Note to Cohortmates: This post is lengthy, as it describes my three-week inquiry journey to questions that I am interested to hear your perspectives on. I know time is precious as are your expertise and insights, so feel free to jump to the end for inquiry questions that I’d love to invite your comments on. (I promise I don’t have artificial intelligence to tell if you do that [bad personalization joke]).
This is a critical reflection about reflections, and how it inspired further critical inquiries for me throughout the past three weeks of this course that relate to my individual paper topic, personalization.
Personally, I struggle with reflective writing. When I reflect on why, I think it is because I have not had to practice reflective writing much in my undergraduate experience or within my work in a corporate context. My undergraduate experience did not involve online learning and consisted of traditional lectures, summative assessments and mostly research or business papers. Instead of reflecting through writing, my learned strategy (and what was commonly used in both environments) was to collaborate with others in a lecture/meeting room and ‘talk it out’. For example, early in my career I took a business writing class and I was told that if an email had to be longer than one major idea, that indicated it was time to pick up the phone or call a meeting. However, I also recalled that I did writing for the educational function of my role, where I wrote for online content or content in educational workshops. I realized that although there may have been a preferred outlet of talking face-to-face with people, my struggle with reflective writing may be because I usually have a purpose for my writing (ie. educating, informing, persuading). So what, then, is the purpose of reflection? This led me to another important question. Why do so many educators place high value on reflection for learners? I say that because I hear it a lot from my network, especially from K-12 and higher education educators and speakers at learning conferences from these contexts. In observing this, these questions led me back to my organizational context – a corporate one.
In my corporate context, I’ve observed reflection in company activities such as project lookbacks (ie. when a team looks at what went well and not well after a project is complete), reflecting on performance objectives at year end and reflective activities built into educational workshops. These are great reflective practices, but I also noticed that they are typically done in a face-to-face setting. What about in the online learning environments? From my own observations, traditional corporate e-learning modules do not typically contain many reflective exercises. I could speculate many reasons for why this would be, but I do want to identify a potential major reason.
As companies compete in the world today, what I’ve witnessed personally is the pressure on learning and development professionals to make online learning faster for learners to digest. This is line with how much change management is coming into companies (shout out to LRNT 525!), especially ones that have been slow to come into the digital world (and therefore need to make some pretty big changes typically in a very fast timeline). In addition, our corporate learners need to be continually equipped with new skills as the external world changes and knowledge fades fast (insert fun fact that I can’t remember but heard at an event about how fast a software engineer’s knowledge now becomes irrelevant in the world of tech).
So how can we tell a learner who needs to learn a skill today for a project starting tomorrow, that the training involved will take a week to accommodate time for a reflective activity? Especially when, as demonstrated by all our group project presentations, there are several libraries like Lynda.com, Coursera, edX or TED that are just a click away for the learner. Because isn’t that the issue? Reflection takes time (or does it?). In my own experience as an adult learner in this Master’s program, I have experienced just how long my own reflections take. I’ve also experienced the feeling that my reflection is rushed for deadlines when I am given a week to reflect. Therefore, I think; how can I impose a shorter timeline on my learners and expect it to be creating the same value that it would create in a higher education setting when the course is spread out over many months? As a result, how can corporate learning and development professionals expect to put reflective activities into their online learning, given this integral time constraint that they need to meet to continue to create value in their companies? This question now led me to another question on how we could better integrate reflection into corporate online learning; How can we decrease the time aspect away from reflection? To me, the answer may lie in my individual topic – personalization.
Personalization can be described as the ability to tailor learning experiences to their personal and preferential information, by gathering and analyzing learner information to create customized learning (Garcia-Rivadulla, 2016). So how do we as learning designers personalize reflection? Isn’t reflection by it’s very definition a personalized experience? Isn’t it tailored to you because the reflection is about your thoughts as a learner? Through my experiences as an adult learner being asked to reflect in this MALAT program, my answer to that last question is no. This personal observation led me to consider our overall summary in my team group project about how the quality assurance process for learning design needs to accommodate multiple learner needs (see Figure 1). I was especially intrigued by my team member’s Krista’s topic of neurodiverse learners and how they have specific needs that, when unmet, may mean they cannot contribute as meaningfully to the community. This is just one example of a learner need that can be identified and met with effective learning design to ensure that the learner is getting the full value (or as our group labelled it: ‘awesome sauce’) from the learning.
