Itinerary

• Delhi to Kulu by small plane
• Kulu to Palumpur by public bus
• Palumpur walking distance to Tashijong Monastary
• Palumpur to Jammu on narrow gauge railroad thru mountains
• Jammu to Delhi via daily train

Tashjong off in the distance

In the Himalyan foothills nearby to Tashjong

Everyone is assembled for the entry of the reincarnated Rinpoche.
Note the “Clown Character” in center screen and the Vice Abbot seated to the left of the long-bearded Lama.  Note spectators in the background.

The Tashijong’s Senior Leadership (1983)

Everyone Heads for the Tent which has been set up in preparation for the Mahakali Dances.

Kids watching me watching them. Everybody has come to watch the dances.

Everyone Rises and Sutras are read to commemorate the occasion
NOTE:  The 6-year-old reincarnation of previous Lama seated on throne

The Temple Used as Backstage

• Costume changes
• Conference
• Way to make BIG Entrance

Table Used for props and important ritual items.

Spiral Dance

• Like the Whirling Sufi Dervishes except much slower
• Moving in circles turning on one leg for extended periods of time

NOTE:  Spectators in background

Animal Spirits

Enter down the temple steps and into the playing area

NOTE:  The Western Saddhu sitting in the upper left background

Good View of Animal Mask wearing monk as he enters  playing area.

Animal Spirits do Circle Dance
NOTE:  Charm held in hand of Cow in forefront

Dead Assemble, Before doing their dance.

Blue Faced Clown with top knot n big ears keeping close watch on two Bon demons.

Pursuing the Demonic Forces and Exiling them from Tibet

A Bon Demoness: Dances in front of Black Hat dancers with ceremonial drums

The Scariest Demon of Them All

Final ritual of the Mahakali ceremony takes place at midnight

End of Day

The post Tashijong Mahakali Dances first appeared on Kantor Consulting.

I

How many of you heard about the “revolution” in Sri Lanka.

Apparently, 1000s of every day, average Sri Lankans attended a demonstration to oust the President of the country.  This led to their taking over his Presidential Palace and several other buildings around it.  They have since occupied this building and it is being used as a Museum of Unintended Wealth and Corruption as 1000s more Sri Lankans walk through the place and literally have the opportunity to see how the other half lives.

This is a classic scene from a Frankenstein movie, when the local villagers and peasants head up to the castle of the doctor and storm it to root out the monster.
It is also exemplified, to a less extent, by a group of Amazon workers determining they want to unionize.  Largely it is the playing out of frustration, anger and resentment towards power, authority and to a lesser extent, wealth.  It is my thesis that this kind of bottom up processing, is at the root of Design Thinking and it’s application in organizational settings.

It is a reversal of values and corporate intentions.

Instead of top down processing, where all strategy and direction for a company flows from the top down, Design Thinking proposes that those who do the work and are most impacted by workforce design and ongoing Operations, should have a say in helping to improve Operations and make suggestions about innovative measures that would focus on the two key drivers in most business settings:

1. How the innovation will help contain costs?
2. How the innovation will increase revenue?

OF course there’s more…..

Increasing employee engagement and satisfaction

Increasing customer engagement and satisfaction.

How can Design Thinking do this?

By providing bottom up processing that is data and evidence driven without the typical filters required to get the data “to the top” of the organization where it is made by company leadership and straights.
Let the people who do the work, design the processes by which the work is done in a more
reality-based framework.  Sounds like Total Quality Management and the work of Jonathan Demming.

What was the key difference between US and Japanese auto manufacturing that resulted in higher Japanese quality?  It was the ability for almost any Japanese assembly line worker to “stop the assembly line” because of an observed defect or process issue.  At American auto companies, this was not possible.

Key outcome of Design Thinking and TQM?

Let the workers take control of their work and share in the pride of successful planning and continuous improvement together.

II

Here’s some background on my experience at the iDesign Institute at Stanford University, attending an Introduction to Design Thinking Workshop.

