Career Development/Social Media

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Initiative Open Student Support, OER University
Status Draft concept in development
Funding Pursuing organization for funding.


Project summary

Digital literacy skills for social media is an international priority for all adults. OER resources for developing social media skills are prerequisites for learning success under the open student support initiative of the OER University. Currently these needs are not being addressed in a scalable, affordable and universally accessible manner.

Brief problem statement

The majority of adults do not have the digital literacy skills needed to enter or succeed in the workplace. They will need to participate meaningfully in social media technologies in order to be able to adjust to the rapid changes in most workplaces. Social media encompasses a range of contemporary web-based technologies that facilitate scalable and interactive communication around the creation and exchange of user-generated content -- these skills are becoming essential not just in the workplace, but perhaps more importantly for participation in learning, the community and the family. It is estimated that social media accounts for 22 percent of all time spent online in the United States of America (Nielson 2010: Online) and the most visited websites of the world are social media websites (i.e. Facebook, Youtube, Blogger, Wikipedia, Twitter)). However, existing learning resources for skills development in social media are sparse and inadequate because they are typically vendor specific, restrict reuse due to restrictive copyright arrangements and not designed for an adult audience.

The vast majority of adults are excluded from utilizing the benefits of social media for work and learning due to a lack of skills in using these technologies. International data collected by the OER Foundation (OER Foundation, 2009,Online) confirms that 64% of new account holders in their wiki projects have not created a wiki account prior to signing up for an online wiki skills course.

Career Service Professionals

The vast majority of adults are excluded from utilizing the benefits of social media for work and learning due to a lack of skills in using digital technologies. For Career Services Professionals, there is strong interest in social media skills training, to enhance their leadership, job effectiveness and career advancement, and to support clients in effectively using social media to secure meaningful employment.

While face-to-face training is preferred, a blended approach to social media skills training offers considerable advantages in cost-savings, reach, scalability and ultimately, achieving desired outcomes.

Proposed Intervention

The proposed project involves:

  1. Model development:
    • Integrating and refining existing pedagogical approaches from existing tools and digital literacy approaches for reuse in social media contexts.
    • Drawing on the research and experience of conducting Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) which typically attract more than 1000 learners per course.
    • Building on the groundbreaking work of the Commonwealth of Learning (Vancouver), the OER Foundation (New Zealand) in pioneering scalable and low-cost online training models - which include an apprenticeship / skills certification component. Since adoption in 2008, the Learning4Content skills training project has provided free training opportunities to more than 5200 educators in 135 different countries.
  2. Building expertise & capacity: The refinement of existing models will contribute to building expertise in successfully scaling digital literacy training internationally using open education approaches. Many literacy trainers, themselves lack the digital social networking skills that are so important. This project will include participation by literacy trainers and thus upgrade their skills and their capacity to create, design, and deliver effective literacy training using modern technologies.

Phases

Phase 1: Design and development

  • Review learning activities, exercises and pedagogical approaches adopted in the digital literacy training initiatives.
  • Develop and implement an online communication and reporting strategy to maximize participation and engagement of all stakeholders in the open design and development process.
  • Collaborative and transparent development of the curriculum outline for sub-units and subsections of the social media literacy toolkits covering the dimensions of communication, content collaboration and multimedia. (All stakeholders will be free to participate in the development of the curriculum outlines.)
  • Develop 12 independent study tutorials / toolkits for online delivery using mass online workshop approaches totaling a minimum of 120 notional student learning hours. The toolkits will incorporate blogging, micro-blogging, social networking, wikis, social bookmarking, image sharing, video sharing, live casting and presentation sharing. (Using open development methodologies, all stakeholders will be free to participate in the development of the toolkits.)
  • Develop Apprenticeship and Certification Framework, based on the WikiMaster Framework

Phase 2: Delivery (piloting), research and evaluation.

