Want to read a thriller on 'training'?

Want to read a complete and thrilling book about training? Try The Junior Officers’ Reading Club by Patrick Hennessey. Don’t be fooled by the title as the book tells you nothing about reading, books or even the real Afghanistan. It is, nevertheless, a book worth reading, as a soldier’s story. Intensely autobiographical, it describes, in detail, his training at Sandhurst, the boredom of the Balkans and Iraq, then the terror of his time in combat, in Afghanistan.

Obsolete mentality

Officer training in the British Army is stuck in a 19^th century timewarp, as is arguably its army. Hennessey is honest enough to admit, at times, that his regiment is “stuck in the obsolete mentality of the Victorian era that was our heyday, so obsessed with pageantry and protocol”. He’s smart enough to see the need for tough training, modern enough to see through the antiquated bullshit and honest enough to admit that this model is not all it’s cracked up to be. He comes to love and admire the Afghan army he has to work with, “and fuck me if they hadn’t killed more Russians than we had ever seen”. The current operational model is unworkable, frenzied British regiments arrive and do six months with the Afghan army, who have to work with group after group of fresh British troops. Who’s doing the training here?

Sandhurst “Hogwarts with Guns”

But nothing is as anachronistic as the class-driven, officer training at Sandhurst. The “factory” that is Sandhurst, has a selection procedure that borders on the corrupt, rejecting able people and accepting some who “struggled severely to learn fundamental lessons”. He's scathing about the process, although he never really addresses the apartheid of the officer/men distinction in the British Army, glossing over the obvious snobbery in many, if not most, regiments. To be fair the social mix has changed considerably, but is still, literally 'old school'.

The training itself is a massively, immersive, physical experience punctuated by classroom and (oddly) videos – Band of Brothers, Saving Private Ryan, Gladiator, A Bridge Too Far. I followed an Officer Training course at Shrivenham and found it laughably formulaic, with dull lectures and a pipeline of short-term memory experiences. As he says, the British army “stubbornly refuses to look round the corner, let alone into the future” with procurement a “Dickensian mess” buying the most expensive ships we’ve ever bough and no planes to go on them, and fighter jets that were obsolete before they were built.

Hennessey is well read and aware of the alternatives, having read The Utility of Force by Rupert Smith, Romeo Dallaire’s Shake Hands with the Devil, Michael Dixon’s On the Psychology of Military Incompetence and Michael Rose’s Fighting for Peace. But he is annoyingly silent on analysis and alternatives

The Cold War framework of the course was one thing, having to polish the soles of your boots another. Then there was the huge effort put into guard duty and tourism in London. Playing Tin Soldiers and being soft-feathered in the expensive mess.

Now Hennessey is a good writer and his descriptive passages of the physical training are excellent. You feel the discomfort, hunger and pain, as well as the pedantry and pettiness. But he is ambivalent about its effectiveness, describing much of it as “irrelevant” and a “mere irritant”, “progress being made in spite of the training that was being done”. He ends this third of the book with a serious and n ominous saying, “Let no man’s ghost say, ‘I wish I had been better trained’.

Iraq

Weeks of boredom, sunbathing, sit-ups, porn and still the pettiness; flip-flops and shorts were banned, even for guys coming in after 24 hour sweltering patrols. They watch more war than they fight; DVDs, PS3s, Xboxes, boxed sets watched in batches of five or more episodes at a time. It was fascinating that soldiers would play war games after coming in off patrol. Ipods are all pervasive, the sound of this war being rap rather than Nam’s rock. The surreal surroundings of the green Zone, full of steroid pumped contractors and mercenaries.

Afghanistan

The book explodes into action as he narrates fire-fights, injuries, the madness of combat and tragically; death. Forget the sanitised BBC reports on yet another couple of ‘they look so young’ casualties in Afghanistan. This is the truth of often fruitless territorial gain through tragedy, territory that is soon lost again, all told in bloody and terrifying detail.