I attended the workshop in 2018.  There were about 200 participants.

Participants were somewhat diverse in terms of socio economic background, (somewhat affluent), and  educational status (college educated).  A majority of attendees were female and youthful (under 30), but in reflection the diversity of the participants was impressive.

Some interesting points:

There were no chairs in the workshop space.  Everyone stood and moved around.

There were lots of warm ups and ice breakers in which people interacted in different ways as a large group.  The goal was to increase energy and engagement and it appeared to work as there was lots of laughter, energy and physical movement.

Lecture was done in short bursts with lots of activities.  Lecture was  generally based on the power of creative imagination , appreciative inquiry and astute observation.  Many of the terms being used and Science being cited about the efficacy of Design Thinking and bottom up processing as a path to innovation appeared to be derived from Product Development methodologies previously used to great effect at IDEO, the worlds greatest product development lab situated in Palo Alto.  Much of the design for Apple products and many, many other well known products and brands have been invented,  enhanced or transformed at Ideo.  Ideo methodology is based upon concepts derived from cultural anthropology.  There is a heavy emphasis on ethnography, in Vivo observation, piloting different concepts, continuous improvement, and lo fi prototyping with frequent revisions based on user acceptance testing and other forms of direct feedback.

So, after we had been sufficiently warmed up in the workshop via singing, cheering, and greeting one another, we were divided into teams.

There were about 15 teams of between 7-10 people.  This was going to be scenario driven, project based, collaborative learning.   We were asked to imagine ourselves as process-product engineers for a company. We were placed in a simulation together seeking to solve a business problem for an imaginary company.  It was a complex problem.

There were many, many supporting faculty around to help each team.   Each team was assigned a couple of “coaches” while other more senior Design Thinking practitioners circulated around the large iDesign facility  ready to step in and assist.

NOTE:  If you decide to use Design Thinking in your organization, you are going to need to get a core group of resources trained up and certified in the Design Thinking methodology, to ensure that your people really understand the method, its phases and expected outcomes.

After about 45 minutes of group work to design our process and product based upon the requirements provided to us at the beginning of the activity, there was an exhibition.

The exhibition provided opportunities for groups to present on their solution, answer questions, and most importantly travel out across the iDesign facility to have a look at the solutions produced by other teams with the same problems.  It was a fascinating journey.

III

Nobody becomes a Design Thinking expert by attending one workshop.

It is the intersection of Design Thinking, AGILE /SCRUM-based project management and the philosophy of Continuous Improvement and the ongoing attempts to put those methods and values into practice that matter.  Most notably, the attitude of management towards their employees and the value that they, the employees, can bring to their operations in ways that are based on front line experience, motivated engagement and creative problem solving, and as a result of feeling as if they are “being heard” by management, an opportunity to support the organization and gain recognition and financial reward.

The post Design Thinking: Revolutionary Organizational Concept That Suits Current Times first appeared on Kantor Consulting.

Given an organizational need to build capability, solve a problem or enhance efficiency and/or effectiveness, a project gets chartered, some budget is stacked against it and then there is a requirement for a plan that moves along the ADDIE process and becomes the guidelines to the planning, design, development (construction), delivery (implementation) and evaluation (via assessment and other means)  of how that intervention will be  instantiated.  This document is a learning architecture that encompasses all aspects of an effective approach to teaching and learning within your organization.  Many aspects of learning architecture are composed based upon the constraints and benefits that a particular technology ecosystem affords.
Effective learning architecture requires a combination of current tools and technology that can be deployed depending upon the needs of the client.  The kinds of analytics that feed learning architecture blueprints and implementation plans include an examination of a client’s business and capability outcomes and  requirements, the cultural orientation and  available resources that can be used to create the educational intervention, and assorted inputs as interviews or documents such as needs analysis,  curriculum review and maintenance, and audience/voice of customer data , and technical analyses.  Yes, a learning architecture provides a blueprint for the design, development, implementation and evaluation of corporate or organizational training.  Your learning architecture will only be as good as the manner in which the architect truly understood the steady and future state desired based on their own experience and the inputs from the client described above.

