and reviews about salaries, company culture, interview questions, leadership, and more. Glassdoor turns this data into useful reports, and helps job seekers determine if a company is a good fit for them.

Glassdoor now has more than 22 million members and custom data on more than 300,000 companies. Just last week, it raised $50 million to accelerate its global expansion. 

More than half a million company reviews were submitted anonymously to Glassdoor by employees over the past 12 months. The surveys ask employees to provide input on how satisfied they are with their company; workplace attributes such as career opportunities, compensation, benefits, culture and values; work-life balance; how they feel senior management is doing; whether they would recommend their employer to a friend; what their opinion is of the company’s outlook, and more.

Glassdoor then analyzed all this data to create a ranking of which companies fared the best. This is of particular concern to the tech industry where hiring competition is fierce, and companies consistently try to out-do each other with benefits and perks.

Twitter moved into swanky new office space on Market street in San Francisco last year, complete with a rooftop garden, cafeteria, yoga studio, and arcade. It is rated 4.4 out of 5 stars by its employees and is one of the top five highest paying employers for software engineers. CEO Dick Costolo is a well-known influencer and speaker on issues of leadership, and has an approval rating of 96%. Twitter’s successful IPO also probably gave a big boost to employee morale.

Companies with at least 1,000 employees had to have at least 50 approved company reviews shared by employees in past year to be considered.

 

Image Credit: Glassdoor, Facebook

The post Tech companies ‘best places to work’ appeared first on Tech City News.

Argyris & Schön support the argument that individuals have mental maps both for their skill assets and how to act in situations. They assert that it is these mental maps that guide people’s actions rather than the theories they explicitly espouse. This has implications for approaches to organisational learning. Continue Reading →

Doing the rounds of my usual clients in the not-for-profit sector, it is clear that this autumn managers who are not information professionals are beginning to see intranets less as products in themselves, and more as features of the collaborative way of working in which many are putting their faith as the future of effective, productive organisational work. It is easy to speculate, as I have heard some do, that intranets are on their way out, to be replaced by collaboration platforms and enterprise social networks.

read more

This is my final post from down under and the Ascilite 2013 conference. My former colleague Bill Johnston and I had a short paper accepted based on the series of blog posts we started about 18 months ago called “a conversation around what it means to be a digital university“.   As with all the short papers we only had 15 minutes to present, but we were very pleased with the number of delegates who came to our session.  Luckily we had much longer to share our thoughts at a workshop at Macquarrie University, organised by Panos Vllachopoulos from their Teaching and Learning Centre.

As I commented in my earlier post, networks and connections were a common theme across the conference, and this workshop was an example of this in action. For the past year Bill and I have been critical friends to Edinburgh Napier University’s Digital Futures Working Group chaired by Keith Smyth.

Keith read our blog posts and used our matrix as a basis for their work.  Panos also used to work at Napier alongside Keith and was keen to find out more about the working group and the thinking behind it, so seeing as we were all in Sydney for Ascilite he arranged a session for staff at Macquarrie.  Once I’m back from down under, Bill and I will be writing a longer post around developments at Napier, and the final recommendations from a really inspiring cross institutional project, but in the meantime, here are the slides from the session.

Tagged: #ascilite #digitaluniversity

Now that November’s NaBloPoMo (National Blog Posting Month) is a fond memory and your blogging habit is firmly entrenched, it’s time to take a peek back at November by the numbers on WordPress.com.

Posts that grabbed your attention

In November, you wrote nearly 36 million posts and over 245 million words. Think about that: 245 million words. That’s about 4,000 250-page books. Your muses were on fire on November 21st, the most prolific day of the month, where together you wrote nearly 1.5 million posts.

One of those posts, Seth Adam Smith‘s Marriage Isn’t For You went viral, and has had over 26 million views to date.

The post has been widely publicized and featured on BuzzFeed, The Huffington Post, Mail Online, Cosmopolitan, The Matt Walsh Blog, and Today.com, just to name some of the outlets that covered the post and its rise to fame.

