Who are we educating?

Here is an infographic about who are we educating, tourists or professionals. Unfortunately, I see more educating tourists than professionals. Students cannot be a passive receptor of knowledge. Students need to active participants in the community of IT professionals gaining knowledge and skills through their learning journey. They start out as newbies and work their way to being considered competent by the IT community. Experience is what we hear all time these days by employers and I will tell you that it has not changed in 20 years. I am seeing programs being developed that were done in the late 1990s. Been there and done that. My goal today is to crack the nut of EXPERIENCE and how we get students experience in a program. One technique is found at makinglearningreal.org. This is one of many that I have participated in for years.

Student's Responsibility in Learning

Lately, I am getting concerned that students think that learning is just a one way street and all the responsibility falls on the educators. Well, that is far from the truth. Students must be active in their own learning and understand their role in the process. Employers expect competence. So, students need to understand that they must develop their skills to a level that allows them to demonstrate competence. Grades are meaningless today. It is about what you know and do more than what you know. Educators, on the other hand, must coach students to help them get to competence. I ask each faculty member - what do your students know and can do after they leave your class?

I developed an infographic titled "Are you an aspiring IT professional?" Enjoy! Learning is more sitting in a class. It is about participating in the community of IT professionals and recognized as a member of that community.

Balancing Education and Training

Education vs Training Debate

There is a long standing debate in higher education - education vs training. I have been in education only environments, training only environments, and a mix. I will tell you that a balance between education and training is needed.

If you just focus on training, then you end up with someone who is unable to understand what is going on and has issues with problem solving. If you just focus on education, then you have someone who has no skills and unable to function in a work environment. Unfortunately, I see this quite often in the IT education world. Students take a bunch of classes which focuses on very little hands-on and ends up with no skills to be able to find a job with. This is a huge issue.

My attitude now is we need 50% hands-on training and 50% education. Students need to understand the underlying principles of the training they are doing but they need to develop skills to be employable. Employers are unwilling to take on on-the-job-training for a new graduate these days. I understand why. It takes about 2 or more years to get a new graduate employable and billable. That is a lot of money to invest in someone. But, employers still need to provide training to on board the new employee but that training should be focused on that particular job but not on the key knowledge and skills they should be coming into the job with. Unfortunately, the consulting industry provides the type of training that should be in colleges. They should be doing more advanced training and learning the tools and technologies particular to their needs. But, that rarely occurs right now.

As educators, we must provide project-based experiences to students. They will be motivated and willing to work harder with these type of experiences. They get inquisitive and start asking the right questions about how things work under the hood.

Sorry State of IT Education

Here is an interesting article (Sorry State of IT Education and Sorry State of IT Education (part 2)) that has caused a buzz in the community recently. The age old dialogue between Education and Training is one that dates back decades. There has to be a partnership between educators and industry. There has to be a right balance between the two. But we as educators have to figure out how to do a better job preparing students to be IT professionals and right now we don't do a great job at all. I will write a lengthly blog topic on this over the next few days. 

Software Engineers are in great demand!

I work with quite a few employers and they all have been telling me that Software Engineers (SE) are in great demand right especially in Health IT and financial services. Baseline has an article about how SE are in great demand so there is some confirmation of what I have been seeing lately.

Now, what does it take to break into SE? Well, you need to have PI type of skills. You need a broad IT skill set with depth in an area. Also, you need to be skilled in a domain. Right now, Java skills in depth through J2EE and .Net are both in heavy demand. I also see companies with needs in LAMP also.

References

Software Engineers are in great demand

New Innovative Startups

One of things I like to research are the innovative projects that are being funded by Venture Capitalists. TechCrunch wrote an article recently on the best YCombinator Startups.

One of the challenges of integrating voice into an application is complexity to do so. A new startup, wit.ai, seems to have solved this problem with an API to integrate voice commands into your app. This will be fascinating to watch the viability of this company going forward.

There were other projects but I found interesting the number of Health IT projects. Right now Health IT is pretty hot so it is not a surprise funding is happening with Health IT projects.

I am always on the look out for new innovative education technologies. Clever is an interesting application that looks to help integrate multiple legacy systems. See it at getclever.com.

References.

Best Y Combinator Startups
Clever: Ed Tech Startup

Course Design

If our job is to prepare students for the workforce, we must balance teaching the knowledge and skills to students. Students must be more active in their learning. The days sitting in a class listening to faculty lecture needs to be a thing of the past. We need to focus on courses that are centered on projects and not fake projects but real projects that will help students prepare for the workforce. So, class could be structured as follows -

The Project Context

Weeks 1-3 Proposal/Requirements
Weeks 3-8 Design/Implementation
Weeks 8-9 Testing/Deployment
Week 10 Project Delivery

There are some key principles that the students need to master. Faculty can provide reading assignments and videos that provides the foundation knowledge needed to do the project. You will find that students will be more motivated to learn because they will need information to do the project. The concepts support the project instead of the project supports the concepts. There is a tendency to add a lot of concepts and you end up just mentioning them with no depth to learning. This forces you to only cover what is needed to do the project. The focus of the course is the student has been hired by X to do Y. Information about the context of the project gives all the information needed to understand the domain the project is in. The context is as much information about the company and other details needed to do the project. We want to students to simulate working and have deadlines for students to meet. Week 10 is presenting the final product/paper to the client. Students learn to write technical documentation such requirements documents, etc. This is reinforced in each course. Some courses might provide a requirements document and the course is focused is on delivering a product. Some courses might be just to deliver a requirements document. The goal is to make the work real to students who are working in a term. For some faculty, this technique seems very foreign.