Experience design is a fairly new discipline in the field of learning design.  It is of importance to note this design approach emerged during Covid.   The experience of learning, experiential learning is “red hot” because it focuses more on the whole person who is learning and the environment in which they are doing situated.  Aside from work at home considerations, we also have the world of immersive learning and virtual and augmented reality environments that can extend first hand experiences in ways that help to motivate learners and embed learning in highly authentic learning environments.  Dr. Kantor can help you better use your current learning ecosystem, figure out how to spend your previous budget more effectively, and assist you in making what you’ve got better or easing into the future world of experiential learning and global interaction that the is heralded by the Metaverse  and more innovative models of virtual classroom use.

After working with the Cognition and Technology Group at the Learning Technology Center at Vanderbilt, I went on to work as an assistant professor of instructional technology at the University of Houston – Clear Lake.  Instructional technology was basically the use of computers, the nascent Internet chat groups, media such as one-way video, audio recordings and  so-called training manuals.  Once the media left our hands, the next time we would hear about it would be in class discussions, papers, or as student answers on tests.

Interaction with faculty was based on luck and personal fortitude.  If you kept trying, eventually you’d get your face time.
Instructional design was really about the design of the materials being used for teaching and learning and the use of technology pretty much reflected standard, shall I say traditional pedagogical practices.  The key monograph being used in schools was Gagne and Briggs “Conditions of Learning” and that methodology was rooted in an military and industrial complex, behavioralist and strict hierarchical approach.
Coming from Vanderbilt, a hotbed of cognitive theory about teaching and learning, we had tried to apply the use of technology to support the theory of anchored instruction delineated by Bransford, et al and push the technology in ways that extended beyond tradition and embraced both cognitive and neuro learning theory.  One of the most striking aspects of the new technology, especially in the world of instructional video, was random access.

Rather than have to watch a video in a linear fashion, you could jump anywhere in the video you wanted without having to wait for wind, rewind etc.

At the same time, the Institute for Learning Sciences, led by Roger Shank and his Goal-based scenario approach was breaking ground in similar ways, and both organizations were highly collaborative and competitive with one another.

The post How Instructional Design Has Morphed into Experience Design: Why and What Does It Mean? first appeared on Kantor Consulting.

Background

When I first was hired away from Accenture to join Bank of America, I was asked to assume the management of the Bank’s enterprise-wide compliance training.  I was told that my job was going to be creating a version of compliance training that was engaging and would result in “performance change” for the better.

Frankly, I had no idea what I was getting into.

I didn’t know that the culture of  Compliance Training at the bank was all about the Compliance and much less about training.  So, the notion of creating “engaging” training that resulted in “performance change” was an almost impossible task, because nobody really took their Compliance Training as a valued opportunity to increase their knowledge and enhance their skills.  The culture was really permeated with the notion that this type of training was a “pain in the butt”, but had to be done any way so you wouldn’t get in trouble with your boss or get them in trouble for not ensuring all of their people had complied.

What I Learned Via Observation

Having been trained as an applied researcher, I began to conduct some due diligence to better understand the current format and learning architecture for the Bank’s “As Is” state of compliance training.  I also reviewed a bunch of verbatim comments, so-called, Level 1 feedback, based on Kirkpatrick’s framework.  These verbatims were qualitative comments  which different people who worked at the bank provided on the evaluation form-survey, conducted at the conclusion of the  compliance training.

Their Feedback:  The Voice of Customer

Indicative findings based on opportunistic sampling of verbatim data set:
1. It’s the same stuff (content) over-and -over again

2. Why do I have to take the same stuff repeatedly, year after year?
3. Why is this content and training so boring and repetitive?