Lest we forget

On November 11th, we marked Veteran’s Day in the United States and Armistice Day and Remembrance Day elsewhere around the world. A Pearl Harbor survivor’s “visit to the Navy,” recorded in A Sailor’s Dying Wish, is powerful. The story of Electrician’s Mate Second Class William Bud Cloud’s visit to the USS Dewey, and the incredible reception he received from the servicemen and women aboard the ship, is both poignant and moving.

Good things to come

Under the heading of WordPress.com authors in the news, John Scalzi completed his next novel, Lock In. The current publication date is August 26th, 2014. You’ll want to mark your calendar!

Your favorite topics in November

Speaking of Veteran’s Day, you published 3,710 posts on that topic in November.

Writing was on your minds. You published 11,772 posts on NaBloPoMo and 7,784 posts tagged NaNoWriMo.

The holiday season was front and center. You wrote 39,510 posts on Thanksgiving, 1,694 posts on Hanukkah, and 54,290 posts on Christmas, maybe because you’re thinking of food, (48,170 posts) family, (46,948 posts) and friends (18,125 posts).

Perhaps in anticipation of upcoming New Year’s resolutions, you wrote 12,123 posts on diet and 8,402 on exercise.

In the world of sports, you’re talking more about hockey (161,472 posts) than football, (139,934 posts). You’re just starting to get pumped for the upcoming Olympics (1,309 posts).

A lively conversation

You’ve got a lot to say! You wrote 53 million comments in November in response to nearly 36 million posts. You were feeling chattiest on November 1st, where you made over two million comments across WordPress.com. You gave out over seven million Likes during the month.

Behind the scenes at WordPress.com

In November, we were excited to launch Twenty Fourteen, the new default theme for the upcoming year. It’s a free, sleek, magazine-style theme we think you’re going to love for content-rich sites.

Previous instalments in the “By the Numbers” Series

• The October Hot List
• The September Hot List
• The August Hot List
• The July Hot List

Filed under: behind the scenes

The Ministry of Justice has recently launched a major open policy forum and consultation to source the public’s ideas and views on the future of out-of-court disposals. It is one of the largest consultations of its type to be launched by a UK central government department.

This open-policy forum, powered by Wazoku’s Idea Spotlight for Government, will help the Ministry of Justice steer the future direction of out-of-court disposals in an open, innovative way. Members of the public are invited to actively contribute to the consultation by sharing and discussing their views on one platform.  This open consultation was launched in a bid to engage the public in policy shaping and to improve services.

Out-of-court disposals allow the police to rapidly deal with low-level, often first-time offenders who do not need to appear in front of judges, thus giving the police more time to handle serious crime. The Ministry of Justice is simultaneously offering a platform where the public can share their ideas as part of one community and another one where policy makers (police, Crown Prosecution Service and Ministry of Justice staff) can analyse and discuss these ideas.

If you wish to share your ideas and opinions on out-of-court disposals, you can join the discussion by logging in to the out-of-court disposal review here.

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FutureLearn, the first UK-led provider of massive open online courses (MOOCs), has signed up the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) as its latest business sponsor of MOOCs aimed at furthering professional development. The news was announced in China today, where Martin Bean, FutureLearn Chairman and Vice Chancellor of The Open University, accompanied British Prime Minister David Cameron on a visit to strengthen ties with the country. One of the many aims of the UK delegation was to explore ways of tackling 21^st century challenges such as educating the next generation.

The IET is one of the world’s largest organisations for engineers and technicians, with 160,000 members in 127 countries around the world. The free courses created through the alliance with FutureLearn will provide industry professionals, engineers and technicians worldwide with knowledge that will help develop their careers. The new MOOCs will also highlight the importance of engineering as an occupation in the 21st century.

