Blog

Awards will be given for successful courses, sites, and products, in three categories: e-learning, blended learning, and mobile learning. Each category includes awards in both the Academic and Business divisions. The winners will be announced in June 2014 at the ICELW Conference in New York, though you do not need to come to New York in order to win an award.

The International E-Learning Association is a leading international group that brings together researchers and practitioners in all forms of e-learning. IELA's sponsorship of international conferences and journals, and its strong membership base, continue to advance the state of the art of the e-learning field worldwide in academic and business areas.

Submissions for the 2014 International E-Learning Awards - Business Division are due on March 1, 2014. For more details regarding the submission process, please check the IELA Awards Page. We look forward to your submissions!

• Online training methodologies (simulations, case-based learning, and more)
• Performance support systems
• Just-in-time learning
• Mobile learning, including the use of iPads, smartphones, and other mobile devices
• Collaborative and social learning
• E-learning design
• E-learning usability studies
• Success stories and case studies
• E-learning experiences in large and small organizations
• Knowledge management
• MOOCs and their uses in professional and career development
• Strategies for implementing e-learning
• Authoring tools and Learning Content Management Systems (LCMSs)
• E-learning evaluation
• Studies of e-learning in practice
• E-learning project management
• The use of virtual worlds in e-learning
• Communities of practice
• Other pertinent topics from the ICELW community

The quote comes from The Seattle Times’ special economics correspondent, Jon Talton, on this Sunday’s business page. In a follow-up to a previous column, where Talton tried to reassure readers that the machinist union’s rejection of Boeing’s 777X contract didn’t spell Detroit-like doom for Seattle, the columnist made clear that the Emerald City does face serious challenges to our collective economic future.

Citing a McKinsey Global Institute research report, Talton outlines a dozen “disruptive technologies” (examples: automation of knowledge work and advanced robotics) that could truly decimate Seattle’s high-tech job markets in a not-too-distant dystopian future. One might term this the “unemployment isn’t just for the low-skilled anymore” phenomenon.

Talton is hardly an agent of despair, however. He provides the community with the two solutions needed to avoid, or at least mitigate, a jobs meltdown.  The first, which Talton has commented on before, is that Seattle needs to recapture its innovative edge.  He notes, with a hint of pride, that Seattle has been one of the leading centers of these fearsome disruptive technologies.  But he adds it has been an uncomfortably long stretch since Seattle has produced an Amazon or a Microsoft.  And time waits for no one. His solution is for our region’s leaders to become “early adopters” of technology.

The other antidote, and the one most relevant to ASTDps members, is for government policy makers to considerably increase investment in retraining workers for the jobs of tomorrow. Let me offer, in my role as the Chapter’s manager of public policy, two comments on Talton’s second recommendation.

First, note that Talton isn’t recommending training. He is saying the need is for RE-training. This is important, because during this year I attended and wrote to you about meetings and conferences where the sole focus was on training the upcoming generation.

To reiterate what I said before about these meetings, I am of course very much in favor of making sure our young people get the training they need to successfully join the workforce in a good job. But there seems to be an almost willful blindness on the part of many of our region’s elite opinion-makers to high, persistent, long-term unemployment and its corrosive effects on society as well as on many unfortunate individuals.

Despite all of the talk about life-long learning, there are no effective policies in place – nor, from what I can tell, even on the horizon -- to support the increasing need for retraining of workers of any age whose job has disappeared due to disruptive technologies. It’s time to get serious about this need.

Second, this need is both a challenge and opportunity for ASTDps and its members. It is in our self-interest to advocate for policies, and the right sort of policies, that will move policy makers toward actions to support more and better RE-training that will benefit our entire region’s workforce.  This includes thinking beyond the state’s university- and community college-systems, as important as they are, to come up with comprehensive systems that link employer needs to a multitude of training options. 

Please contact me if you would like to find out more about these issues and work on them.

William “Bud” Wurtz, PhD

ASTDps Manager, Public Policy

governmentaffairs@astdps.org

• topical openings
• energizers
• ways to form groups
• closings.

Compatible with iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch with iOS 5.0 or later.

This webcast, which I alerted you to a few weeks ago, is now rescheduled for Tuesday morning (Pacific Time) of next week. The OECD and the prestigious Washington, D.C.-based “think tank”, the Center for American Progress, are sponsoring the presentation.

 Panels of top experts will review the U.S. results from the recent cross-national survey of adult skill conducted by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OEDC). (I reported some of the dismal U.S. results to you back on October 9^th.) More importantly, the panelists will debate the implications of the results for American society and needed policy responses by all levels of government and private enterprise. Among the experts are:

Allyson Knox, Director for Education Policy and Programs, U.S. Government Affairs, Microsoft

Brenda Dann-Messier, Department of Education, Assistant Secretary for Vocational and Adult Education

Harry Holzer, Professor of Public Policy, McCourt School of Public Policy, Georgetown University

Whitney Smith, Employment Program Director, Joyce Foundation

I urge you to make a special effort to carve out time next week to watch this important webcast. To join the webcast, go to 

http://www.americanprogress.org/events

at the scheduled time and look for and then click the link to the event.