What’s odd in all this is the lack of reflection and analysis. He buckles under the psychological pressure of being loyal to his employer, rather than the truth. In truth, this is a book about how people are trained not to think but to do what they’re told. It’s written by what the Americans call a ‘warfighter’ describing ‘warfighting’. That’s what makes it so interesting. In a way the training works by producing people who fight, unaware of the alternatives.

One could argue that this is the whole point, as it is the politicians that need to decide on policy. On the other hand he starts by reflecting on the anachronistic nature of the training but doesn’t relate it well to the tasks at hand. To be fair he’s being true to himself and his mates, not the war. A sign that he has been indoctrinated is his use of an army of acronyms, which infiltrated everyday speech in the military. For non military readers this can be infuriating as the book has a next to useless glossary.

Other Iraq/Afghanistan books

Lions, Donkeys and Dinosaurs by Lewis page is a superb analysis of hopeless procurement and waste in the military. He has a go at all three services showing the top-heavy structures, wasted expenditure on headquarters, pointless frigates, artillery, aircraft and tanks.

If you want to about the ‘real’ Afghanistan, I’d recommend Rory Stewart’s The Places In Between, his walk from west to east across the country in the depths of winter, experiencing the extremes of hostility and hospitality. Afghanistan, is not really a country, explains Stewart, and needs a deep cultural understanding, before parachuting in crude military or NGO solutions.

Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s Imperial Life in the Emerald City is a depressing account of Baghdad’s green zone, where Muslims are forced to serve pork and “we have no French fries here sir, only freedom fries”. It’s a shocking description of US personnel, the majority of who had never been outside of the US before this posting (they had to get their first passport). A street-cop mentality where appointments were made on political credentials not competence.

My own favourite is Signal Catastrophe, the story of the catastrophic second Afghan war in 1842, where the British invaded, then left having been defeated by the complexities of the culture and idiotic, aristocratic leadership. This one will end in exactly the same way. Plus ca change.

North Korea - educational holocaust

I was one protagonist in a ‘knives out’ debate at Online Educa against Aric Sigman, on whether technology harms the mind or not. What surprised me the most about Aric’s opening slide of some smiling North Korean children, was the fact that he praised the North Korean system of education for its structured approach to learning, free from the interference of technology. Oh yeah?

Nothing To Envy

Well, this year has seen the publication of ‘Nothing To Envy’ by Barbara Demick, which just happens to feature, as its main subject, a defected teacher from North Korea. It’s a harrowing but worthwhile read, showing that education is not always an intrinsic good. In countries where religious fanatics or dictators who promote religious adulation, set the educational agenda, education is the tool by which people are enslaved in mind and body. Kim Il-sung modelled himself on Stalin and the Japanese Emperor, instilling a crude form of Confuscian Communism that saw him as God and his son as the son of God.

There is a legal obligation to have a portrait of the great leader in your home, and even a law that it must be regularly cleaned, enforced by spot-checks. Indoctrination also takes place in collective farms and factories, with regular indoctrination sessions. All enforced by a network of ‘snitches’. But it is in the schools that the real mind-games are executed, with chilling efficiency.

North Korean schools

Above the blackboard, all classroom s have double portraits of the Great Leader and his son. Each school has a separate room, a shrine to the Great Leader, where children must take off their shoes to enter and speak in hushed tones. This religious devotion has been extended to his son, who demanded that another room to be built, as his shrine.

Books are rare photocopied things , barely legible and often copied by hand (by parents) if the children needed to study at home, even paper is incredibly scarce. The title of the book comes from a song that all Korean children know by heart ‘We Have Nothing to Envy in the World’. This is only true by virtue of them knowing little or nothing about the rest of the world. The country and its beliefs are a closed system, with no internet.

Curriculum

Kim Il-sung’s Theses on Socialist Education is the guiding manifesto, with political and ideological education at its core. Children learn by repeating key passages and phrases by heart. All other subjects are taught through propaganda related to the Great Leader. For example, in maths, “Eight boys and nine girls are singing anthems in praise of Kim Il-sung. How many are singing in total?” Or the even more absurd, “Three soldiers from the Korean People’s Army killed thirty American soldiers. How many American soldiers were killed by each of them if they all killed an equal number of enemy soldiers?” One song, taught to primary school kids is called “Shoot the Yankee Bastards!”

