The second part of core activity 5.1 was to read Warrior's ‘Reflections of an educational professional’ and to use her thoughts on education as a profession to in framing my own thoughts with regard to elearning. Here are my own preliminary and brief definitions of ‘profession’, ‘elearning’ and ‘elearning professional’ based on the reading
Professionals and professionalism
I read Warrior, and found it triggered some useful thoughts on professionals and professionalism. I felt she got a bit lost at the beginning. I think the question of a professional as someone who is paid (as opposed to an amatuer, who isn't) was a bit of a diversion, as was her discussion of gender discrimination (which might be all correct, but had little to do with the core subject). Once she got going, however, she introduced a number of key concepts and ideas about what a professional is.
I won't comment on her thoughts one by one, but rather give my thoughts that were triggered through my reading of this and other sources.
In my mind, being a professional is related to the following concepts:
Personal initiative - a professional has to be able to make their own decisions and decide courses of action, based on their own knowledge and experience.
Independence - a professional should be trusted and is expected to exercise their own judgement.
Personal responsibility - A professional has to be liable for and takes responsibility for decisions made, and can't hide behind rules and regulations.
Recognised training - a professional will have completed formal, certified training, recognised both formally and by the wider public.
Recognised development path - professionals have a recognised path (or paths) through training, experience and certification.
Experience and career development - professionals demonstrate commitment to a long term career. You can't be called a professional just because you have passed an exam.
Maintenance of skills - a professional is expected to maintain their knowledge of their domain and their skills in working within it.
Paid - I don't think you can have unpaid professionals (although they may do specific activities for nothing, or "pro bono").
Institutional membership - every profession has a recognised national or international body that both represents the collective views of the profession, and is concerned with professional standards and behaviour.
Quality - a professional does high quality work.
Dedicated - professionals are seen as committed to and believing in what they do.
Status - a profession is not a profession if its status is not recognised and respected in the wider community.
As I thought through all this I found it interesting to compare a professional with an expert, a craftsman or a specialist.
You can be an expert in a subject or a domain, without being a professional. You may not work in the domain, you may not be able to hold a position of responsibility, you may not have broad enough expertise (which might make you a specialist) or it may not be in an area recognised as being professional. (By contrast a professional may also be an expert and a specialist)
A craftsman is to be admired for his or her skill, but professionalism is also related to making wider decisions and exercising initiative beyond an object or artefact.
So, after all this wandering, I found it hard to put together a precise definition, but here goes:
A Professional is an individual, recognised for their knowledge and skill in a particular field, and trusted to use their initiative and experience to make important decisions within their area of competence. They will have undergone extensive training in their field, and be certified by a widely recognised national or international body.
elearning
Literally, elearning is learning through electronic means. By extension, we can think of elearning as the wider domain concerned with supporting and conducting learning through electronic means.
Interestingly, I don't think you'd talk about "an elearning student", and we don't call someone who teaches using electronic means as an "eteacher" or an "elearning teacher". So that narrows down the definition to:
Elearning: the theory, practices, processes, technology and people that facilitate student learning through electronic means.
elearning professional
Based on the above definitions, we should be able to say that an elearning professional is a professional whose domain of expertise and work is elearning, and who also meets the other criteria for professionals listed above.
Unfortunately that would mean that right now there are no elearning professionals in our new and developing domain. We currently lack a widely recognised professional organisation (although some are developing, such as the Association for Learning Technology) and there is no recognised career path that would differentiate between a professional and a well trained expert.
At present there are certainly professionals (educationalists, chartered engineers, academics, etc) who also are experts in elearning, and who work in the field, but that isn't quite the same.
Perhaps right now we are studying to become the next generation of elearning experts, and once the discipline has matured, and the supporting scaffolding of a profession has been built and recognised, we will be able to join the first wave of elearning professionals.