This agreement marks an important step towards adding even more career-enhancing subjects to FutureLearn’s diverse course list, while working with industry to support the take up of Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM) among learners around the world.

The IET will work with FutureLearn’s university partners and other corporates to make high quality engineering and technology MOOCs that meet the body’s criteria towards professional qualifications, membership requirements and to support continuing professional development. Available from 2014, the courses will be available to the IET’s members around the world, as well as FutureLearn’s global learner base.

A further objective for the IET is that these MOOCs will inspire school and university students to aim for roles in Engineering and Technology, something which is crucial in helping to resolve the global skills shortage.

Martin Bean, FutureLearn Chairman and Vice Chancellor of The Open University said of the new relationship, “In an increasingly competitive global economy, people around the world need to know they can access the education they need to get ahead. By working with FutureLearn, the IET will be able to boost the talents of engineers everywhere while also inspiring the next generation of skilled professionals in this vital sector.”

Simon Nelson, Chief Executive of FutureLearn, said, “I am delighted to welcome the IET as the first professional engineering body to sponsor MOOCs on FutureLearn. This relationship creates a valuable opportunity to give our learners access to the IET’s expertise and content as they look to MOOCs as a way of building their professional knowledge.”

Nigel Fine, IET Chief Executive, said, “The IET is a trusted source of essential engineering intelligence. This partnership with FutureLearn means we can give even better access to technical training to our members and the wider engineering community.”

Amanda Weaver, IET Publishing Director, said, “Through the use of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) we will be able to provide huge opportunities for our members to brush-up their skills, move into new technical areas, and with the additional outcome of a certificate to prove completion of a course and accrual of CPD hours.

“Our involvement with FutureLearn and MOOCs will also greatly support our efforts to support STEM courses and attract more people into the subject.  There is a global skills crisis affecting engineering and technology which is negatively affecting the economy.  Through this work we can open up learning and knowledge to the next generation of engineers and technicians whilst also helping current engineers to develop the professional skills they need to develop their careers.”

The post FutureLearn secures major industry alliance with world-leading engineering body appeared first on FutureLearn.

Flexible working is on the rise. However, as reported today, while employers are happy to equip workers with the facilities required to work away from the office, there is a worrying level of unwillingness amongst many bosses in checking the safety and comfort of home workers. Employers have a duty of care to their home workers under health and safety legislation and the Working Time Regulations 1998. This means that care should be taken by employers to ensure that home workers operate in a safe and appropriate environment. This duty of care goes beyond supplying an ergonomic workstation. Managing home workers requires a varied set of management skills and best practice processes.

When setting up a home worker, care should be taken to ensure the employee operates in a safe and appropriate environment. An assessment of the working space should be undertaken and consideration should be given to supplying furniture, such as an office chair or desk to ensure the working environment is safe.

You should also ensure that employees use their holiday entitlement, that they are not working excessively long hours, and that they are taking the requisite breaks. Hours and break times should be clearly defined and reinforced regularly during one to one meetings or other reviews.

From a performance management perspective the essential starting point is to ensure that your home workers are left in no doubt as to the parameters of their employment, the processes that are to be followed, and how they are expected to perform their role. Clarify objectives and set clear timescales.

Home workers need to be provided with more specific, and often more regimented guidelines compared to their office based counterparts. In effect they need a more bespoke form of management.

It is often a good strategy to require new starters to spend a defined initial period of time working in the office environment to provide them with a good grounding in the aims, and ethos of the business together with obtaining knowledge of the practises and processes used in the workplace.

Extra care should be taken to check the understanding of instructions with home workers. Phone calls and emails are the obvious methods of effective communication but employers should consider utilising video conferencing facilities such as Skype to improve communication with workers.

It is important to introduce key performance indicators so you can objectively and consistently assess how each employee is performing. This will also allow you to compare home with other workers and evaluate the effectiveness of each method of working.