Teachers

Mi-ran, the main subject of the book, trained to be a teacher but even her training was a story of horrific suffering, with students living in accommodation with no heating and little food. A curious aspect of teacher training was the compulsory need to learn the accordion, regarded by the authorities as a portable and suitably stirring instrument for collective celebration. Malnutrition was rife. In the end she defected after not being paid and seeing the terrible suffering of the children she taught, and this is all recent.

Children

The real tragedy, as told by this teacher, was the malnourishment, starvation and deaths among the children. Over just three years enrolment in her class dropped from 50 to 15, through famine. She saw them get listless, bring no lunch because they had no food, their stomachs extend, then disappear, never to return. The system, propagated through propaganda-driven education was killing the nation and its children.

For Aric, it’s just another PowerPoint slide, for the people of North Korea it’s an engineered, educational holocaust.

Gates on learning

Bill Gates has some interesting things to say about the future of education in this video. All in all, I agree with what he says, with some additions.

Schools

Gates: K12 school is designed to baby-sit kids while adults get on with their jobs/lives. So he doesn’t see much change here, apart from home schooling which is still only 3/4% of provision. In fact, success in schools seems to be on even more schooling and immersion, namely longer school days, summer catch-up.

He’s fundamentally right here, in that the system will remain intact for a long time. However, he short changes the idea that technology may allow us to get better results without simply adding to the length of the school day. The answer to poor schooling has always been more schooling – but do we really want to inflict this on children? I’d say the answer is better schooling. It is not possible to do this through better teaching, curriculum change, revolutionising the concept of homework, vocational recognition, reducing costs through technology?

Technology

Gates: Feedback, discussion, video etc make technology an increasingly sophisticated method of learning.

Absolutely, we are nowhere near realising the potential of a) what we’ve already got, b) what’s available for free, c) increasing the productivity of educational institutions through the use of technology to manage and deliver learning.

Cost

Gates: Universities/Colleges need to be less place based. A $200,000 education is too expensive, inefficient, outdated and increasingly hard to get. Only technology can get this cost down to, not $20,000 but $2000.

Too true. The tyranny of time and location plague our system and have raised the costs to unsustainable levels. There’s far too many (mostly empty) buildings, far too many 2^nd and 3^rd rate researchers far too many poor teachers and far too little access to good content and real critical thinking tools and opportunities.

Innovation

Gates: No room for innovation in the standard system. Some experimentation but should be about 20 times as much.

This is his most profound point and the one that poses the greatest problem. The belief set, structures and funding methods mitigate AGAINST change and INNOVATION. Vice Chancellors settle, not for leadership, but maintaining the status quo. In the UK, as I was told by a retired Vice Chancellor, it’s chasing an OBE, CBE or knighthood by not rocking the boat.

Google Goggles – mind goggling application

We’re reaching a tipping point in mobile technology where the apps on your phone are better than the apps on your computer. One knockout application (killer apps are passe), and the one with massive potential in education and training, is Google Goggles. It’s a visual search tool on your phone. No more typing or voicing in your request – just point and click.

Point your camera at any object in the real world; a building, landmark, object, painting, business card, shop, food, car, plant, animal etc. Google will shoot back an identification, explanation or further details and links.

Google Goggles and learning

Let’s take this one step further. Imagine a world where, whenever you’re stuck on a problem, a tricky maths problem, balancing a chemical equation, identifying a tree from its leaves, translating an awkward word or phrase in a Shakespeare play, translating a word or phrase from another language, getting a word for an object in a foreign language, the painter of a painting. In the future this applications has the potential to provide help whenever there is something in the real or represented world that you can point to. This is the phone as performance support.

It’s a window into a future where performance support will be linked to just pointing your phone. Want to know what chess move to make – point and click. Want to know where to plant that plant you’ve just bought, how to repair that hole in your wall, set up that electronic device you’ve just bought? Point and click.

Android as teacher

The next level is not the provision of learning experiences directly related to that object. Rather than provide the direct answer or short solution, there may be a mode where you get tutored support or suggestions on how to get the right answer. The phone as a supportive teacher.