In addition, I got the opportunity to observe a group of Derivatives Traders taking their compliance training, I noticed that their goal was to finish as quickly as possible and get back to work, rather than spending the time in the training to learn anything.  The most predominant action observed while watching them was how quickly they used their mice to click forward in the eLearning. While I was watching them “take” their training, I recalled that there were numerous complaints in the qualitative feedback that identified a “flaw” in the compliance training.  This flaw consisted of a frustrating tendency of the training software to lock up and jam.  When I observed the derivatives’ traders in training, I could see what the root cause of the problem was.  They were clicking the page forward button before the full page had loaded in.  It was evident that they weren’t reading the training, they were  just skipping ahead  as quickiy as possible

.

Using Design to Solve a Cultural Challenge Around Compliance Training

I knew I couldn’t change the culture of Compliance Training in the Derivative Trading Group, but I could solve the root cause to the “technical problem” they were experiencing.   So, the first innovation we implemented in the product was to make sure that the “forward button” did not appear on the page until the entire page had loaded in.  Complaints went down about jammed software, but in reality, the actual process of learning was still defective.

How We Attained Eight Straight Quarters of Increasing Satisfaction

My first year, we released several new versions of compliance training for Code of Ethics, Anti Money Laundering, and Info Protection.  Each release was followed by a vigorous review and analysis of our evaluation data, level 1 Reaction feedback.  From this analysis, we identified a list of items we could use to continuously improve the products’ usability, quality of instruction and learning opportunities by incorporating Voice of Customer and closely observing, and thereby recognizing, the cultural factors that drove compliance training in the bank and beyond.  As a result of our applied research and ability to rapidly turn around product improvements, we were able to increase customer satisfaction for eight straight quarters.

After 2 years, the form of the bank’s compliance training was complete, and that functional template continued to be used in the bank for the next few years.

Shared Findings & Recommendations

Here are some interesting findings I’d like to share with you based on my three years running BoA’s compliance training and via the experience I have consulting to other, non-financial organizations that were also seeking to improve their compliance training and enhance its value.

Lessons Learned

• Recognize that in most companies, compliance training isn’t training, so much as a way for the company or organization to mitigate legal, reputational and liability risks in the content area being addressed
• The most important component of compliance training in Fortune 500 companies and other organizations is the “Attestation” at the end of the course. This is the page in the training where participants agree to abide by the policies enumerated and discussed in the training. Why is this so important?  Because, if there happens to be an info protection, say a company laptop left in a car and stolen with proprietary data on it, , the company, in this case BoA, is not responsible for the actions of the employee, because said employee agreed to abide by the Bank’s policies info protection policies.  If there is litigation it tends to be a civil case and the Bank is not culpable for the incident or problem, the careless employee is to blame, not the Bank
• Many employees, at least at BoA, had taken the same Compliance training for many years over-and-over again. Only a small sliver of the content was new and significant, and that content was “buried” inside of the compliance training eLearning product in a way that made it hard to find and recognize.
• Banks and other financial solutions are interested in reducing risk, but not at the expense of increasing their employees’ “time in” the training. They monitor time on task assiduously at the bank and too much time training reduces productivity.
• ROI is difficult to measure, but cost containment is less so. Time spent in training, especially when using eLearning is easy to measure and quantify.  If you can reduce time spent in training, without losing the value of the specific learning, it is a win for the business.  This is an ROI that is easy to measure, especially when a minute saved times 5000 participants can be quantified as a significant productivity savings.
• It’s not easy when leadership is fundamentally conservative and narrow minded based on their own school experience, but as a learning strategist and adult learning specialist, one must be willing to fight for the right of employees to self-direct their own learning in ways THEY know has value for them. Organizational leadership needs to “trust” their own employees and let them guide their own learning.  This is worth fighting for, especially in light of recent cognitive research which suggests more self-direction of learning better learning outcomes.
• Assessment of most compliance training is generally an unreliable knowledge test or even worse a quiz with obvious answers at the conclusion of the course. Generally, this quiz has items aligned with the course’s learning objectives.  If retakes are required or requested as participants strive to pass the test, most LMSes allow your instructional designer to set the delivery of test questions in a randomized manner.  Unfortunately, they are using the same or VERY similar questions that are just reordered randomly and served back up to the students.  This is NOT particularly effective if the same questions are just re-ordered.  Another design approach is needed to increase reliability of the testing,  so employees are less likely or able to “game” the assessment.  To make the Federal Regulators satisfied that the assessment has validity, another methodology is needed, so they will validate that the compliance training was sound and met the legal requirements of Sarbannes-Oxley, or some other regulatory screed.