I always get but the students do not know anything. Well, they are increasing not learning concepts anyway in a traditional model. They are forgetting everything in a few months anyway.

We are not doing our jobs as educators. We need them prepared to work. The classroom needs to be redesigned like the workplace and provide tasks/projects that students work on just like they were in an actual workplace. You will find a more engaged student and more satisfied with the course at the end. From January through March, we piloted several project courses (one undergrad and one grad). 100% of the students would rather have a project course than a traditional course. I have done these types of courses for a long time with great success. It is not easy and requires more work by the faculty but we need to do something different if we want different outcomes.  More to come ...

College Enrollment Declines

John Ebersole in a Forbes Article in December wrote -

"According to data released by the Census Bureau earlier this year, college enrollment for fall 2012 was nearly half a million lower than the year prior. This decline, it reported, was driven by students 25 and older who accounted for almost 90 percent of the decrease."

I have a hypothesis of the decline for 25 and older students in education. In the IT workforce, experience and skills outweigh education today. I have talked to a lot of employers and friends and there is a consensus among them that is startling to me as an educator.

If education can not help students with the experience and skills, why would people enroll in school? Why would someone rack up debt if there is nothing for them at the end of a program? What is the ROI for someone to attend school?

People attend school to help them move up in their careers or into careers. If the school can not help them with that I can see why enrollments are down. We have to do a better job in understanding the ROI of students and why they come to school in the first place. I think there is a disconnect between education and the workforce and gulf is getting larger.

Thankfully, there is a solution and we have to transform learning to improve the situation. We have to provide the experience and skills in a program of study. We can not just educate; we must educate and train. We must listen to the needs of students and employers and be the bridge between the two. We can not put our heads in the sand and hope the world changes towards us. That is not going to happen. We must lead! We must transform! We must help and not be a barrier to success! Our success is our graduates success!

References

An Upside Down Economy - Education Cycle

Digital Badges - Are they a solution to the credentials issue?

Digital Badges

     There is a credentials issues in IT education. For employers, grades are meaningless today. They do not tell them what a student can do today. They want to know what the competencies of graduates are and what level they are at. A resume does not really tell an employer much except what is told to them by their candidates. A resume lists the experiences and skills they have BUT not what they can do.

     There is a movement called Digital Badges. Digital Badges is a technique that allows someone to document the skills someone has. The concept is similar to the Boy Scouts Merit Badges. I am hopeful that badges could be a solution but I am concerned that badges are given out when someone completes a task or series of tasks. How do we know what is learned in these tasks? Someone could do the tasks but not learn a lot.

    I believe a combination of the prior learning assessment (PLA) and badges could help this out. Experience is what employers want today and PLA is a way to measure that learning has taken place. So, I would like to see more accountability in how badges are awarded and not just awarded for completing simple tasks without some assessment of the learning taking place. This does not mean that we will just create a test and when they pass we award the badge. It is much more than that. Students must demonstrate the skill and also the knowledge gained in learning that skill. This will provide some accountability that the badge the student has earned truly illustrates the knowledge and skills learned in that badge that was earned.

References

Digital Badges

The Death of the Entry Level Job

This recent email we got from an employer sums up the issue that we face as IT educators -

He looks like he is on the right track in terms of growing in his young career. However, our internships and full-time positions are very competitive, and he doesn’t have a lot of experience or education at this point. We are looking for people with the drive and dedication (which I’m sure he has), but also experience, work history and education means a lot. I don’t think he would qualify unfortunately. Have a great day!

For the last 10+ years, I have researched the IT employment picture and increasingly employers are not satisfied with new graduates. Some even think it takes 2 years to get someone billable. The consulting firms have figured out that they must provide training to prospective employees that lasts anywhere from 6-8 weeks. I am puzzled why we as IT educators do not provide the education and training necessary to be successful today. We, at Stratford, have decided to transform our IT programs to change how we prepare students for the IT workforce. It will not be easy but we have to. We have an obligation to our students to help them be prepared to work at graduation. I have been working a new model and have prepared a white paper on this issue.

Updated: Learning through Experience

I'm back. Sorry for the long delay in blog posts. I am now going to provide a concept map of learning through experience. Learning is more than just sitting in a classroom, taking tests, and getting degree. It is about becoming a professional. Becoming a professional is about being immersed into the activities of a community of professionals. Immersive activities is about the learning experience. Learning takes place through experience. The learning experience consists of practice fields and real fields. Think about how different sports get ready for games, the real field. They practice. They are put into simulated experiences and also do deliberate practice. Simulated experiences are like scrimmages. Deliberate practice is like practicing techniques over and over again until they are mastered. Simulated experiences and real fields consists of a coach, activity, and a learner. The biggest difference between a simulated experience and a real field is about identity. Practice allows learners to practice a professional identity but it is the real field where becoming a professional takes places under real world conditions. Nothing can replace the actual experience but simulated experiences are good to help learners practice skills under a controlled environment. The coach is the teacher in this model and their provide just in time teaching and assess performance during practice and real fields. There are many ways to assess the experience of a learner through performance assessments. We will review different kinds of activities in a later blog post. We will also explore the role of a coach in a later blog post.