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How Fine-Grained Will New Credentialism Get: Credit For Watching a TED Talk?
jyosim writes: In a sign of how willing some companies are to consider alternatives to higher education, services are popping up that allow employees to track their informal-learning activities so they can be added to their credentials. These activities can include such things as watching a TED talk, a Khan Academy video, or reading a newspaper article. "It’s easy to poke fun at a single TED talk or a single article and say, What is the merit of this and what’s the efficacy of a single article?" says David Blake, chief executive and a founder of Degreed, a service that logs what employees are learning online. "But when you zoom out and look at a year’s worth of learning," it adds up, he argues. "The average professional’s time on videos, books, and articles will substantially outweigh their time inside a classroom. In aggregate, it is the story of our lifelong learning."
I'm becoming convinced TED talks actually make people stupider. Here's a TED talk about it.
While we do a lot of our lifelong learning outside of formal structures, I think it would be dangerous to rely on this until it can demonstrate that people did not merely watch, but actually now know and understand the material. That may be difficult to measure in an unstructured environment, but without it, the system will be ripe for abuse and ultimately fall into disrepute. Especially because you can't even confirm that someone watched a video, but only that it played for its full duration on a specific machine.
I am among other things an accountant. In accounting there is a principle that if the cost of tracking something is larger than the benefit received by doing so then we don't bother tracking it. It provides a bright line for when we are clearly wasting resources on something that does not add value. I have a hard time believing that the value of tracking education to such a fine grained level would outweigh the administrative cost of doing so.
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TED Talks nowadays seem to be more sub-industry leaders, not world-class industry leaders.
While it's good that the TED Talks have grown, that very growth has pushed aside what originally made them great.
Of course not.
He thinks he can have a business model to leverage the synergies of holistically tracking of the buzz-wordification of the educationalizing of people as it pertains to encouraging companies to place value on his system, thereby affording him a platform to optimize his return on his own personal branding in a lucrative fashion.
This is just more examples of companies trying to tell us what the way of the future is for education, while trying to capitalize on it, and without any supporting evidence.
Follow degreed.
I mean, can you imagine a bunch of little micro-acomplishments like self-assigned gold stars on someone's resume? "In October Larry watched 8 videos on how to do something, representing a year-over-year increase of 100% for that period." I just don't see this happening.
Now, the data acquired by a bunch of people reporting what they've watched, and the accompany ability to monetize and exploit that ... well, I'm sure that's all part of phase 2.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
My employer spends a significant amount of money on training. Maybe you just need to get a new job.
That's funny. My current I.T. job is for the government. The older workers told me that they used to fly out to Microsoft for training and conferences. That stopped ten years ago. If you want training or attend a conference, you have to do it on your own dime.
Hmmm... that's weird. I've got my budget open and there's this line item for "Training and Conferences". I hope I didn't make a mistake when I used that to pay for training some staffers in mobile development this year...
Every system of this nature is going to be fundamentally divisive, arbitrary, incomplete, and inaccurate. It's not possible to design a "fine-grained credentialism" system without requiring the full dedication of one person's attention to the activities of another, for every waking hour of the observed person.
Divisive: Where today coworkers have no qualms about sending interesting/educational links to their coworkers, like interesting reads in a technology journal or a tutorial on a new feature of some software (for example), if these things will be counted as "credentials" that improve hireability, job security, and/or compensation, then individuals will be motivated NOT to share anything they learn or read with coworkers, since their coworkers could use this to advance their own credentials, and get a leg up on the person who shared it with them. The people who succeed would thus be recipients of well-intentioned coworkers' educational resources and information, without sharing anything back to their coworkers.
Arbitrary: What counts "for (micro)credit", and what doesn't? Where do you draw the line? If you draw the line at some arbitrary place, there are going to be educational resources that people use, which are extremely relevant to someone's job that actually enhanced their suitability to do their work, but don't count for credit. If you don't draw a line at all, or set the bar so low that just about anything can be accepted, then a lot of people could arguably gain "credit" just by watching CNN and claiming credit for the random sound bytes that sound off information that pertains in some general way to the field the worker is in. Microsoft stock went up? Well, I'll claim a credit for Technology! Because Microsoft is Technology! Oy vey...
Incomplete: There are many experiences that can be very educational for someone, but don't have any authenticity, quantifiability or verifiability to them. For example, if you are on a 3-hour bus ride and strike up a random conversation with a passenger who happens to be in the same field as you, and you learn something entirely new from them that opens your eyes and enables you to do your job better, can you claim credit for that? How would the organization know whether you're lying or not? How many of these little nuggets can you squeeze into their system in a day without being flagged for possible forgery? If there's a limit and you can find it, you better believe the min-maxers will find a way to fill up their daily quota, every day, without fail, on their way up the corporate ladder -- walking on the heads of honest people who probably are more competent than they are.
Inaccurate: This is really the biggest problem with the whole idea of "credentialism" from life experience or gaining "micro-credits" for every little thing you do or learn: you cannot implement a system, short of Orwellian 24/7 total surveillance and constant manual, human monitoring, that *fairly* and *accurately* captures exactly what each person has learned every day, and what kind of merit that learning deserves. Those are actually two separate problems: actually capturing all of the distinct learning events, and coming up with some kind of a system to determine how useful, educational, or meritorious those events were with respect to the individual's suitability to fill a certain role in a job.
If the system is too rigid, you miss out on things like open source projects, reading/responding to mailing lists, the aforementioned "bus conversation", etc. If it's too open, people will gamify their careers through lying or taking the easiest course toward getting an advantage over people who are vying for similar jobs, all so they can make more money.
Now granted, the de facto education system is basically an extreme example of a system like this that is simply too rigid and too coarse-grained to be fair, but making it fine-grained doesn't actually solve any problem: you're just shifting the problems to another set of equally severe problems, without making the hiring an
Then the bean counters took over, hired more and more bean counters, and sucked up all the overhead. But the requirement on my part didn't go away, so Ridiculous things became training, like Wikipedia articles, or online tutorials.
I never claimed a TED talk as career development, but in a world ruled by accountants, who think the main product is accounting, I could see that.
I'll be there will be an accountant hired to keep track of it too.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
"Quality and Quantity are two different things when it comes to learning. "
You nailed it. Once again a service sector process, teaching and learning, is trying to be managed as an industrial manufacturing process. "X number of hours looking at learning stuff equals job efficiency" with out any regard for how learning actually gets done or know if it even happened.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
People would set up "learn farming" systems similar to today's "perk farming" systems, to make it look like they're watching TED talks and reading technical articles on half a dozen devices at once all day long.
What's the difference? Watching a TED talk or reading a technical article doesn't imply that any understanding, retention, or learning has occurred between the ears of the content consumer.
You can never know everything, and part of what you do know will always be wrong. Perhaps even the most important part.
During my tenure at Motorola SPS, it was a written rule that all employees get 40 hours of training every year. In the late '80s my management spent quite a bit of money to send me to UNIX administration courses of questionable value (I was a CPU geek using mostly MVME systems with rarely more than a bootloader, much less a full System V installation) to get me my hours. A change in management found that training was the easiest budget to reallocate for other purposes, however, and so it always was. By the mid-90's, when I asked my boss if I could go attend a training session that was exactly in my area of responsibility and I needed to extend my knowledge, I was told that since I spent what he believed to be an hour a week reading EETimes and IEEE Spectrum (at home, on my own time), he had already credited me with 50 hours of training and since I was beyond the 40 hour requirement I should ask him again next year. I wouldn't be surprised if the managers today are tracking IP addresses to form a way of crediting training with no cost at Freescale, if the 40 hour requirement survived the spin-off.