Warrior, B. (2002) ‘Reflections of an educational professional’ (online), Journal of Hospitality, Leisure, Sport and Tourism Education, vol. 1, no. 2
Showing posts with label eLearning 'profession'. Show all posts
Showing posts with label eLearning 'profession'. Show all posts
Thursday, 12 November 2009
Professions and professional values - Perkin
Core activity 5.2 first required us to read the chapter by Perkin and write a short comment (maximum 500 words) on whether we think his view of modern society is justified, and also to compare Perkin’s view with alternative descriptions of modern society that you are aware of – for example, the ‘information society’
I found the Perkin paper a fascinating politico-socio-economic piece, but struggled to draw from it too much about professionalism, or the values that entails. I also found it hugely challenging to read and critique, mainly because it is outside my normal sphere of understanding.
My main concern was the age of the paper - 1996 - and thirteen years on I feel his view is no longer justified. Things have moved on enormously since then, in particular due to the internet and the array of knowledge and information dissemination pathways which this has spawned. With this ready access to vast amounts of information, many people and businesses no longer require professionals to provide this knowledge. Obviously expertise and analysis remain valuable, and information always requires interpretation and application, but I suspect the role of a professional as Perkin considered it is changing.
Perkin argues that the terms professional, professional expert and professional expertise should be taken in the widest terms - including the tradional professions, but also 'professional bureaucrats' and 'professional managers'. This aligns with Sockett's definition of a profession as "an occupation with a crucial social function, requiring a high degree of skill and drawing on a systematic body of knowledge", but less with Millerson's "closure of the profession by restircitve organisation" or Lindop's " standards that are publicly acknowledged".
Perkin's wide view of professionals as an elite in a specialised-service based economy seems to echo the initial definition of the information society as a "society in which the creation, distribution, diffusion, use, integration and manipulation of information is a significant economic, political, and cultural activity" and where "the knowledge economy is its economic counterpart whereby wealth is created through the economic exploitation of understanding". However, please note that these are Wikipedia definitions, which is my current level of understanding of the meaning of the 'information society'!
It could be argued that today we are moving beyond Perkin's Third revolution, into another where the professional has a different role. The information environment has shifted radically with the internet giving access not just to formal resources, but to a mass of informal information in blogs, web pages, videos and pictures. It is in this new environment that elearning professionals will have to operate, no longer the guardians of specialist knowledge, but rather guiding students through a chaotic and ever changing world of information.
"The Third Revolution - Professional Elites in the Modern World". Harold Perkin (1996), Routledge.
I found the Perkin paper a fascinating politico-socio-economic piece, but struggled to draw from it too much about professionalism, or the values that entails. I also found it hugely challenging to read and critique, mainly because it is outside my normal sphere of understanding.
My main concern was the age of the paper - 1996 - and thirteen years on I feel his view is no longer justified. Things have moved on enormously since then, in particular due to the internet and the array of knowledge and information dissemination pathways which this has spawned. With this ready access to vast amounts of information, many people and businesses no longer require professionals to provide this knowledge. Obviously expertise and analysis remain valuable, and information always requires interpretation and application, but I suspect the role of a professional as Perkin considered it is changing.
Perkin argues that the terms professional, professional expert and professional expertise should be taken in the widest terms - including the tradional professions, but also 'professional bureaucrats' and 'professional managers'. This aligns with Sockett's definition of a profession as "an occupation with a crucial social function, requiring a high degree of skill and drawing on a systematic body of knowledge", but less with Millerson's "closure of the profession by restircitve organisation" or Lindop's " standards that are publicly acknowledged".
Perkin's wide view of professionals as an elite in a specialised-service based economy seems to echo the initial definition of the information society as a "society in which the creation, distribution, diffusion, use, integration and manipulation of information is a significant economic, political, and cultural activity" and where "the knowledge economy is its economic counterpart whereby wealth is created through the economic exploitation of understanding". However, please note that these are Wikipedia definitions, which is my current level of understanding of the meaning of the 'information society'!
It could be argued that today we are moving beyond Perkin's Third revolution, into another where the professional has a different role. The information environment has shifted radically with the internet giving access not just to formal resources, but to a mass of informal information in blogs, web pages, videos and pictures. It is in this new environment that elearning professionals will have to operate, no longer the guardians of specialist knowledge, but rather guiding students through a chaotic and ever changing world of information.