It's an application that has so many uses for both learner and teacher.

Android v Apple

Apple may have won the immediate battle but Android will win the war. Android’s an operating system not a proprietary device. It opens up the market and opportunities, not close them down. This is good for education and learning. The projections for iPhone growth are good, but for the Android they’re better. It’s that old adage about being second in a market being better. The development community is huge and code is written in Java. And with App Inventor, the Android market opens up application development to a much wider community that serious coders.

Layar

This is a related augmented reality app that provides layers of useful information over any real scene you point your phone at. Layar is useful for details about locations as well as information on nearest tube stations and so on.

PS

I'm working on an app called Beer Goggles - you take a photo of yourself or anyone you know. It first makes them a little thinner, then younger, then more physically attractive with every new snap.

Fat or obese?

A row has erupted after a minister and prominent physician recommended that patients be called ‘FAT’ and not ‘obese’. Actually I don’t want politicians lecturing me at all on what vocabulary we should use in any context. Are we to call anorexics? Skinbags? Are we to call kids who have learning difficulties ‘stupid’? How about kids who wear glasses? Specky? Would Anne Milton say to Anne Widdicombe’s face that she was a ‘fatty’?

Jamie Oliver has also been attacked for a ‘lecturing’ approach to parents and children. So it’s OK to lecture them on maths, religious education and other subjects, but not on their health? School does much damage to children by feeding them foods with dangerous levels of saturated fats. There’s something deeply duplicitous about a government that wants education to be one long lecture, but eschews advice on nutrition. Andrew Landsley, who made this attack is somewhat ‘obese’ but let’s start calling him ‘fatty’ in public and see how he likes it. Then there’s fatty Tories such as Boris Johnson, Ken Clarke and huge fat f***ks such as Eric Pickles and Nicholas Soames. Let’s use Parliamentary privilege to denounce them as ‘fatties’ in the House of Commons. Cameron himself has a podgy face and Osborne a beer belly. Let’s be clear, they’re fat because they eat too many expensive lunches and dinners. It’s their fault.

CIPD accused of incompetence in Telegraph

Jackie '405k per year' Orme comes under more pressure as the charge of unprofessionalism and incompetence appear in The Daily Telegraph (thanks to Garry Platt for the link). The Chief Executive of LSIS (Learning and Skills Improvement Service) wrote a stinging rebuke to the CIPD’s “wildly inaccurate” report on Government spending on skills organisations. As he listed the report's many errors, he put the knife in stating surprise that the CIPD could be “so unprofessional as to not check their facts” and suffering from “a lack of professional competence”. This follows on from another complaint from NIACE along the same lines.

Here’s the letter in full:

21 July 2010

Dear Sir

Quangos and the facts

At a time of economic stringency it is clearly important that all parts of the public sector are appropriately scrutinised for the contribution that they make to society and for their value for money. Your coverage of the report from the CIPD yesterday gave credence to the popularly held view that considerable sums of money could be saved without detriment to the services offered by four of the government so called “quangos” – namely LSIS, LSN, LLUK and NIACE.

Unfortunately the section of the CIPD report that relates to LSIS – which incidentally is not a quango but a sector led body – is wildly inaccurate. We do not fund LSN as is stated and there is no mention of the £80m cut that has been made this year in our funding. Neither is the fact that we use the sector itself to support improvement by providing staff development, materials and consultancy in areas of government priority. We also deliver the majority of our funding back to the front line and assist institutions that have failed their inspection. In the latter case we are proud to report a 95% success rate of satisfactory or better provision being identified when those same institutions are re-inspected. It is unfortunate that an organisation such as the CIPD that purports to support professional development can be both so inaccurate and dismissive of this activity. It’s a pity too that they can be so unprofessional as to not check their facts or find out how an organisation really works or what it does before rushing into print. I’m sure many of their existing members will be very disappointed in what is clearly a lack of professional competence.

