Great Job for Readers of this Blog

Because you dear readers must care that learning interventions are research-based, this job may be of interest:

JOB DESCRIPTION

Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center 

Position Title: Director of Learning Sciences Program in the Department of Surgery

Department/Section: Surgery

Reports To (Position Title): Vice Chair of Education and Chairman of the Department of Surgery

Expectations for All Employees:  Supports the organization’s Code of Excellence and Values by exhibiting the following behaviors:  Integrity, Respect, Compassion, Excellence, Stewardship and Community.

Age Specific Care Requirements:  N/A

Position Summary: 

The Department of Surgery at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center has embraced a goal of international recognition for innovative learning strategies that foster the acquisition of skills and knowledge.   Current initiatives include developing surgical residents as educators; improving the lecture experience through flipped classroom, simulation, and team based learning; and enhancing the intraoperative teaching experience.

We are seeking a Director of Learning Sciences to help develop and implement a strategy that creates and sustains a community of learners to meet this goal.  A background in medical education is not essential. In the process of this endeavor, the Director would work with our clinical education faculty and students to foster and promote opportunities for interactive learning, including networked learning and team-based learning, as well as to support active learning by providing multi-modal learning opportunities.  It is anticipated that Director would provide guidance on effective teaching and learning strategies, particularly with regard to educational technologies. We seek a leader who can develop relationships across Harvard University (Harvard Graduate School of Education, Harvard Business School, as well as Harvard Medical School’s Office of Global Programs, Center for Educational Technology, and Department of Continuing Education).

Reporting directly to the Vice Chair of Education and Chairman of the Department of Surgery, the Director or Learning Sciences is responsible to assess needs, plan, develop, implement, and evaluate educational activities, including those directed at Harvard medical students, surgical residents, and postgraduate continuing medical education.  The position will focus on the application of state of the art and emerging instructional technology related to online and classroom learning, intraoperative learning, including both instructional design and assessment..  This position will work closely with faculty from different divisions and will also work collaboratively with a range of departmental offices focused on research programs and faculty development and promotion.  The position may also interact with faculty in the Learning Technologies Center at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and across the University as needed.

Primary Duties and Responsibilities

Resident and Medical Student Education:

  1. Implement and evaluate rotation specific (synchronous) educational activities and instructional technology to improve learning outcomes related to acquisition of technical skills and enhanced clinical decision making.
  2. Apply state of the art and emerging instructional technology to improve quality and content of asynchronous didactic lectures and assess impact of these initiatives. Research and test instructional technologies.
  3. Guide the usage synchronous and asynchronous delivery technologies.
  4. Create / assist in the creation of course-related digital content
  5. Advise faculty on technology components of multimedia assignments and provide troubleshooting to students on multimedia projects.
  6. Assist faculty in design and deliver highest quality education, including use of instructional technology and coaching sessions on teaching and learning, as needed.
  7. Contribute to consultations with community regarding meeting pedagogical challenges through the thoughtful and appropriate use of technology.
  8. Collaborate with faculty to improve intraoperative teaching experience and assess impact of these initiatives with and without the application of instructional technology in the operating room setting.
  9. Initiate a program to enhance the capacity of surgical residents to serve as educators for fellow residents and medical students through curriculum design directed at small group discussion and case method teaching.  In the process, it is anticipated that resident presentation skills will be enhanced and residents will acquire skills in teaching through application of simulation and educational technology.

 

Postgraduate Continuing Medical Education (CME)

Collaborate with faculty to develop innovative CME offerings, such as traditional courses, online programs, and other postgraduate education that generates income for the department

 

Other

1. Consult on preparation of grant proposals and manuscripts in surgical education.

2. Assist in the design and evaluation of resident, fellow, and faculty education research projects.

 

Qualifications/Skills & Knowledge Requirements:

The appropriate candidate for this position will have 5+ years of experience in education with a minimum of a MA degree. A Masters in Educational Technology is strongly preferred.  The ideal candidate should have excellent computer, writing, communication, and organizational skills, and be able to manage a multitude of tasks and meet deadlines.  Candidate needs to be proficient with MS Word, Excel, and Powerpoint and needs to be adept using web-based applications.

 

Supervisory/Management Responsibility:

Responsibilities may include managing Harvard Presidential Instructional Technology Fellows, as well as an administrative assistant who will also be responsible for supporting the surgical faculty Harvard Medical School promotions process and other faculty professional development initiatives.

 

A nice post

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Read more

Case Question — Concept Mapping, Question Answering, Multiple Sessions

In this scenario, John and his best instructional-design team have to decide whether to utilize concept mapping, question answering, or multiple sessions instead of just presenting material in the normal way. Can you help them make the best decisions?