Figure 1: Awesome Sauce’s infographic for our team’s critical inquiry into the edX educational app for the instance of edX101: Overview of creating an edX course (edX, 2018)
Using this team insight as described by the above infographic, I came back to my original question of how to reduce time for reflective activities. Learners’ diverse needs likely require accommodation in a reflection activity for multiple reasons. Using myself as an example, reflection may not be a practiced habit and may not seem inherently meaningful for my learning at the outset. Therefore, personalization can be built into the learning design of a reflection activity to provide an accommodation for the learner and make it more meaningful. Like other constructivist educators as defined by Ertmer & Newby (2013), I believe that to be effective, learning must be relevant and meaningful. As discussed above, effectiveness in a corporate context may include a timeliness aspect. Therefore, personalizing reflective activities may result in decreasing the time needed for reflection, as it could adapt the activity more for a learner’s needs allowing them to more quickly define meaning from the exercise and thereby, participate more quickly in the actual reflective part of the reflection activity. In this way, personalization could include offering more optionality for them to derive meaning and value from the reflective learning experience. For example, in a reflective activity, rather than providing text only, a visual could be given or worked examples that involved differing perspectives that were not prescriptive, but demonstrated how different reflections could be. Also, to accommodate some neurodiverse learners, the information could be all in one place instead of in many places in the online learning environment, so that it would not feel like such an overwhelming task. If you had the capacity (and budget), you could also add artificial intelligence to the learning design to allow learner data to be translated into a more personalized learning activity based on testing the learner for individual differences in cognitive processing, as Belk, Germanakos, Fidas & Samaras propose doing in a 2014 presentation at a User Modelling, Adaptation and Personalization conference (as cited in Hutchison, Kanade, Kittler, Ricci, Dolog, & Houben, 2014).
What are your thoughts? As I’ve observed through my research so far, there can be many interpretations for the term personalization. I am using the term personalization as it pertains to the ability to tailor learning experiences to their personal and preferential information, by gathering and analyzing learner information to create customized learning (Garcia-Rivadulla, 2016). With that in mind, here are questions that I identified along my inquiry journey which I invite your comments on:
• Is reflection already a personalized learning activity?
• Do you think adding personalization to learning makes it more meaningful?
• Do you think reflection in learning takes time (ie. longer than a day) to be valuable for a learner? If not, why?
• Have you used reflection activities in your context and have you found them to be effective for your learners? If so, how did you know it was effective?
• Do you find asking learners to reflect is easy to do or have you encountered learners that struggle with it as a concept?