Yours faithfully Dr David Collins CBE

Chief Executive

Learning and Skills Improvement Service

$35 iPad for education

India’s Institute of Technology and the Institute of Science have launched an iPad lookalike for education. The touchscreen, Linux based, webcam (iPad doesn’t have one) wireless device is, according to Kapil Sibal, ready for mass manufacture. Even more astonishing is the claim that the price may drop, on volume, to $20, and eventually to $10!

Add -ons include a solar power charger.

CIPDs Jackie Orme issues grovelling apology & pulls report

The CIPD have been forced to withdraw their report ‘Quangos in the education and skill system’, and the hopeless and hapless Jackie Orme has had to offer a grovelling, written apology. Surely she has to go. She has come under fire recently in TraingZone and the CIPD members Group in LInkedin for her astronomical salary, at a time when the revenues of teh CIPD have shrunk. She pocketed a £57k bonus, while sacking over 40 staff and freezing bonuses for everone else.

This is the message on the CIPD website.

"We have removed this paper from our website as NIACE and LSN, both charities and not quangos, were concerned about appearing alongside quangos in the context portrayed in the paper. We will consider the paper for future publication only following a thorough review."

Just to be clear, they have no idea what they are talking about, as their researchers don't know the first thing about the sector and the status of the organisations within the sector. NIACE is NOT a quango. NIACE, like the CIPD is a charity (as is the LSN also featured in the report), and does genuinely do useful and charitable work (unlike the CIPD in my opinion). The board is not appointed by the secretary of State and it wins the majority of its Government revenues through tenders.

This was a mean-spirited report by a charity, having a pop at other charities. I wonder why? Could it be that the CIPD wants to consolidate its position as ‘opinion’ former? What a bunch of hucksters.

Full report still available from here!

Read the CIPD Report "Quangos in the education and skills system" - [PDF]

Robot teachers – endlessly patient, CPD updates in seconds

The article in the New York Times will no doubt drive traditionalists to apoplexy, so there must be something in this report about the rise of robots in schools. Imagine a teacher that is endlessly patient, always teaches the correct skill in the correct way, provides lot of constructive feedback, can receive CPD updates in seconds, never gets ill and costs less than one month's teacher’s salary? That’s the long-term promise.

What makes all this possible are advances in AI, motion tracking and language recognition. We have already seen what Microsoft have done with Natal in terms of speech, gesture and motion recognition. Plonk this into a robot and we’re really getting somewhere. The point in the short term is not to replace teachers but to replace the teaching of SOME TEACHING TASKS.

The focus, for the moment, is on early years education, playing to the ‘cute’ factor. This makes sense. We could see significant advances in early numeracy, literacy and second language skills in schools with software that provides guidance superior to that of many teachers. In addition, they can be updated, wirelessly, in seconds and can even learn as they teach.

The basic premise is sound and was shown convincingly by Nass and Reeves in The Media Equation – we treat technology as humans if it has the right affective behaviours – good timing, being polite, co-operative etc.. This is how computer games work. With the right movement, sounds and behaviour, avatars and robots seem real. Tens of millions use and experience this phenomenon every day. There’s even a touch of this in your ATM, where you’d rather deal with a hole in a wall than a live teller.

Robots don’t get hangovers, don’t take holidays, never discriminate on grounds of gender, race or accent. They’re patient, scalable and consistent. The ideal teacher!

Robots & language learning

The initial trials have been in learning tasks in autism and English as a second language. S Korea sees English as a key skill in terms of growth and its Institute of Science and Technology has developed Engey, to teach English. Their goal is to have an effective robot, that is better than the average teacher, in 3-5 years. This is part of a general push in robotics that sees robots do things humans do in areas such as production, military, health and education. Hundreds of robots are already in S Korea's 8,400 kindergartens and the plan is to have one in every Kindergarten by 2013.

The University of California has been doing studies with a robot called RUBI, teaching Finnish. Initial studies show that the children do as well in tests as children taught by real teachers on specific language tasks. The retention was significantly better after 12 weeks with a reduction in errors of over 25%. Another interesting finding is that the robots need not look like real people, in fact hi-fidelity seems to be a little ‘creepy’ for kids. Although for an amazingly life like robot watch this.