Stealth Messaging for Chief Learning Officers (and other learning executives)

After years of being embedded as a consultant in organizations who have struggled to move their stakeholders beyond a training-centric model to a performance-improvement approach, I finally realized that our painstakingly slow progress might be due to our own failures in getting our messages heard.

We in the workplace learning field are over-reliant on conveying our messages in a way that attempts to connect to our stakeholders’ logical, analytical, conscious cognitive processing. The problem with this — beside the fact that it is obviously not working — is that most cognition occurs subconsciously. We’ve been trying to sing underwater.

I’ve always been enamored with the idea that we need to find the most important causal factors and focus on those–not on the hundreds of factors that might have minor impact. I’ve followed this approach in reviewing the learning research — finding the most important learning factors, not the fad-of-the-year learning factors. But this leverage-point approach applies to our workplace-learning organizations as well. We should be looking for our most potent leverage points and focusing on those.

So, after some lengthy reflection, I have written a book chapter which describes how our leaders — our chief learning officers, training managers, and other learning executives — might restructure some of their organizations’ standard operating procedures to send stealth messages that resonate at both a conscious and unconscious level with their stakeholders.

You can access this chapter — which I should warn you is in rough-draft form — by clicking here.

If link doesn’t work for you, go to Work-Learning Research catalog.

 

Speaking on Stealth Messaging

Also, come here me talk about this at the ASTD International Conference next week (May 7-9, 2012 in Denver, Colorado, US). Here are the details:

Tuesday 10:00 to 11:15AM

  • Room: Mile High 1F
  • Research-Inspired Rubrics to Boost Training Transfer to On-the-Job Performance: The Example of the Course Review
  • Co-Presenter: Russ Spaulding of DIA

Wednesday 10:30 to 11:45 AM

  • Room: Mile High 1F
  • How Learning Executives Can Use Stealth Messages to Change Their Organizations. For Example:  Moving from a Training-Centric Approach to a Performance-Improvement Approach

I’m speaking under the auspices of the ASTD Forum, a group of organizations who meet regularly to share best practices.

Chapter 41 — Change Management and Stealth Messaging

I recently completed a chapter — a first draft anyway — on change management for workplace learning-and-performance professionals. It’s so good I couldn’t wait to share it with you.

The chapter is too long to print here right in the blog, so I’m going to offer you a link below.

In the meantime, let me offer you a summary and some provocative quotes from the chapter.

 

Chapter Summary

The chapter discusses the following:

  1. As workplace learning-and-performance professionals we have an incredible need to be successful in pushing for change.
  2. How to use the soft-power of stakeholder management, as well as using hard-power when it is required.
  3. Stakeholder mapping, and particularly the idea that our goal is not necessarily to get everyone to agree, but to get people to move toward agreement and support—and away from resistance and active blocking.
  4. Exhortations and grand visions are not enough to change long-held mindsets—that while we need to “educate,” we need to go beyond education to alternative approaches.
  5. How we can use stealth messaging in our standard operating procedures—in the practices we are already using—to utilize multiple channels to change long-held mindsets.
  6. Utilizing leverage points—standard operating procedures we use now—that could be modified to send more effective performance-improvement messages, to help our organizations move toward a focus on performance and effective work-learning.

i.    Course reviews
ii.    Course evaluations
iii.    Trainer evaluations
iv.    Recruiting of work-learning professionals
v.    Training requests
vi.    Performance data
vii.    Workplace performance assistance
viii.    Learning needs analysis
ix.    Annual reporting to senior management

Quotes

Unfortunately for us, we’re the training weenies. We’re the spineless gelatin of the organizational world. Our betters tell us to heel, and we lick their boots.

I used to believe—foolishly I see now—that all we had to do was “educate” our stakeholders to change their mindsets…If you want to change a long-tenured organizational practice, utilizing a short-term education tactic will be grossly insufficient.

Stakeholder management allows us to swim upstream because it temporarily slows the water so that we can make progress. Ideally, to create meaningful sustainable change we would reverse the heavy flow of our organization’s cognitive trajectory. In other words, we would develop new mindsets all around. We would aim to float downstream with our coworkers, in a flotilla of inner tubes, bobbing contentedly, lovingly embraced in the warm water a new collective mindset.

By being embedded in the battle, I’ve come to see how difficult it is to move the workplace learning team toward more effective approaches.

Two warnings to aspiring visual-model creators—be very careful to communicate all the right messages, and realize how difficult it is to create a model that is both simple and true.

We in the training field have an inherent tendency—damn if I haven’t seen this over and over again—to believe in our power “to train.” We seem to believe that our words, our stage presence, and our unique ability to use powerful metaphors can enlighten all who hear our clarion calls. This is one of our biggest failings—we believe too much in the power of our own words.

 

Link to Chapter

Click to download the chapter.

Let me know what you think!!