Best Practices

1. Develop assessments that rotate “entire test forms” rather than just the same questions in a Ferris Wheel effect. Really you want to swap out the entire Ferris Wheel and ensure questions are not just aligned to learning objectives but decidedly different.  These are not reordered question, but isomorphs and analogous to ensure near transfer takes place.   NOTE:  The Regulators and Executive Conference Board really liked this approach.
2. Provide access to “Anytime Tests”.  Make it possible for those who have taken the same type of compliance course over and over to test out at any time they want to, not just at the beginning of the course or the end.
3. Add In a “What’s New” section, so those employees who have taken the same type of compliance training in the past, can review what’s new first and then, if they see fit, to brush up on the older, more familiar content, before testing out on an Anytime basis.
4. Make the compliance training self-contained, all links are internal to the product. We learned that if the product links out to the web, participants, especially more naïve users, can get lost on the Internet and have trouble finding their way back in to finish the training.  Keep all links inside the product, so it’s easy for them to find their way back and not spend time noodling around the Internet when they have company business to complete.
5. Give participants the opportunity to either proceed quickly through course content or “dig into” areas of interest within the product that helps to build skills. Most of compliance training is about knowledge transfer and not skill acquisition and personal development.  However, when the compliance training is being designed, the learning architects need to uncover areas of particular interest where management has identified, via needs analysis, performance gaps that have to filled.
6. Where Needs Analysis has identified specific performance gaps that are reducing productivity or efficiency, these “Critical Mistakes” should be treated as a chance to provide those being trained with opportunities to practice the task receive feedback and try again. These opportunities should be salted throughout the compliance training as optional exercises.  These practice opportunities in the compliance training should only be included in those areas of concern that an organization wants to address immediately.

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One would think that with all of the forced innovation in the Covid year we just lived through might result in a an approach to education that would be transformative and progressive, but instead we’ve got a situation in which education delivered via virtual delivery vehicles like Zoom have all but locked down regressive pedagogical strategies.  Since lecture is the easiest, most industrialized form of education, requiring the least amount of effort from instructors and most amount of effort from students, this was the primary pedagogical approach used via the pandemic to “teach” students.  Never mind, the reversion to correspondence-type education…the pack of work that goes out, is worked on independently and returned for grading.  That became a common practice as well.  So what potential improvements to education does the continued use of virtual delivery, the staging of educational interventions using virtual means…what does it have to offer?  This short blog will explore some areas of opportunity that shouldn’t be lost as the return to face-to-face teaching and learning in the fall.  This goes for K-12 and higher education and has implications for corporate training as well.

Chaos in the Ed Domain

“Variation is the enemy of efficiency and effectiveness”

It’s an old saw, but a true one.  When everyone executes a common process in a different way expecting the same result, it eliminates the possibility of in common terminology, processes and robust collaboration.  After a year of desperate improvisation trying to figure out what to do when sheltering at home to avoid infection and using Zoom like tools and packet sending asynchronous learning approaches, everybody’s the expert and thinks they know how to “get it right”.  Here in North Carolina, numerous school districts have set up Centers of Excellence for distance Learning.  They can’t ALL be excellent and what standards are being used to judge whether excellence has been achieved.  Satisfaction? Ha!  Amount learned?  Ludicrous!  Teachers who are happy with the medium and know how to use it effectively?  Ridiculous!  What about school entities that have built out a learning ecosystem that supports course, content and learning management?  Well, yes, if you already were an affluent school or forward looking universities that had the people, technology and processes in place to support the enhancement of existing systems vs. trying to “start from scratch” and come up to speed at the speed of change.