  • Pilot and evaluate the delivery of 6 mass online workshops to refine the design approach and implementation models for institutions to scale and adopt these teaching and training approaches in their own organizations. (Note, the pilot offerings are designed to research and refine the resource toolkits and pedagogical models. They will be presented free of charge to all participants, and registration numbers will not be restricted in any way.)
  • Ongoing communication and stakeholder engagement
  • Evaluation report and sharing of guidelines for organizational implementation of the model.
  • Research: Groups: (1) Aboriginal; (2) Newcomers / Immigrants; (3) Disabilities

Phase 3: Deliver (full-scale), certification, monitoring and evaluation


Background

  • Cost is a big issue
  • The Place of Social Media
  • Social media is recognized as being an important tool for undertaking career service work. 24% believe it is very important, while 41% think it is important. Only 4% believe that it is not at all important.
  • Social Media and Client Training
  • Only 11 percent is very skilled - which poses challenges in educating clients about social media tools; 12% are very involved compared to 42% who are not at all involved.
  • initial training, and then downstream to clients -
  • Top 5 research gaps are:
  1. Labour market trends
  2. Social media / web 2.0 / cybercounselling
  3. Mental health
  4. Post-secondary education
  5. Career issues for immigrants / new Canadians


Meeting training needs

  • Lack of funds is the main obstacle to accessing necessary career development information. Over two-thirds (67%) mention it as the greatest challenge to meeting their ongoing learning. A shortage of time (46%) and the fact that training is not offered in an accessible venue (41% are the two next leading obstacles

Preferred Training Method and Access to Information

  • Receiving training in-person is favour over accessing learning remotely. In-person workshops / seminars (51%( were rated as the most preferred type of training followed by conferences (45%) and courses with face to face delivery (34%). That being said, Webs site & Internet searches is by far the preferred means of accessing research and information on tips, trends and techniques in the career development field. 80% favour this method followed by online magazines or newsletters (63%), books, (33%) and academic journals (28%).

Solution

  • Leverage multiple channels of learning - e-learning, webinars, conference presentations (in-person), materials development (handouts), etc.

Social Media Tools

Social media tools can be divided into three groups:

  • Communication including: Blogs (e.g WordPress, Blogger); Microblogging (e.g Twitter, Google Buzz and identi.ca); Social networking (e.g. Facebook, Linkedin)
  • Content collaboration including: Wikis (e.g. Wikimedia, WikiEducator, Wetpaint, Wikia); Social bookmarking (e.g Delicious, CiteULike and StumbleUpon), Collaborative document editing (e.g. Google Docs)
  • Multimedia including: Photosharing (e.g Flickr, Picasa); Video sharing (e.g Youtube, Vimeo, BlipTV), Livecasting (e.g. Livestream, Ustream); Audio sharing (e.g ccMixter and Last.fm); and Presentation sharing (scribd, Slideshare)

Research Data

  • The Place of Social Media
  • Social media is recognized as being an important tool for undertaking career service work. 24% believe it is very important, while 41% think it is important. Only 4% believe that it is not at all important.
  • Social Media and Client Training
  • Only 11 percent is very skilled - which poses challenges in educating clients about social media tools; 12% are very involved compared to 42% who are not at all involved.

Project activities

The proposed project activities focus on two priority areas:

  1. Model development:
    • Integrating and refining existing pedagogical approaches from existing tools and digital literacy approaches for reuse in social media contexts.
    • Drawing on the research and experience of conducting Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) under the auspices of Athabasca University, which typically attract more than 1000 learners per course.
    • Building on the ground breaking work of the Commonwealth of Learning (Vancouver), the OER Foundation (New Zealand) in pioneering scalable and low cost online training models. Since adoption in 2008, the Learning4Content free training project has provided free training opportunities to more than 5200 educators in 135 different countries.
  2. Building expertise & capacity: The refinement of existing models will contribute to building expertise in successfully scaling literacy training internationally using open education approaches. Many literacy trainers, themselves lack the digital social networking skills that are so important. This project will include participation by literacy trainers and thus upgrade their skills and their capacity to create, design, and deliver effective literacy training using modern technologies.