William “Bud” Wurtz, PhD

ASTDps Manager of Public Resources Information

Seattle University is hosting a Graduate Open House Friday, October 18, 2013 from 4:30-6:30pm in the Student Center. The faculty from the Adult Education and Training program will be available at the open house to answer any questions about the program.

The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development has released results of its recently completed international adult skills assessment survey, considered to be the most comprehensive such study ever.  The results are not pretty for the world’s richest country and only remaining superpower.

What follows are some “headline” results from the survey. Read ‘em and weep.

>The U.S. ranks 16th out of 23 countries in literacy proficiency …

>21st in numeracy proficiency

>14th in problem solving in technology-rich environments

Adding insult to injury, these below-average basic literacy and numeracy rankings come despite the fact American adults have higher-than-average levels of educational attainment compared to adults in other countries.

Wait, it gets even worse! Older Americans have better skills than our average young person between the ages of 16 and 24.  Journalist Amanda Ripley, author of "The Smartest Kids In The World" commented in the Huffington Post that this particular finding "perfectly encapsulates how the U.S. hasn't gotten much worse or much better, but that's not what's happened around the world. Other countries have changed a lot while we have stood still. That's the effect of more of these kids going to stronger education."

The results also show our country’s highest-skilled adults are on par with those in other leading nations.  It is our most disadvantaged citizens, particularly racial and ethnic minorities, who are lagging in the skills race.  Socioeconomic status determines one’s skill level more in the United States than in any other country included in the survey.  People born to well educated, affluent parents in the U.S. do better on the skills tests; those less fortunate do less well.  (See the complete study at the link by clicking here.)

In effect, these results are a repetition, or call it a continuation, of the situation with our K-12/16 educational system.  America’s best students can compete with top students the world over.  But the United States is failing to train a considerable portion of its citizens to world-class standards.

Are you really surprised? Are you motivated to do something?  Because this matters. Late this summer (August 15), there was an excellent op-ed in the New York Times about “What Ails Detroit”. The author, Stephan Richter, publisher of the online magazine The Globalist, says this about Detroit’s once legendary economic power:

“But that dominance [of the automotive industry] was, to a considerable degree, a momentary quirk of history: the absence, in the wake of World War II, of any real competition from other nations. Once foreign competition was re-established, in Europe and Asia, only the superior skills of a nation’s workers and a focus on long-term workers’ training would allow a country to stay ahead. …

“It is tragic to hear voices from Detroit declaring themselves ready for a resuscitation of the city. Revival is a question not just of will but also of the available skills base, which unfortunately has deteriorated as a result of a failure to invest in training.”

Today, the entire country runs the risk of becoming a Detroit writ large. It is time to stop deluding ourselves that as a society we are investing enough in adult training. We’re not.  Not enough to remedy the effects of past disadvantages, not enough to keep pace with the accelerating rates of technology that we have done so much to put into motion.

Quote of the Day: "Our younger population should be doing better than our older population. The older population is better educated. And the younger population is entering the workforce." -- Paul Peterson, Harvard University, commenting on the OECD study

A conference on “How Boosting Adult Educational Skills Can Grow the Middle Class” is scheduled for Thursday, October 10, 2013, 9 – 10:30 AM PT. You can watch the live webcast of the conference for free. Find out how at this link. 

Sponsored by the influential Washington, D.C.-based Center for American Progress (CAP), the conference’s intent is to showcase results from an important new study to be released at the conference on adult skills in the U.S compared to other highly developed countries. 

The study, “Survey of Adult Skills”, was conducted by the Paris-based Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).  The Survey of Adult Skills is conducted in 33 countries as part of the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC).  The U.S. Department of Education requested the special analysis of U.S. results from the survey that will be presented at the conference.

I believe this conference is important for a number of reasons, mostly obvious … except for one. Over the past several months, I have been in a number of meetings and attended several conferences related to education- and training-related public policy, which uniformly focused on improving education and training in our K-12/16 systems for children and young adults. 

I have said in previous posts and will repeat here, the recommendations and reforms proposed are all for the good.  I support them.  But where is the public policy focus on training adults?  As a society and as business people we can’t keep talking on the one hand about how technology and markets are changing at ever-greater speeds and then pretend that this doesn’t require more investment in adult learning. 

The skills gap needs to be taken seriously and addressed. This upcoming conference is one indicator that the policy elites are starting to wake up to this fact. I’ll be watching.  I hope you will too.