So, the use of distance learning and synchronous modalities like Zoom is at an inflection point.  Every school district administrator now thinks that they are an expert, or at least want to portray themselves as such to their supervisors and higher ups.  Students and teachers are supposed to suffer the consequences without complaint, while parents, normally isolated from school policies and curriculum have a chance to actually observe what and how their children are supposed to be learning and as it turns out, are not happy with how things were done (policy) and what was focused on (curriculum) in ways that are more informed as schooling became transparent and gave them a perspective on what goes on which upset them.

Track the growth of home schooling over the next couple of years to really know and understand the impact of this new set of parental attitudes based on their unintentional close up look at how and about what their children are being educated.

Areas of Opportunity

Access

Collaboration

Independence and self regulated learning

Behavioral tracking and Remediation

Motivating students and teachers with Authentic, Innovative Assessment via On Line Gamification

My next few blog posts will focus on each of the Areas of Opportunity listed above.

In the meantime, if you think I am too strongly articulating my position above, please let me know via Comments and Inquiries posted via this site.

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Ron Kantor Interview, BRN Weekly Jeffrey Snyder

SPEAKERS

Dr. Ronald Kantor, BRN Weekly

BRN Weekly 

Good morning, welcome back to the broadcast retirement network. I’m Jeff Snyder, this is B Rn weekly, for Saturday, February 20, 2021. And Our top story this week, virtual disaster, the impact of COVID on our educational system. Joining me now to discuss this and a lot more is Dr. Ronald Cantor. He’s a learning and development consultant. Ron, great to see you. Thanks so much for joining us in the program this morning.

Dr. Ronald Kantor 

I’m very happy to be here with you. I’m really proud to be here.

BRN Weekly 

Well, it’s great to have you and, you know, this topic of education. And a discussion about Virtual Education couldn’t be timelier. There’s a lot of talk out there about getting our children out of the homes, for education and back in the schools. But I want to seek out your perspective on this. So give it to us straight and to the point. How are you kind of what are you seeing in terms of successes, and maybe some areas for improvement in terms of this virtual learning?

Dr. Ronald Kantor 

Well, that’s very interesting, because if you think about it, it’s really been a virtual disaster. I mean, so much of what’s happened has taken the notion of schooling and turned it on its head. I mean, if you think about what schools offer kids that they can’t get through virtual, it’s the socialization, it’s the sports, it’s the opportunity to interact with teachers and informally, and all that’s kind of gone away. Then add to that, the rationale given for why we have the absolute requirement to return kids to school. On one hand, you have the educational imperative and time lost learning, on the other hand, you have the economic imperative.  You know you can have a good affluent life in the United States, without both parents working.   School fills the gap of childcare, a provision that really doesn’t exist otherwise in our society.  What’s interesting about the conditions caused by the the pandemic is the real possibility that they may actually lead to positive outcomes and transformation.  Even if you think about the meaning of “virtual” disaster, the meaning of “virtual” is not real. So, I would posit, it isn’t a real disaster. It’s an opportunity.  A chance to move in a direction that’s more interconnected, more leveraged on resources that extend beyond the walls of the school and accessible through the Internet. And if you think about it, one of the things we’ll be left with when this pandemic is beaten, and it will ultimately be beaten with vaccines, is that we’re going to be left with many, many more students connected to the internet, many more opportunities to extend the nature of education in ways that were only available beforehand, to the affluent and their children. So my sense of it is, yes, it’s a sort of a desperate situation. But largely, it’s because we are measuring the wrong things in terms of education. The educational system overall, is in a state of what I would call “hysterical panic” about this, because their whole business model has been turned on its head.  This extends across the entire educational ecosystem.  My daughter, who attends a private liberal arts college that costs $75,000, a year is majoring in a subject where the whole industry is shut down due to Covid restrictions.   So, is studying that topic area logical now?   No, not really.   Was it logical beforehand? Maybe not either? Because if you think about it, there’s such a misalignment between what kids are studying through the K-12 years and then how they continue at the university? And then what relevance does that have to the world of work? Unfortunately, if you don’t have a STEM or STEAM background, maybe no relation whatsoever.  What are your choices when you finish school and have to pay off your students’ loans?   You end up becoming a low paid service worker and if you’re luck, a job at Starbucks.   So overall, I think there are issues that have to be resolved in the educational system including that system’s misalignment, its lack of contemporary topics to learn and skill training that make people successful in the workplace. This pandemic has revealed a lot of those problems. And I think that in some ways, there’s no going back to the way it was before as much as  non-creative school administrators, stressed out parents, and paranoid political entities want us to.   Another important point to consider is how and what we measure to determine student attainment and accomplishment? And the answer is, we use outdated standardized testing, much of which seeks to determine how much one knows about a lot decontextualized topic areas, a garbage pile of information that they’re probably never going to use again in their lives, things they don’t really care about, but are obligated to learn despite individual preferences and interests,  because they have to not because they want to or because it’s relevant and useful.  What about the skills necessary to be successful in an interconnected world we’re living in now?   We don’t even measure technology literacy, coding or the development of digital skills.   We don’t measure the successful competencies needed to use technology to learn by getting connected or putting-up assignments, generally the ability to use various systems effectively.  These capabilities are not even being measured, and yet that’s what’s necessary to be successful. It’s an irony that everybody can see right now, and frankly, I think is going to lead to significant change in the future, but not immediately. What we’re moving to is a gradual recognition of the fact that the overall educational system, which may work for some, doesn’t work as planned for everyone. Our educational system was hardly fulfilling its mission beforehand. I don’t think it’s fulfilling its mission for society even more so now,  and I think the pandemic has revealed this in spades.