Phases

Phase 1: Design and development

  • Review learning activities, exercises and pedagogical approaches adopted in the digital literacy training initiatives.
  • Develop and implement an online communication and reporting strategy to maximize participation and engagement of all stakeholders in the open design and development process.
  • Collaborative and transparent development of the curriculum outline for sub-units and subsections of the social media literacy toolkits covering the dimensions of communication, content collaboration and multimedia. (All stakeholders will be free to participate in the development of the curriculum outlines.)
  • Develop 12 independent study tutorials / toolkits for online delivery using mass online workshop approaches totaling a minimum of 120 notional student learning hours. The toolkits will incorporate blogging, micro-blogging, social networking, wikis, social bookmarking, image sharing, video sharing, live casting and presentation sharing. (Using open development methodologies, all stakeholders will be free to participate in the development of the toolkits.)
  • Develop Apprenticeship and Certification Framework, based on the WikiMaster Framework

Phase 2: Delivery (piloting), research and evaluation.

  • Pilot and evaluate the delivery of 6 mass online workshops to refine the design approach and implementation models for institutions to scale and adopt these teaching and training approaches in their own organizations. (Note, the pilot offerings are designed to research and refine the resource toolkits and pedagogical models. They will be presented free of charge to all participants, and registration numbers will not be restricted in any way.)
  • Ongoing communication and stakeholder engagement
  • Evaluation report and sharing of guidelines for organizational implementation of the model.
  • Research: Groups: (1) Aboriginal; (2) Newcomers / Immigrants; (3) Disabilities

Phase 3: Deliver (full-scale), certification, monitoring and evaluation

Project outputs

  • Improved social media literacy skills for a minimum of 1,000 adult learners during the research phase measured by pre and post-training self-evaluations during the pilot implementation.
  • At least 12 independent study tutorials / toolkits completed and available for reuse, adaptation and modification by international institutions incorporating independent peer review of the quality of the learning resources.
  • Ongoing online communication utilising social media distribution networks and a minimum of six online newsletters published for the duration of the project.
  • A demonstrated model for delivery using open file formats and open content licensing, which can be adopted by all institutions without restriction.
  • The project will establish a steering group comprising national and international leaders in the field of adult literacy, social media and open education resources for overseeing the development and implementation of a monitoring and evaluation reporting plan based on a results-based management framework.
  • Certification Model (peer-based)

Resources

Research Support

Career

Higher Education Business / Delivery Models

Other

  • Project Management Skills for All Careers
  • Situation Analysis

In the Survey of Career Professionals, the section on Certification mentions that 68% (cumulatively) of Career Service Professionals (CSPs) think that certification is very important and important. It goes on to mention that "According to what we learned, career service professionals in Canada receive certification from 7 national and 16 provincial associations / bodies."

Do you have access to the details regarding the type of certification provided by these associations / bodies?

I also noticed from the survey, that cost is a considerable impediment to CSPs. I'm thinking about how the open model (shared with you yesterday) in combination with peer-based certification (great for recognition and building community) and an action research methodology could bridge that gap.

Hi Randy,

We don’t know the exact nature of each certification. I imagine they vary quite a bit given the range between provincial, national and international bodies. You can probably get a glimpse by checking out BCCDA, CPCA, NCDA and IAEVG.


Cost is a big issue for many in this sector. There are also segments of the sector that have gone through a lot of change in the last couple of years, mainly as a result of service delivery changes by provincial funders (see BC and Ontario). This puts even greater prices pressures on everything from procuring resources to training.

People

Letters of Support

Yes

  • OERu Network: Canada - Athabasca University BCCampus, Thompson Rivers University, University South Queensland, UA(Australia), Otago Polytechnic, NZ

Proposed

  • CCCOER / MIT OpenCourseWare (colleges in Canada)
  • Centre for Social Innovation, Toronto
  • Algonquin College
  • Neil Squire Society

Presentation Brief

  1. Contact Information: Include name, address, phone, fax, email, website and charitable registration number, if applicable. Indicate who the principal contact is (and a cell phone number, if applicable).
  2. Brief Description: Include the title of your project proposal. Outline the project and purpose for which resources are being requested. (Identify the need)
  3. Uniqueness: Briefly describe any similar/related projects and how your project differs from them.
  4. Objectives: List projects objectives and activities.
  5. Impact: State the impact your project will have on the career counselling and career development field.
  6. Required Resources: State the type of resources being requested(funding and other).
  7. Budget: Provide an overall budget and timeline for the project.
  8. Additional Support: List other groups/organizations from whom you have requested or received resources.
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