Finally, regular reviews are vitally important to provide home workers with feedback, constructive criticism and to define boundaries.  Home workers should be made aware at an early stage if they are not meeting the expectations set with appropriate support, training and monitoring put in place.

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Founder of Loch Associates, Pam Loch is a dual qualified lawyer acting for employers and employees and advising on all aspects of employment law. She is Managing Partner of niche employment law practice, Loch Associates Employment Lawyers and Managing Director of HR Advise Me Limited.

At the moment there is a lot of activity around mobile devices such as smart phones and tablets. Although there were touchscreen computers years before the introduction of the iPad, it was Apple that changed the landscape and started what … Continue reading →

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Image via Andrey Kuzmin.

Optimally curated content can be a wonderful thing. You’ve got your original content that you create, a tremendously important asset that you want to highlight every chance you get. Augmenting that, you have curated content that you’re sharing, building trust and further establishing and legitimizing your own thought leadership in the field. And it’s this balanced combination of the two that enables you to reap the best of the benefits from both worlds: your audience seeing that you’ve got both your finger on the pulse of your industry and the tools, resources and know-how to blaze a path through that wilderness.

But sharing curated stories and writing your own content isn’t the full story; the key to success is what you curate and how it supports your own, original contributions. You have a lot of options for what content you want to share, and the better you get at content discovery, the better you can inform your audience as it relates to the value you provide. And that’s what curating for context is all about.

The articles you share can serve many purposes, including:

• educating your audience about a widespread problem in your field,
• showing them a project or applied use case that leads some of them towards success,
• sharing a breakthrough or innovation that positively affects them, or
• showcasing a product that may offer a solution to some of their problems,

but at the end of the day, you’re not just after clicks, you’re after conversions, or people who come to you for a product-or-service that you provide. And the best way to do that is to share articles that don’t just highlight an interesting problem, project, innovation or product in your field, but ones that highlight problems, projects, innovations or products that you offer a solution for.

That’s what thought-leadership is all about. It’s not just for sharing tidbits from a widespread conversation, but for framing that conversation around your strengths and offerings. Because when you put out your own original content — sometimes with a call to action as well — you want to maximize your audience’s response, and that’s only going to happen if your audience is well informed about both what you do and why that’s important to them. So don’t just curate for interesting stories alone, frame that conversation around your assets and capabilities, and give your audience the context they need so they can be confident choosing you for their solutions.

-Ethan

Learning is a complex process.

It is a never-ending and evolving process, experimentation, classroom, peer-to-peer, on-the-job, formal curricula, tacit and informal experiences, reflection, failing forward, change management… the jargon, theories, buzzwords come and go… Learning IS complex. It IS a process, not a finite event.

The complexity above, however, is NOT what learning experiences (as designed by professional Instructional Designers) should look like. We have to make the complex simple, we have to make learning seamless, transparent to the learner… perhaps even something they don’t recognize as “learning” sometimes but that can help them accomplish real-world tasks in the context they live/work in…

What Learning professionals design should look like this:

“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”  – Albert Einstein

Cite this article:
Silva E (2013-12-03 12:36:15). Simplifying Complexity: What Learning Does NOT Look Like. Enzo Silva blog. Retrieved: Oct 25, 2014, from http://enzosilva.com/blog/2013/12/03/simplifying-complexity-what-learning-does-not-look-like/

This issue brings together five rather diverse papers focusing on the use of mobile and Web 2.0 technologies in an effort to engage learners. Two of the papers deal with messaging or response systems used by students in higher education, two papers deal with the use of (mobile) social media for professional development of teachers, and the final paper builds a theoretical model for Web 2.0-based workplace learning.

(Published: 3 December 2013)

Citation: Research in Learning Technology 2013, 21: 23309 - http://dx.doi.org/10.3402/rlt.v21i0.23309

Read the complete issue 21-3 (2013) here!

