For many participants in higher education, getting a degree plays an important part in career development. At the OU, many of our students have traditionally been in full or part-time employment prior to, as well as during, their studies. Another category of learner - let's call them leisure learners - take up formal learning as a way of structuring their personal hobby time by exploring a particular subject in some depth, with a community of like minded others.
I'm still trying to work out what the audience is for open content courses, such as those provided by OpenLearn. As time goes on (OpenLearn is coming up to 1 year old in October), and as the user base develops, it'll be interesting to find out just what inspires people to make use of OpenLearn resources, and for what purpose.
Maybe we'll find out at the forthcoming Openlearn conference?
Anyway, if career related personal development is part of the motivation, then it maybe that a "job search networking" could contribute to the growth and sustainability of such sites. So it was interesting to see that Yahoo's new social job network: Kickstart is being toe-dipped amongst US college students.
Apparently, "Yahoo Kickstart connects college students with alumni at the companies that they are interested in. "
Hmmm...
As well as learning for career development, returning to learning is often an outcome of raising aspirations. 43things has long been a site for sharing personal life goals and finding mutual support, although I don't know whether it's also used for job seeking...
When someone takes up adult learning, there is - I suspect - a reason for doing so; a rich context that motivates and drives the learner. I suspect that satisfying, or at least supporting, those wider needs is not something that can be accommodated simply by a virtual learning environment, in much the same way that just publishing course notes does not really help a novice learner to learn from them.
Which is where things like 43things and Kickstart might come in... providing a richer support environment within which informal learning can be pursued in the context of how it might be "exploited".
Maybe...
...or maybe not...
Posted by ajh59 at September 4, 2007 12:08 PMI thought most universities had been doing things like Kickstart for ages? (Though the OU hasn't as far as I'm aware). The limiting issue tends to be getting alumni to sign up as far as I'm aware - at Oxford, there were probably hundreds rather than thousands.
I've certainly seen tools like LiveJournal being used by friends both looking for jobs and trying to find folk to fill positions. The things is that normally the people you want to find are two people removed so the people who aren't interested in looking for jobs need to be reading.
Turning informal learning into stuff that helps you get a job is another interesting issue - I think this is more about employers learning how to recruit based on ability/knowledge than on educations which is tough when you've got very tight time schedules. It still looks better on my CV if I can say I've completed a formal course on usability for instance than if I say I've read lots of articles about usability for instance, whereas I might actually have learned more the latter.
Posted by: Juliette White at September 4, 2007 01:58 PM"The things is that normally the people you want to find are two people removed so the people who aren't interested in looking for jobs need to be reading."
THe OU traditionally differs from other HEIs, though, in that our students often are already in a career/workplace and may well know of jobs in the area...
"Turning informal learning into stuff that helps you get a job is another interesting issue - I think this is more about employers learning how to recruit based on ability/knowledge than on educations which is tough when you've got very tight time schedules. It still looks better on my CV if I can say I've completed a formal course on usability for instance than if I say I've read lots of articles about usability ..."
But if you are on an open course and engaged in a learning community, this info might be interesting to potential recruiters as a 'soft qualification'? It might also be a place to place job ads?
Posted by: Tony Hirst at September 4, 2007 02:49 PMJob ads do already happen in quite a lot of 'informal learning' places - some of the programming discussion lists I'm on regularly have job ads (though not paid for) as do some of the programming/web dev RSS feeds (which are paid for). It's not universal though certainly.
By the way, I wasn't saying that informal learning doesn't necessarily have a place on a CV but it probably takes more skill to 'sell' to many employers than formal learning. I've not got interviews for jobs just because I don't have any formal computing qualifications (I've asked why not!) even though I've informally learned more than the content of many computing degrees. Luckily the OU are a bit more forward-looking than that but a large number of employers aren't :-)
Posted by: Juliette White at September 11, 2007 12:01 PM