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As technological advances continue to transform the way we connect with each other, so there will be a need for different ways of learning. And in the wake of the lockdown and social distancing regulations brought on by the coronavirus outbreak, many industries had to move from casually considering remote working set-ups to implementing them in a short space of time.

In higher education, though, online learning has long been top of the agenda. For example, Unisa (University of South Africa) is popular for its distance learning methods and integrating a system where students can do work assigned to them in their own environments; submit it via the portal and also view results and feedback. They are also a decent example of blended learning.

Learning Management Systems (LMS) can be defined as web-based software platforms that facilitate the administration, documentation, tracking and reporting, and the delivery of educational courses/content and learner outcomes.

And as you typically would join a webinar or online meeting, you gain access to a learning system through a URL or username and password. And it’s worth noting that the quantity and quality of e-learning platforms for higher education have increased significantly during the past decade.

In terms of choice, the number of available tools and platforms, and the possibilities they offer both students and teachers can be both challenging and rewarding.

How LMSs differ from the (traditional) classroom

The first major difference is the format of the interactions between educators and students. Naturally, using online tools to organise and attend your classes has its obvious advantages and a few drawbacks.

Learning through the use of LMS’s means that there will be a change in the type of human interactions, compared to the traditional classroom setting. Subsequently, there might be a need to adopt an independent learning style.

However, the growth of LMS’s present changes to modern distance learning. Courses now mostly incorporate higher levels of human interaction, with teaching styles that lean toward traditional classroom settings. There’s also a variety of tools and features found on most learning management systems designed to help students with their learning, including communicating with lecturers and other faculty staff. And socializing with other learners within the learning platform helps cultivate a sense of belonging, and inspires a well-rounded learning experience.

A few examples

As with any other market, there are several companies that offer products and services connected to online learning. This makes the platforms available and the features they carry different. There are free or open-sourced alternative products as well. These software tools play an important role in the spread of online education, helping students from all backgrounds to acquire education and qualifications.

Google Classroom

With the service owned by a large and well-resourced company, you can easily manipulate and integrate your content across the Google ecosystem. For example, the platform enables teachers to have face-to-face meetings with students using the flagship Google Meet app, which is built into the Classroom.

Moodle

Moodle is a free and open-source learning management system. The platform is used for blended learning, distance education, flipped classrooms, and other e-learning projects in schools, universities, workplaces, and other sectors.

AWS Educate

Amazon says that their LMS is used in more than 200 countries, connecting 2,400 institutions, over 10,000 educators, and hundreds of thousands of students. Part of their mission is to help people discover the necessary skills to begin building careers in the cloud industry. Along the way, learners have opportunities to test their knowledge and obtain credentials for subjects passed on the platform. With the qualifications obtained, they can go on to apply for jobs within the Amazon platforms or at other companies.

Blackboard

The University of Johannesburg broke new digital ground when they introduced a range of 100% online courses. The organization uses a learning management system called Blackboard.

Broadly, this means that to successfully complete a Bachelor of Commerce in International Accounting degree (with U.J. or any other institution with an LMS in place), you’ll need to learn the basics of working within a learning management system. Additionally, working with different types of media as part of organizing your education will introduce you to the concept of content management systems.

A content management system (CMS) is a software application used to manage the creation and modification of digital content. Example: a blogging platform such as WordPress is a CMS. By creating a user account, you can write, design, host, or publish a variety of media on the platform.

Advantages of a LMS

• Learning Management Systems support content in different formats: text, video, audio, etc.
• Immediate access to learning material at any time, anywhere.
• Instructors can edit/modify and re-use learning content, and students don’t need to wait to access updated material.
• The evaluation of students is much easier and fair, based on student attendance and online quizzes.

Pitfalls of a LMS

• Teachers and students have to be willing to adapt their courses and ways of working from traditional to online lectures.
• Learning fully through an LMS can feel impersonal and lacking in dialogue provided by in-person training.
• Not all students have access to reliable and always-available Internet connectivity.

Another thing. It’s easy to assume that all students are tech-savvy and will easily embrace technology for their learning. However, for students to get maximum value from using digital learning systems, basic digital and platform training goes a long way to help them interact effectively with coursework.

Navigating the pitfalls

Blended learning as tool

This is a combination of distance learning and the traditional in-classroom learning. Ultimately, you have a less rigid schedule where you attend some of the classes on campus. However, most of the work still remains online, allowing you to complete assignments at your convenience. This ensures that you still get the administrative and archiving benefits of using an LMS and balance out the disadvantages, such as working in isolation for prolonged periods.

Planning ahead

Using digital resources to connect to people and knowledge is an incredible feat. However, living within the reality of continuous #Loadshedding power cuts, it’s essential to plan ahead. When possible, get a schedule detailing the load-shedding program in your area. You can use electricity to charge up your devices and attend to your ‘online tasks’ and during the hours with no power, you can push ‘offline tasks’, for example.