Discusses ways in which social and digital technologies can and increasingly will have a real impact on the world of work

Two weeks ago I attended the WCET Conference in Denver. While much smaller than EDUCAUSE and some others, I find these conferences to be great learning experiences, especially as WCET supports open dialogue between academic leaders (provosts, deans, etc), academic IT and edtech support, and industry leaders. The combination of mindsets – especially the combination of academic and technology – leads to very strategic discussions.

This year the keynote was presented by Dr. Paul LeBlanc, the president of Southern New Hampshire University, which has made quite a name for itself with the College for America (CfA) program. College for America is probably the second best-known example of competency-based education (CBE) after Western Governors University (WGU), and in fact the CfA program was the first to gain Department of Education approval using the “direct assessment” rule that completely avoids seat time. See my previous post for a primer on CBE.

While you can see the entire keynote here (using the mediasite player), I wanted to highlight four key points that help illuminate the reality of competency-based education today. As CBE becomes more hotly debated, it is useful to have real examples to evaluate. I have very roughly paraphrased and taken notes on what I heard in the keynote on these points, not as a defense or endorsement of CfA, but as a real-world early example of CBE.

1) Competency-based education is typically targeted at working adults (14:11 – 20:40)

One of the things that muddies our own internal debates and policy maker debates is that we say things about higher education as if it’s monolithic. We say that ‘competency-based education is going to ruin the experience of 18-year-olds’. Well, that’s a different higher ed than the people we serve in College for America. There are multiple types of higher ed with different missions.

The one CfA is interested in is the world of working adults – this represent the majority of college students today. Working adults need credentials that are useful in the workplace, they need low cost, they need me short completion time, and they need convenience. Education has to compete with work and family requirements.

CfA targets the bottom 10% of wage earners in large companies – these are the people not earning sustainable wages. They need stability and advancement opportunities.

CfA has two primary customers – the students and the employers who want to develop their people. In fact, CfA does not have a retail offering, and they directly work with employers to help employees get their degrees.

2) Competency-based education can require the unbundling of instruction (25:56 – 32:14)

One of the goals of CfA is to use technology to rethink its own business processes, which leads to disaggregation or unbundling. Higher ed does have experience with unbundling with food services, marketing services, but typically higher ed has resisted unbundling the core of what we do – instruction. Traditional faculty can fiercely hold on to these functions. This unbundling causes you to rethink the processes around course design, instruction, advising, and assessment, and there are a growing number of sources for these services (see slide below).

The most important change is to rethink the credit hour, which is the Higgs-Boson – the god particle – of higher ed. Amy Laitinen has a great article explaining the history of the credit hour. It’s great at telling you how long a student has sat down, but not very good at telling you what the student knows. We know that employers trust higher ed less and less. This leads to the core concept of competency-based education – focus on competencies rather than seat times. Jobs for students are not the only goal for higher education, but employers don’t think we do a very good job.

credit: Paul LeBlanc slides at WCET13

3) Competency-based assessment does not equal testing (41:14 – 45:05)

Competencies are can-do statements, they’re measurable, they’re observable, and they are harder for some disciplines than for others.

CfA doesn’t do tests – they instead rely on project-based learning. Competencies never exist in isolation, as they end up in workplace situations. When students select which cluster of competencies to work on, they select an appropriate role to take and work through the projects.

The projects lead to filled-out rubrics that are evaluated by trained faculty, typically with a 48-hour turn-around time.

4) Competency-based education often requires custom IT systems such as the LMS (45:08 – 46:19)

Most higher ed IT systems have been designed with the traditional credit hour in mind, with defined start and end dates. CfA started using Blackboard but abandoned that effort right away. They then went to Canvas, but Canvas is still very credit-hour based. This is not a knock on those LMSs, since they were built to solve a different problem.

In the end, CfA developed their own LMS based on the Salesforce.com platform. The first iteration of the platform was a kludgy mashup, and they had to do a lot of work to simplify the user interface.

Full disclosure: Western Governors University has been a client of MindWires Consulting.

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