"The Third Revolution - Professional Elites in the Modern World". Harold Perkin (1996), Routledge.
eLearning and professional development
Core activity 5.1 was to explore a number of websites looking for implicit and explicit definitions of elearning professionals, and then to consider how far the areas of professional development contained in H808 so far have been in line with what is going on elsewhere in the elearning world.
Clearly so far in H808 we've looked at eportfolios, reflection, PDP, and development of technical competencies. These are all related to developing skills to be both a successful learner and successful elearning professional (and presumably H808 students aspire to be both). In my exploration of the suggested websites I felt the focus was less on technical skills, and more on the development of communities of practice, accreditation and on the development of competencies particularly for (possibly predominantly )classroom-based teachers and trainers. I think this perception of difference between H808 and the elearning world based on focus on technical skills being a key part of this course is actually mistaken, as I see the technical elements as being included in order to explore the pedagogical principals they support.
The consideration of what it means to be an elearning professional (elsewhere in Unit 5) aligns very well with the variety of terminology that is out there. While I found none of the suggested websites attempting to define 'elearning professional', the scope of what was included (e.g. administration, facilitation, instructional design, teaching, content authoring, mentoring, learning system production) goes some way to illustrating the breadth of the term. Perhaps H808 is pushing boundaries and asking difficult questions by trying to define what we mean by elearning professionalism. Some of the websites certainly don't seem too questioning (e.g. The eLearning Guild, which appears anyone can join if you want to pay up), whereas others have more stringent conceptions of professional development and maintaining competence (e.g. CMALT, membership of which requires assessment by your peers and experts, with periodic updating). Certainly the questioning, reflective attitude promoted by H808 appears to be one cornerstone of professionalism on which the more rigorous websites (CMALT, EIfEL etc) are agreed.
Clearly so far in H808 we've looked at eportfolios, reflection, PDP, and development of technical competencies. These are all related to developing skills to be both a successful learner and successful elearning professional (and presumably H808 students aspire to be both). In my exploration of the suggested websites I felt the focus was less on technical skills, and more on the development of communities of practice, accreditation and on the development of competencies particularly for (possibly predominantly )classroom-based teachers and trainers. I think this perception of difference between H808 and the elearning world based on focus on technical skills being a key part of this course is actually mistaken, as I see the technical elements as being included in order to explore the pedagogical principals they support.
The consideration of what it means to be an elearning professional (elsewhere in Unit 5) aligns very well with the variety of terminology that is out there. While I found none of the suggested websites attempting to define 'elearning professional', the scope of what was included (e.g. administration, facilitation, instructional design, teaching, content authoring, mentoring, learning system production) goes some way to illustrating the breadth of the term. Perhaps H808 is pushing boundaries and asking difficult questions by trying to define what we mean by elearning professionalism. Some of the websites certainly don't seem too questioning (e.g. The eLearning Guild, which appears anyone can join if you want to pay up), whereas others have more stringent conceptions of professional development and maintaining competence (e.g. CMALT, membership of which requires assessment by your peers and experts, with periodic updating). Certainly the questioning, reflective attitude promoted by H808 appears to be one cornerstone of professionalism on which the more rigorous websites (CMALT, EIfEL etc) are agreed.
- EIfEL (European Institute for E-Learning), http://www.eife-l.org/
- The eLearning Guild, http://www.elearningguild.com/
- New Zealand Ministry of Education (?) ‘Tertiary (e)Learning Research Fund’ (online). Available from: http://cms.steo.govt.nz/eLearning/Projects/Tertiary+eLearning+Research+Fund.htm
- (specifically Shephard, K., Stein, S. & Harris, I., 2009. Professional development for e-learning: A framework for the New Zealand tertiary education sector. Available at: http://cms.steo.govt.nz/NR/rdonlyres/FB28C494-93B1-4C2E-ACE4-E10ACC43A9E7/0/ShephardTitleandExecutiveSummaryFinal2.pdf Accessed November 11, 2009].)
- Digital Learning Asia 2007 conference: eAsia 2007, http://www.digitallearning.in/dlasia/2007/agenda_day3_9.asp
- Research Center for e-Learning Professional Competency, http://elpco.a2en.aoyama.ac.jp/EN/index.cgi
- About-elearning.com http://www.about-elearning.com/e-learning-professional-organizations.html
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