CES 2010 featured a wonderful talking robot that follows you around the house and teaches you languages. It was remarkably sophisticated, with voice recognition, face recognition, picture recognition (show it a picture and it will say the word in your chosen language).l

Robots & autism

In a collaborative Japanese/US research project, children with autism have been shown to respond positively to synchronised behaviour from a robot. This is used to move the child on to other types of social interaction. In the University of Connecticut, a French robot is being used to with autistic children using mimicry to establish trust. Have a look at Beatbot's Keepon robot designed for kids with autism.

Robots and personalised learning

Personalised learning can also be realised through one on one interaction and the robot engaging in conversations and learning from the learner. Work of this kind has been going on at the Georgia Institute of Technology, with a robot called Simon. The improvements in AI and natural language processing have led to results in the robotic world that promise one to one tuition in the future.

Robots & physical tasks

There’s also the teaching of physical tasks, such as setting a table, where Honda Labs have taught older children to complete the task without the aid of teachers. Robots can already complete physical manufacturing tasks way beyond the physical capability, speed and accuracy of a human. We’ve had 25 years of robotic surgery, with robots being used to do surgery at a distance, unmanned surgery and to minimise invasion. In May 2006 the first AI doctor-conducted unassisted robotic surgery on a 34 year old male to correct heart arrhythmia. The results were rated as better than an above-average human surgeon. The machine had a database of 10,000 similar operations, and so, in the words of its designers, was "more than qualified to operate on any patient." The designers believe that robots can replace half of all surgeons within 15 years. In January 2009, the first all-robotic-assisted kidney transplant was performed at in the US by Dr. Stuart Geffner. The same team performed eight more fully robotic-assisted kidney transplants over the next six months.

Conclusion

It is only natural that robots, which have replaced highly skilled tasks in manufacturing, should be considered for teaching. Automating repetitive, difficult and dangerous tasks has always been technology's trump card. If we know one thing about teaching, it’s that it is difficult and demanding, leading to unnatural levels of stress and illness. If we can, at the very least, relieve the pressure on teachers, that is surely a noble aim. In its own way, simple robotic, screen programmes like BBC Bitesize and e-learning have already automated a lot of education and training. Robots promise to personalise this process. Every passing month sees improvements in movement, gesture and language recognition, with the technology appearing in the games world this year by Christmas. I have no doubt that robo-teaching will be common in schools in my lifetime.

UFI/Learndirect - reports of death greatly exaggerated

Michael Gove's endless, faulty lists were clearly a sign of his inexperience. This is what happens when ideology overrides good sense. To rob the budget for repairing existing schools to pay for new schools for middle-class lobby groups is madness beyond reason.

But this is not the only gaff made by the new Government. Vince Cable, or at least his department BIS, has mistakenly announced the abolition of UFI/Learndirect, not once but twice. The first was on 24 May, which popped up, rather surprisingly on my alerts. The second was on Monday 19 July in an official press release from the COI, on behalf of BIS.

As Mark Twain said, discovering that his obituary had been published in the New York Journal, "Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated" but having your obituary published twice seems, well.......odd!

Would be interesting as UFI HQ is, I believe, slap in the middle of a certain MPs Sheffield Hallam constituency - Nick Clegg!

UFI/Learndirect - reports of death greatly exaggerated

Michael Gove's endless, faulty lists were clearly a sign of his inexperience. This is what happens when ideology overrides good sense. To rob the budget for repairing existing schools to pay for new schools for middle-class lobby groups is madness beyond reason.

But this is not the only gaff made by the new Government. Vince Cable, or at least his department BIS, has mistakenly announced the abolition of UFI/Learndirect, not once but twice. The first was on 24 May, which popped up, rather surprisingly on my alerts, then recinded. The second was on Monday 19 July in an official press release from the COI, on behalf of BIS. As Mark Twain said, discovering that his obituary had been published in the New York Journal, "Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated" but having your obituary published twice seems, well.......odd!

Depressing survey of L&D

It’s has been claimed by the likes of Donald Taylor and Jay Cross, that training must transform itself or risk being ignored. And there is a feeling in the training world that all is not well, and that the deep, dark secret is that training is regarded by many as second-rate, full of odd people delivering oddball stuff using outdated methods.