References
edX (Producer). (2018). edX101: Overview of Creating an edX Course. [MOOC]. Retrieved from https://courses.edx.org/courses/course-v1:edX+edX101+1T2018/course/
Ertmer, P., & Newby, T. (2013). Behaviorism, Cognitivism, Constructivism: Comparing critical features from an instructional design perspective. Performance Improvement Quarterly, 26(2), 43-71. DOI: 10.1002/piq
Garcia-Rivadulla, S. (2016). Personalization vs. privacy: An inevitable trade-off? IFLA Journal, 42(3), 227-238. doi:10.1177/0340035216662890
Hutchison, D., Kanade, T., Kittler, J., Ricci, F., Dolog, P., & Houben, G. (2014). User modeling, adaptation, and personalization : 22nd international conference, UMAP 2014, aalborg, denmark, july 7-11, 2014. proceedings. Cham: Springer International Publishing. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-08786-3
Image Source:
Photo by Redd Angelo on Unsplash
May 28, 2018 at 4:36 pm
Thanks Nicolette for this very thoughtful post. There’s lots of good food for further discussion here. In corporate settings critical reflection seems to take place mainly, as you note, in groups or teams, and they’re explicit processes. These activities range from post-incident debriefings or reviews of a project’s successes and failures (during development, at the end, or both), to laying a foundation for a strategic plan. These are of course good things, and organizations that don’t undertake these as part of a constant improvement strategy are missing out. When it comes to just-in-time learning, that too has its place too in meeting the constantly changing needs of the workplace, if properly implemented; some it may very practical and pragmatic. And I’m sure a lot of individual reflection goes on all the time, mostly unseen, as employees try to figure out what went wrong or right, how to fix a problem, how to get better at something, and also what kind of learning they might need moving ahead. However, apart from occasional HR practices (usually on lunch time), I have seen very little personal critical reflection encouraged in a systematic manner in the workplace. I’d be interested to hear how participants from the corporate world feel about your questions, and what their picture of reflective learning in the workplace might look like. Perhaps in PD sessions, retreats, or even taking courses that encourage the practice of reflection? Leading us to…
…one of the reasons higher education exists is to provide more space and time for reflection, to encourage thinking more broadly about things and development of critical insights and self-awareness as part of a learning journey. This is a somewhat different process, but hopefully complementary, and it’s an interesting question as to how this approach intersects with learning for adults, especially when many such learners are managing time between work, home and school to manage a busy life.
As for personalization, if I understand it correctly you are advocating more varied ways to promote, encourage and guide reflection activities in education. Did I get that right?
I look forward to others’ thoughts on this.
Irwin
June 4, 2018 at 6:10 pm
Hi Irwin,
Thanks for the additions you provided to my ideas as well as the support for some of my thoughts with your own experiences – this was valuable for me to further internalize the learnings from my reflections.
I liked your use of the word ‘explicit’ to describe specific reflective practices in the corporate workplace. I would also further add to your comment that organizations that don’t take the time to reflect on projects may not only be missing out on opportunities, but potentially are making themselves less competitive and perhaps even stifling innovation that could happen under more ‘explicit’ reflection.
It also resonated with me that you observed reflection as a major part of a corporate employee’s development but that rather than being ‘explicit’, it holds more of an unseen presence (which may also be an implicit one ;)). I was thinking that this may explain the popularity of learning management systems (LMSs) to capture learner data , as this ‘unseen’ portion may be difficult for learning and development (L&D) professionals to assess impacts on the learner that relate to L&D’s organizational educational efforts.
Further, your statement that higher education provides us as adult learners with the time and space for reflection provided me some real food for thought for a goal that I strive for in MALAT, but do not always take the time to recognize. What you described – fitting learning into the ‘messiness’ of an adult life – reminded me of the concept of lifelong learning and recalled a quote that I came across in reading about adult learning theory:
“there are few educators who would disagree with the principle that lifelong learning is a good thing but the important questions are about the types of learning that the concept promotes, the life that it encourages us to lead, who benefits from this and the nature of the society that it upholds” (Merriam & Bierema, 2013, p.20/21).
This ties together your observation with how the type of reflection that we practice in MALAT can relate to benefits to the organization that we as the adult learners work at, the team we work within and other related stakeholders. However, I think these benefits can sometimes be ‘unseen’ by us as learners (at least in my own experience) as it interweaves so much with thoughts and ideas that are sparked from the marriage of our experience in addition to the knowledge we acquire through MALAT.
For your last question, I was advocating personalization as not only an approach to provide learners with increased ways to reflect but more so, I was suggesting that this ability within personalization could imply an inverse relationship between increased personalization and reducing the time that it takes for the learner to practice reflection. This would be as opposed to the learner spending time to make the activity more meaningful for them prior to undertaking the task and thereby, reducing the benefits intended by the design of the reflective learning. Instead, the increased presence of options that accomodate diverse learner needs may allow the learners to derive more meaning from the exercise at the outset and therefore, may contribute to an increased intrinsic motivation for them to practice reflection. Hope that explanation makes it clearer. I believe it adds a layered question to the research that is focused on determining qualitatively or quantitatively whether personalization makes learning more meaningful (which would be a given assumption for this theorized relationship to exist).