BRN Weekly 

What are the steps that you would recommend going from where we are today, what I would call point A, and get us to point z, which is more openness, more access, a curriculum, or curricula, whatever the proper grammar is on that is really appropriate for our next generation of leaders and workers?

Dr. Ronald Kantor 

Well, I think we can learn something from the Chinese and how they have approached integrating ed tech and distance learning into their education system.  I was in China in Beijing in 2018, for the Global Education Technology Summit. And I was very impressed.  I discovered, firsthand that the Chinese were already using artificial intelligence in education, and even augmented reality, on the university side, to teach engineering and other topics, which we are hardly even touching in this country. On the on the K-12. side, the thing the Chinese educators and instructional designers recognized was, that the use of distance learning was essential, because the regionally distant cities outside of Shenzhen, Beijing, and Shanghai, just didn’t have strong educational resources, most notably teachers of English, advanced math and science.   So, based on government policy,  they planned was to make the educational system more equitable using the same distance learning technologies were using here in the US to cope with exigencies during the pandemic. But the difference between the Chinese approach to distance learning and ours is that instead of focusing on the content and treating the students as tabula rasas that could be written on via lecture and the transmission of information,  the Chinese instructional and experience designers focused on the emotional state of the students. The Chinese are using artificial intelligence, facial recognition, and various other algorithms to understand the emotional and psychological state of the students who are at a distance. And then they’re providing teachers of those students, intact classes of students mostly, with feedback to know how to improve their approach to engaging those students even though they are geographically dispersed.