For the first time I’ve seen evidence that this may be true. So I draw your attention to this independent survey of decision makers at 100 of the UKs top 500 companies (by turnover):

70% see inadequate staff skills as barrier to growth

40% see risk of employee skills risk being obsolete

55% claim L&D failing to deliver necessary training

46% doubt L&D can deliver

less than 18% agree that L&D aligned with business

(Coleman Parkes Spring 2010)

Too often astrology not astronomy

Worrying or what? Imagine the furore around these stats if applied to your production, finance or marketing department. These stats suggest an L&D lag that threatens to hold organisations back in any economic recovery. What lies at the heart of all this is a non-strategic approach to training and development. The industry is mired in a gooey swamp of faddish, non-empirical and ineffective approaches from fuzzy leadership courses to life coaching and NLP, that ignores key competences. It’s too often astrology and not astronomy.

Outdated delivery

Imagine the production department hand crafting products using cranky old mechanical, as opposed to computer controlled, production tools. Imagine the finance department using pen and paper without the use of spreadsheets and computers. Imagine the marketing department ignoring the breadth of marketing techniques and ignoring online marketing. That’s exactly what training departments so often do – the main form of delivery is STILL largely talk and chalk.

Strategic alignment

Getting our houses in order means producing some real strategic initaives within a change management context. It means shortening courses and replacing many courses with more agile and flexible tools and delivery methods (usually online). It means making courses shorter and cutting curricula to avoid duplication. It means less classrooms and depressing 3 star hotel venues and more fast delivery design and delivery (usually online). It means reorganising L&D around a more flexible and responsive delivery. It means a different set if skills within L&D. It means better evaluation, targeted at the decision makers. It means freeing training from that money-making monopoly the CIPD. Above all it means fostering a spirit of innovation within L&D that matches the aspirational innovation of the organisation.

OU the key to future of HE?

1969 was the year we walked on the moon. It was also the year the OU was formed, now an important beacon in the academic landscape. With over 200,000 students (none on campus), it’s easily the largest University in the UK. I personally regard it as the single greatest education institution in the UK, and it’s formation in 1969 (first students 1971) as the most important 20^th century achievement in UK education. Remember that’s it has a much longer pedigree than any of the 64 post-1992 Universities. It consistently rates high on student satisfaction studies and teaching excellence, and attracts tens of thousands of foreign students every year. Remember also the way it reaches out to those with disabilities, in prison, full time employment and in the armed forces. What’s shameful is that other universities haven’t taken the model more seriously in terms of technology, content, support and tutoring.

Better option for many

1 in 4 students at the OU are aged 17 to 25, as ambitious young people want a degree without being burdened with massive debts and the much exaggerated ‘social experience’. It also reflects the increasing thirst for higher education from older, part-time students. Fees are around half that of a campus-based university and a great deal of effort is made to support those who could struggle to pay. In addition, you don’t have the ‘luxury costs’ of the drunken meander through a three year degree with accommodation, living expenses and beer money.

The module, credit system is also admirable, allowing students to progress with a set of wider set of intellectual interests at a pace that suits them. The range of qualifications and sense of clear progression is another virtue. Of course, it’s not without its problems. I, personally, think that it could do without being a ‘research’ university, and its cost base in terms of curriculum development was badly managed and expensive. It also burned £20 million is a spectacularly unsuccessful foray into the US. This was all down to poor leadership and management. I believe however, that these problems have been addressed.

OU model may be copied

I had dinner with David Willetts recently, along with the excellent Martin Bean, Vice Chancellor of the Open University, and several other Vice Chancellors. The OU model got a good hearing and we see signs that this government is sympathetic to the OU model being adopted, in part, by other universities. This more flexible approach to university education would save costs, provide higher quality teaching, get away from building yet more buildings and stop the whole system being fixated with the ’18 year old undergraduate intake’ model. It would drag many of our universities into the 21^st century and allow us to cope with higher student numbers at a lower cost, all without sacrificing student satisfaction and teaching excellence. That would be a move towards maintaining our system as ‘world-class’.