–Will

Five Failures Translated into French

My post on the Five Failures of Workplace Learning Professionals has been translated into French:

Many thanks to Frédéric Domon of Entreprise Collaborative.

http://www.entreprisecollaborative.com/index.php/fr/articles/231-5-erreurs-de-la-formation-en-entreprise

Immersive Learning University — Upcoming Conference

This is going to be a great conference, first, because I'm doing a keynote address, second, because I'm also speaking on Situation-Based Learning Design, and third, because this conference will have some very unique elements.

In addition to me, the conference highlights other experts in learning and simulation. Dr. Richard Saetti will speak on using cinema and simulations. Brandon Andrews and Dean Fouquet will talk about mobile simulations. Phil Clements will speak on the business ethics of immersive learning. Mike Graham and Ken Spero will discuss how to blend soft and hard skills in simulations. Ron Kantor will speak on social media and immersive learning. And the list goes on.

This conference provides many unique advantages compared with other conferences, which aren't as focused on the development of simulations and immersive-learning environments. First and foremost, the folks who are leading the discussions provide a blend of practical wisdom. These folks don’t just talk about immersive learning; they’ve actually built simulations that work. The conference is designed to have two tracks, one more conceptual—to ensure that we learn the right mental models about simulation design and delivery—and one more focused on the how-to’s of authoring simulations—to help us understand the nuts and bolts of how to actually build simulations that work.The conference is also going to provide a great opportunity for learning and networking, because it's going to be a small, intimate affair. If you want a chance to hob-nob with learning and simulation experts, here is your chance.

The conference is sponsored by NexLearn, creators of SimWriter (a simulation authoring tool). All conference attendees will get a copy of SimWriter Simplicity–so even folks new to simulation authoring can build their own simulations.

EARLY-BIRD SPECIAL Ends Shortly in about a week.

To check it out or to register, click here.

Want to Contribute a Chapter (on social media in higher education)?

CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS – Do you use new technologies and social media to teach in higher education? Please consider submitting a chapter (by January 15, 2012) to the upcoming book "The Plugged-In Professor". Details, contact information and an easy-to-use template are all available at http://nova.wpunj.edu/wilderh/Plugged-in_Professor_Call.html.

Course Review Template

You clicked!

As promised, here is the secret: The Course Review Template is NOT $100,000, it is NOT $50,000. The Course Review Template is free!! Just another way that Work-Learning Research works to meet its mission of creating transformative improvement in the workplace learning-and-performance field.

All you have to do is download the Course Review Template and use it. It’s just two pages, and though it looks rather straightforward, it holds within it the secrets of successful training courses.

In fact, the reason for all the marketing hype is to get you to seriously pay attention to this simple-looking tool. Without the introduction, you might not notice how powerful the Course Review Template can be.

As I said before, it’s research based, it’s practical, it is a provocation for improvement.

To get it, click here to go to my original blog post on this revolutionary tool.

 

Thanks for your interest!

 

Will Thalheimer, PhD
President
Work-Learning Research, Inc.

(contact me at: info at work-learning.com)

 

External Battery for Your Laptop–A surprising find

My Dell Vostro laptop (after about 2 years of use) regularly runs 2 to 2.5 hours on its battery. It is a powerful laptop.

I bought the Lenmar external battery to help me work on long-distance flights and to take to coffee shops, meetings, etc. (where I'm not sure I'll be able to find an electric outlet). I used the battery only once on a 5 to 5.5 hour flight from San Diego to Boston. And it worked great (so far) so I thought I'd tell you about it.

I used my regular battery till I had about 20% charge left. I plugged the Lenmar into the place where my power-cord normally goes. It quickly (within about 30 minutes) boosted my battery capacity to about 98%–all the time I was still using my computer. I didn't have to reboot like I might have had to do if I was switching laptop batteries. I unplugged the Lenmar and continued to use my laptop and had about 50% left of it's capacity when the flight attendant told us to turn off all electronics. In other words, I probably had my computer on for about 5 hours, and it's likely it might have gone on for up to 5.5 to 6 hours.

I don't know whether this Lenmar external battery will always perform this well, but so far, it's perfect for what I need it for.

1. It doubled my battery life.
2. It's about one-third to one-half the price of an extra computer battery.
3. It's reasonably small, a little smaller than an Ipad.
4. It didn't get hot (a little warm maybe).
5. It's easy to use.
6. It is better than carrying a second laptop battery because you don't have to shut down your computer to install the battery–you just plug it in. It is bigger than a regular laptop battery.
7. You can also charge your cell phone (I think at the same time, though I haven't tried that yet)
8. And it looks good too.

In its first use, the Lenmar external battery appears to be a real find. I had no idea external portable batteries for laptops existed–and there seem to be only a few on the market that can handle laptops.