Managing information, nurturing creativity

As we’ve established, we live in an interconnected world where the traditional concept of learning (or anything else), is fast becoming irrelevant. And software vendors, open-source developers, and educational institutions, awake to this change, will continue to embrace systems that support the management of courses and communication with students remotely.

The ultimate key to effectively engage with learning management systems is to make a paradigm shift. This means moving into a mindset where the information you consume as a student can be stored, managed, updated and expanded into a useful library of knowledge over time.

WHAT IS KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT

Knowledge management is a broad discipline that has many applications. Businesses have to practice some form of knowledge management in order to be efficient, though some are haphazard about it and thus experience inefficiencies and losses due to poor knowledge management. In short, it is a collection of practices – strategic and operational – that enables organizations to collect, organize, store and recall information and reflect on past and present practices and experiences in the business to plan their future actions. The last part is key for successful knowledge management because its purpose is to effect well-informed decision-making to lead to successful actions. In short knowledge management is identifying, gathering, reflecting on and telling stories. History, archaeology, publishing, libraries and the field of Information Systems are all forms of knowledge management

Personal knowledge management, as discussed in a previous post, can be a personal practice that helps you develop better planning and decision-making processes. It has four essential elements: data that is organized and information that is compiled; human reflection or artificial intelligence analytics for building knowledge; secure storage and the capacity to recall data, information and knowledge. Data is a collection of facts in their raw form – unorganized, unrefined and uncontextualized. Information is data that has been organized, refined and contextualized. Knowledge develops from the processing of information through sentient thought or artificial intelligence, to draw conclusions and forecasts to guide our decision-making. Think about military-based action movies where they’ve spoken about gathering intelligence, and then plans of action are made and executed based on that intelligence. That’s an example of data (collection), information and knowledge. Afterwards when reports are written and filed, the work reviewed and further and wider knowledge is built based on an aggregation of information, actions, knowledge and records – that is knowledge management.

WAYS TO DO PERSONAL KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT

There are several tools and techniques one can utilize to do personal knowledge management. Journaling, keeping notebooks, creating digital notes and files, and personal online channels are a few of the options.  A system called the bullet journal method was created by Ryder Carroll.

He designed it over time as a tool to help him be more productive because he had Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD). He found that when he was a child and university student, there were not enough resources available to help people with ADD to organize their thoughts and actions and block out distractions. It has become a widely popular phenomenon used by millions of people around the world. With the bullet journal technique, you focus your thoughts and actions on one quiet, uninterrupted analog space – your journal – to work on focusing on those things that are the most important to you. Carroll says the idea of the bullet journal “is to track the past, organize the present, and plan for the future.” A brief overview of how the method works: create index system at the start of your notebook so that you can write down the page and topic references; set out a section called “future log” and number the pages – write the page numbers and section name into the index;  set up a monthly log, followed by daily logs and number the pages and note those pages in the index section. Write in the journal every day to track your activities and make future plans. Read through past entries and notes to reflect on what you planned on doing, what you accomplished, and what future plans still need to be actioned. You can watch a detailed tutorial below, that Carrol gives, to get step by step instructions.

Subject or priority specific notebooks or digital files are a tried and tested method for keeping a record of things of interest or importance. The benefit is that you can keep all information regarding a particular area of interest in one place and have extensive details on it. For example, if you are interested in management information systems (MIS) all the articles that you read and download and notes you make can be saved in a single MIS folder. When you need to access information on this subject, you know where to find your resources and you can easily search them. If you are keeping digital files on a personal device or the cloud, you can save different formats such as text, images, video, and audio resources in one location. You can tag websites and pages of interest by bookmarking them so that you can access the information as you need it. For your digital filing system make sure you use a good naming convention so that they are easy to remember and search. If you like to do things old-school, having various notebooks for subject-specific notes is very useful. Numerous studies have shown that the act of handwriting improves our ability to recall information we’ve recorded. Label your notebooks according to the subject you are writing about, e.g. Sustainable Urban Development notebook, and then every time you read on the subject and attend events and seminars or travel to different urban locales you can make notes in that specific book. Over time, as you collect notes, pictures, names of resources, etc. you will build expert-level information in addition to building your own levels of experience and knowledge.

One can use short-term or temporary tools such as white boards, bulletin boards, concept boards and vision boards for more highly specific activities. All of these boards can be rendered digitally or produced as analogue, tactile resources that you physically add notes, pictures and samples to. Such boards help you (and your team if it is a shared resource) to see the future goal, track the current situation and the past activities you have delivered.

There are great social media tools that can act as repositories for knowledge assets. Consider YouTube, you can build up an amazing portfolio of work if you do videos on your area of interest. Someone who loves cooking and eating different kinds of food can create a channel where they post videos about their own recipes, amazing meals they’ve had at friends, family, and restaurants. If they travel they can create food vlogs of the new dishes they’ve had and the ingredients they’ve discovered. Their channel will contain a wealth of information for themselves and their viewers as well as track the progression of their expertise in food and travel.