We  have nothing close to that here except if you want to include innovative outliers like Dr. Bruce Kosslyn’s Foundry College (https://foundrycollege.org).   Actually, it would be very interesting to reengage the Chinese now that Trump’s gone to see how they’ve moved forward with their systems almost three years later.  Innovative education companies, like TAL, DAO, and CLASSIN were and still are all pushing the envelope in ways that would help us here to improve the quality of our education. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not as if they don’t insist on curriculum, they already have a textbook that’s been nationally developed, is the basis for a course on the use and development of AI solutions that every college student in China has to take.  We have nothing comparable to that here in this country. And one of the reasons is the same reason we have the problems we are experiencing now with the  virtual learning during this pandemic.  Contemplate this…right now…if there are 2500 school districts, there are 2500 solutions. And as you know, based on Six Sigma principles,  variance is the enemy of efficiency and effectiveness.  In the course of a year, we went from a situation where nobody knew what to do, to a situation now in which everybody  claims to know how to do virtual teaching and learning, but these self-proclaimed experts are all doing different things taking different learning approaches, using different technology and pedagogies.  And part of the reason they’re all doing different things is because the quality of of the Department of Education’s solutions offered, actually, the Department’s inability to come up with a common set recommended standard…well let’s just say their contribution to dealing with these challenges has been vapid. Now that may change, but to this point, it’s everyone for themselves, basically. And that is not the best formula for, shall we say societal success. It may work really well for the affluent who can afford to create private pods and bring in their own teachers and pursue other expensive interventions of this sort.  However, for the general public, a typical family in the United States, I mean, it’s been a horror for them in many ways. And let me give you one example. You know, there’s this new role in distance learning that’s emerged as part of the design for virtual learning.  That new role is the learning coach.  Really, this is just a euphemism. And another way of saying a parent, family member or guardian who has the time and inclination to sit next to an early childhood or primary student who basically helps them to do the work. Actually, what we’ve found is that often, these learning coaches do a lot of the work for the students they are coaching.  Another question that’s come up is how one can be tested fairly if the learning coach is sitting next to them, giving them the answers. What’s most significant about this and worth considering, is the crying need for more family education and life coaching.  There need to be ways by which we can uplift family life, especially during the time of pandemic and specifically when there’s so much edgy mental illness out there right now with people who are isolated and not used to living that way.  This is another valuable opportunity that we’ve been given to help the family really feel like a part of the school community.  In my experience,  often teachers are afraid of telling family/parents/guardians what to do, so sources of family education and guidance need to come from higher level administrators who serve at the school district level.

Another interesting factor, that “fits” with any discussion of Family Education is the way in which Zoom based delivery inadvertently let’s attendees pry into people’s private lives. You can tell a lot about people by looking at their backgrounds.  Zoom-like interfaces can provide an intimate view into people’s lives that normally doesn’t exist and certainly doesn’t in normal/traditional school settings. And distance learning can be a very, very powerful means to support project-based learning and group exhibition.     And that’s why I’m working on a concept with some of my former colleagues at Accenture, called the GLAP, a group learning assessment platform.  which posits that we should use this environment as a way to bring large numbers of people together kids with parents watching to show what they’ve learned to do a live gamified event that will provide students and teachers a chance to exhibit what they’ve learned for parents, and to get a nice community thing going because that seems to me a lot what’s missing right now. Instead, we find parents are learning coaches, meaning they’re the ones who have to flog the kids to do the work. And teachers who have become assignors. And Chief, they give them assignments, and then they clock the assignments back in. But as far as how much teaching is going on, virtual learning is a double-edged sword is they’re learning really going on, we have no way to know at this point, because our standardized tests really aren’t applicable, and they’re not and, and the state here in North Carolina, is afraid to allow students to take those tests because it’ll show how much they fall mind. So, they’re not even taking the tests at this point. There’s a lot of interesting opportunities and challenges. And I don’t think they’re bad. I think they’re actually good because we were stuck in a pattern of school, which probably wasn’t working beforehand, anyway.

BRN Weekly 

Yeah. Well, Ron, there’s so much that you delivered through your through our conversation today. And we look forward to having you back again, we’re going to make this into a regular monthly series, if not, with greater frequency. Ron Cantor. Dr. Ron caner, always a pleasure chatting with you, sir. And we look forward to having you back on the program very soon,

Dr. Ronald Kantor 

Jeff, this is you’re filling a very, very important void right now in terms of education for people across this country who nearly need it, those of us who are retiring, so I just want to thank you very much for all of your hard work to make this network, you know, a possibility. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.

Dr. Ronald Kantor 

Bye for now.

BRN Weekly 

Thanks, Ron. Appreciate your perspective.

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