My learning – Page 5 – Join the Dots

MOOCs won’t disrupt Higher Education, employers will

August 28, 2019April 18, 2017 by mark.drechsler

Last week I wrote a post on ‘students as customers’ in the context of a more corporatised, commoditised Higher Education market. It was interesting then to see another post today discussing the emerging trend of employers dropping requirements for degrees as part of their recruitment criteria, instead selecting candidates

based on merit, rather than credentials, often by assessing candidates with psychometric testing or other performance based tests

This caught my attention for two* reasons. Firstly, it returned my thoughts to the student as a customer, and the likely increase in their willingness to leave the Higher Education system (or not engage in it at all) if it is not meeting their expectations – in this case employability. Secondly, it made me reflect on the role of MOOCs, not as a replacement for a degree, but as a potential perceived indicator of merit in a landscape where a degree is no longer a necessity.

Evaluating leadership through structured team feedback

August 22, 2019December 1, 2016 by mark.drechsler

As the year draws rapidly to a close, the thoughts of many a manager turn to that most dreaded of annual tasks – the performance review. Often ignored, frequently monolithic, a good idea that has been lost in translation to some awful Word document template. Dislike them or loathe them, they are out there. Sadly, this kind of prescriptive process can often discourage what should be a worthwhile activity, that of providing some sort of formal feedback to staff on their year in review, hopefully as a supplement to the regular feedback they have been getting throughout the year (wishful thinking, I know).

But what about feedback going the other way from staff given to their managers, particularly in the case of senior level managers?

In my fifteen years of reporting to senior managers or executives, not once have I been asked for formal feedback on their performance throughout the year. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had some really good managers (and some bloody awful ones), but not once has any of them given me a formal opportunity to provide structured feedback. This year, to show that I’m willing to lead by example, I’ve set up a formal feedback process to give my senior leaders the chance to share their thoughts on my 2016.

The MOOC as a network broker

August 28, 2019September 27, 2015 by mark.drechsler

Inspiration for blog posts can happen at the strangest, and most inopportune times, and this happened to me on Thursday last week, the penultimate day of preparation for the opening of Flinders Connect and a time when my mind was flying around the many last-minute jobs we still had to knock off. The inspiration didn’t so much hit me, it was more delivered in person as I was coming back with a quick bite of lunch, courtesy of Prof Colin Carati, the Director of the Flinders Uni Centre for Educational ICT. After exchanging pleasantries about the opening of Flinders Connect, Colin mentioned the blog post I wrote a couple of weeks back which in summary posited that the next big challenge for Universities could be how best to connect their students to large, open networks as a means to improve employability (based on research from the Booth School of Business).

Colin’s thought to me was a strikingly simple one – what if the real value of a MOOC is to act as a broker for students into these large, open networks?

Seven life lessons I’ve learned from riding mountain bikes

August 28, 2019June 8, 2015 by mark.drechsler

Perhaps its a symptom of getting older, but I see far more connections between seemingly unrelated things these days. If it was twenty years ago and I was still embroiled in my pitiful attempt at a PhD in maths then I’d have probably called them homomorphisms. Mappings of concepts from one part of life on to another completely unrelated one on the assumption that the underlying rules of each system are more or less consistent.

In Layman’s terms – I draw a lot of parallels between things.

Of course I’m not the only one, as a very quick autocomplete check on Google will attest to…

The most recent ones that has been striking me, possibly because I’ve been doing a lot more of both recently, are the parallels between riding off-road bikes and making life decisions.

How I lost my faith in the LMS (or ‘my journey towards LMS nihilism’)

October 28, 2024May 20, 2015 by mark.drechsler

It was a couple of weeks back now when I threw out a tweet asking what my next blog post should be, and as I should have predicted, it came back with the one that is probably the hardest for me to write.

Then, while all sorts of thoughts were rattling around in my head, Phil Hill’s post took quite a bit of wind out of my sails by articulating very neatly a lot of the stuff that I was mulling over. What Phil’s post also did however was to make me realise that my faith in edtech on the whole wasn’t the issue – it was far more my faith in the LMS.

What I did think was still worth doing in spite of Phil’s post was creating a bit more of a personal view of my own journey towards LMS nihilism, which is what I’m going to share here. First though, you’ll need to permit me to wander a little.