References
Merriam, S. B., & Bierema, L. L. (2013). Adult Learning: Linking Theory and Practice. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
May 30, 2018 at 11:36 am
Hi Nicolette,
Great post, very thorough!
In regards to one of your questions:
• Have you used reflection activities in your context and have you found them to be effective for your learners? If so, how did you know it was effective?
I have recently stated incorporating more reflection activities into the courses I teach. When I started teaching, I didn’t give them much thought and did not believe that they were valuable as a teaching and learning tool. As I have matured as a teacher, I find that effective use of reflection allows the learners to deepen their understanding of a concept or understand better their own learning process.
Anecdotally, I realized it was effective after I implemented my first reflection activity when I had many students comment that it was only after careful reflection that they realized some of the valuable concepts I was trying to teach.
June 4, 2018 at 6:24 pm
Hi Steve, thanks for sharing your own educational experiences with reflection and how it engaged the learner further into the concept. I agree with your comment that reflection is a tool to understand better understand their own learning process (great observation!). I think this actually ties tightly with constructivism and its implication that learners need to take more ownership in their learning, especially now that they have the digital tools to do so (Sheninger, 2014).
References
Sheninger, E. (2014). Pillars of digital leadership. International Centre for Leadership in Education. Retrieved from: http://www.leadered.com/pdf/LeadingintheDigitalAge_11.14.pdf
June 2, 2018 at 4:41 pm
Hi Nicolette,
For me, reading about reflection raises more questions than it answers.
How would we know if written reflection was providing less benefit than spending the time doing something else?
How would we know what the ideal time is to reflect on a task?
Does reflection need to be written or is thinking about it sometimes enough? I reflect on many of the things I do but only ever write down my reflections if it is required of me. I will however write down things I might want to change the next time I am doing whatever it is I am reflecting on, which is one component of reflection.
Does written reflection provide similar benefit to everyone, or does it vary significantly? Does written reflection provide little benefit to some people?
June 6, 2018 at 1:10 pm
On behalf of Katie who is experiencing technical issues on posting comments to my site, I am posting her comment under my profile on her behalf. Please note that this comment is from Monday June 4, 2018:
Great post Nicolette, I’m really enjoying the approach many people have taken in this course to personalize and reflect on their learning journey. It brings a more human side to the academic world that can sometimes feel rigid and robotic when it comes to expressive writing. Much like you, my commerce degree was not the most helpful when it came to teaching me to write at an academic level and I felt a little out of the loop when I started this program. With a topic like learning and technology, I was expecting far more creative control, platform exploration, and tactile skill development as opposed to heavy research and formatted paper writing. As I progress through the program, I do see the need for the foundational research related to learning theories, design, and issues related to the topic but I would agree, it’s hard to shift your mindset to one of reflection when it’s something you’re really not used to doing.
You asked many great questions in your post, specific to incorporating reflection within corporate learning strategies, this is something I never really considered before because you’re right, time is of the essence in the corporate world, and often times, time is money. In many organizations, I could see reflection being determined as an “unproductive use of time” and not something that senior executives would necessary budget for. It’s unfortunate though, as I do think it’s valuable, especially when you look at the empathetic design approach and consider the needs and desires of your learner over your own (Goldman, 2012).
Although I don’t have experience incorporating reflection in the corporate learning projects I’ve been involved with, I do think it’s something to consider. I’d love to hear if anyone else has experience with this and if so, how was it done? Does reflection look like physical allotted time during a training seminar? Is it prescribed in an online setting as something to come back to after the training?
Thanks for bringing up this topic Nicolette, I will be sure to let you know if I end up incorporating this aspect down the road!
Goldman, S. et al. (2012). Assessing d.learning: Capturing the journey of becoming a design thinker. In H. Plattner, C. Meinel & L. Leifer (eds). Design thinking research: Understanding innovation. (pp. 13-33). Berlin: Springer.