training (was Resourceful BSD/Linux Network Administrator)

[Paul Robinson]

I should warn you that even for me, this is a long e-mail. some of you
should just hit 'D' now - this is not for the easily bored. :-)

On Mon, Jul 05, 2004 at 11:58:50AM -0700, Jeremy C. Reed wrote:

> Many of my students have limited time and limited interest to learn
> FreeBSD on their own. But their employers are interested for them to take
> multiple days of hands-on training.

No, not always.
 
> Also, learning over a "couple months" is too slow versus a class that can
> teach many skills with real experiences in a few days.

You're making a mistake here. You're making a lot of assumptions that even
the worst academics threw out with the bathwater a decade ago. I know you're
not an academic, so it's not your fault. I'll try and help your mind get
through this, but this might be a bit terse.

I'll say this again for clarity before I go on - this is my job, I do it for
a living, I work on a GBP 3.3 million publically-funded project in a
University to deliver learning to those working in the IT industry in the
North West of the UK, I've been working with a research group on this for
two years.... if this was a legal discussion, we'd all be "IANAL", but in
this context, I *am* an expert. For the last 12 months I have lived and
breathed pedagogical analysis, accreditation frameworks, learning objects,
etc., etc...

Right then, now that's out of the way,

Most are in general agreement that JIT (Just In Time) Work-based learning is
what most people working in our industry do. That means you're sat at your
desk, you have a problem, you don't know how to solve it, you go out and try
and find out how to do it. With OSS this typically involves google, some
mailing list archives and perhaps a mail to a list where you think you might
get some help. You do not have the time to phone up a training company and
spend 4 days in a classroom next month at a cost of several hundred quid,
because you need the knowledge *now*.

There are two problems here:

1. The "student" is always learning "just enough" to "get by" and so his 
employer suffers, as maybe half the time the employee is learning rather 
than doing.

2. It does not allow for accreditation/certification as it's unstructured.  

So, a scheme was dreamt up allowing for evidence-based accreditation. This
would mean that you could show me a webserver you setup as evidence you know
how to setup a webserver. I could ask you to produe a httpd.conf that allows
for multiple virtual hosts to be quickly created, and you provide your
evidence which I can then assess within the context of an accreditation
framework.

This could blend with a traditional framework where you are expected to take 
some form of examination, or in fact be completly replaced by it if you're 
just starting out in the industry, to help learners gain certifications. It 
has the advantage that it takes into account existing knowledge and 
experience whilst still allowing a clear pathway through for those who have 
no work-based experience. We are assessing knowledge after all, not 
experience. All accreditations do, with the possible exception of those that 
are so hard, the only way you can pass is with experience (e.g. CCIE)

So, a student could go out, get the accreditation and an employer would have 
a clear indication of an employee's competencies, and the employee would not 
be constantly scrabbling for knowledge - they would have all the knowledge 
needed to do a particular job. They would still be able to do JIT learning 
if needed, but on providing evidence of that learning, they would be able to 
make the time spent on it fit into "accredited study". Neat, huh?

But this doesn't really work either. The biggest problems are:

1. The accreditation frameworks don't exist, and this is partly because job 
roles are ill-defined within the industry (what is a "Sysadmin"? what fits 
in one company, doesn't in another) and can never be well-defined enough to 
make such a framework easy to produce. 

2. You need to structure learning materials to make it easier to fit a
learner's knowledge against an accreditation framework - they need to know
what they're actually being asked to learn, and therefore you need to know 
what information a person needs to do their job.

3. The learning content is itself currently VERY scarce other than through
those ad-hoc channels discussed above, and there is no method to capture
tacit knowledge within a piece of structured learning content. Where it does
exist, it is typically out of date and of a poor quality, or incredibly 
expensive.

So, the whole point of what I've been trying to say, is that via 
collaborative working, a set of LOs (Learning Objects) can be built up based 
on knowledge held by those experts in particular fields that can be mapped 
against an accreditation framework. This would be able to accomodate tacit 
knowledge, could be quickly built up to take into account emerging trends, 
etc. and yet still act as a framework for instructor-led, on-line or other 
forms of learning.

If you want a certification to actually hold water with employers, you can't
just say "let's get people to fix a broken server". It is more complicated
than that. Fixing a server shows a competency, but a competency is only one
part of what needs to be tested for a certification to stand up.

Your short term solution provides a sufficient enough answer to address
immediate structured training needs. It does not, however, fit into a
long-term plan to provide accredited learning and structured certifications
that can be recognised internationally. Of course, that's not your current
aim, which is why you can live happily doing what you're doing. But really,
now we're talking about moving into a different realm, you're not going to
be able to map what you're doing across easily as "the way to do it". You
need to think outside the box a little. :-)

I'm afraid that quite frankly, I don't know how to convince you otherwise
without you going out, spending a lot of time and effort building up what
you want to do and then for you to wonder why it doesn't get the recognition
you feel it deserves. I could send you a dozen books on the matter, but
they're not light reading material, and I'm not paying the postage. :-)

What I will do though, is take these notes made here, merge them into the
open training stuff up on Vagueware, and see if that begins to make any
sense. If it doesn't, no worries - the fault is with me, and I haven't
explained what all this means properly. If it does, then maybe we can start
to make something happen.

I'm not saying my suggestion is perfect, but it stands up to academic 
scrutiny more than anything else discussed so far, so let's start with that 
and let it evolve a little and see where it goes?

As all this lot will go into a wiki, you can edit it to your heart's content 
anyway, or even delete it. :-)

> And as others mentioned, trying to learn on your own may not provide with
> the real-world experiences that a qualified instructor can provide.

Define "qualified" instructor. You're talking about instructor-led training,
which seems an odd segregation to make in the age of blended learning. 

Ideally, you need a mixture of instructor-led, workshop, textbook, tutorial,
etc. and these would ideally be a mixture of on-line, classroom-based,
whatever. It is rather naive to say that "instructor-led training is best",
as people on this thread have already said - different people need to learn
in different ways.
 
> Yes, the students could have learned in an alternative way, but sometimes
> paying money encourages you to learn differently.

The level of absorbtion is not governed by how much money has been spent. In
some countries, higher education is still free you know. :-)

-- 
Paul Robinson
http://www.iconoplex.co.uk/