WHY IS KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT SIGNIFICANT?

Personal knowledge management helps one to be intentional, informed, and equipped to make well-informed decisions. By building a solid foundation of assets and resources related to your personal, academic, and professional interests you are equipping yourself to become an expert in those areas. By organizing and cataloging a record of your activities and achievements in these fields along with having a library (digital and/or physical) of related resources, you will have a bank of knowledge and evidence of your expertise. This of course takes time to build up, knowledge management is not static. Like learning it is ongoing and ever-changing, you accumulate knowledge artifacts and systems on the foundations of what you did before. We leave you with three core benefits of practicing personal knowledge management: it helps you to get into and build the habit of regular reflection; you will be able to clearly identify the things that interest you and the things you are passionate about, eventually being intentional about what you prioritize for learning, action and growth will lead to expert levels of knowledge and skills.

It’s commonplace. Spending a significant amount of time searching for knowledge online and other sources. It’s become the way we learn, the way we connect with loved ones, and definitely the way we network and grow our careers.

This means that there’s a need to develop our skills in effectively managing the information that we collect from the sources that we frequent and trust. Otherwise, we run the risk of spinning our wheels and throwing our time into the (digital) abyss without ever getting anything back in the way of our personal development.

Then enters personal knowledge management.

And um, please don’t be put off by the word ‘management’. It’s a fun way to accelerate your learning and most importantly, organize all the valuable information and insight you gather from your research and reading. Plus, personal cloud storage has become easily available and most devices allow for easy filing, tagging, organizing, and searching.

Knowledge management, as a practice, is defined as the thoughtful process of defining, structuring, retaining, and using/sharing information.

And to effectively manage your library, build an easy-to-navigate system to store different types of material. You can categorise information into common themes. Example: the online links to informative videos, articles, online courses, etc. can be stored in one folder.

The benefits of managing knowledge

Retaining information (or, building a ‘back-up brain’)

The truth is that it’s difficult to remember all the things we see and learn daily. Important insights that could be saved and later combined with other pieces of information eventually get lost. An effective note-taking system allows you to build a habit of recording your thoughts and ideas and use them to build an expansive library that will become an ally to your learning.

Archiving notes makes for easy future reference

As a student, you spend a large sum of your time finding and reading, interpreting/summarizing and using information to learn and improve. And eventually, graduate through the course. With knowledge management, the idea is to properly organise what you learn, and place yourself in a position to leverage what you gain in the process.

Personal knowledge management combines (and helps improve) research skills, critical thinking, and evaluating communication. And in a learning environment, information literacy is important for academic success, and in the workplace too.

Increased self-awareness

On a ‘smaller scale’, keeping a diary could be considered a form of knowledge management. It involves thinking over again and writing down the details of your day or week, and processing emotions. It improves critical thinking skills and self-awareness. Over time, the diary becomes a tool through which you can look at yourself objectively. You are able to find useful (or, destructive) patterns within the diary entries and make necessary adjustments.

Keeping track of what we learn and think is also a useful way to explore language and improve communication skills.

The more we discover new information, archive it, and find ways to use it to learn and add value to others, the more we find connections between different ideas.

And it goes without saying that a personal knowledge management system cultivates a habit of lifelong learning.

This year has seen a significant increase in interviews being conducted virtually due to the contact restrictions necessary because of COVID-19. It is predicted that this form of interviewing will continue to be favoured even after we can resume traditional face-to-face meetings. We’ve discussed how to prepare for a virtual interview in another post, now we will focus on some of the unique opportunities this type of interviewing offers candidate.

Control over your environment

One of the simplest advantages of the virtual interview is that you have control over the environment that you occupy for the duration of your interview. You can prepare it in a way that is comfortable for you, get the lighting just right and have resources around you that are out of the line of site of the interviewer.

Take advantage of the autonomy you have, by not being in the actual room with your interviewers, by having detailed notes on all your skills and previous experience that correlate with the requirements in the job specification you are interviewing for. You can prepare notes of real-life scenarios from your current and past roles (professional or extra-curricular) typed in detail with keywords highlighted so that you can easily refer to them during the interview as necessary. Be careful not to read back rehearsed answers to interview questions though, as this will appear very unprofessional. Your notes are there as a tool to trigger your memory and order your thoughts as you respond to questions. If you can, have them visible on a different device to the one you are doing the meeting on, or print your notes.

You can have someone whom you trust to sit in on the interview but off-camera. They can assist you with holding up or opening the documents you need to refer to, signal to you whether you need to add more details to your responses or when you are wandering off the point. Think of this person as a director (as in TV or film), who is helping you put your best presentation forward and keep you grounded in the flow of the interview. This approach may be useful to someone who is new to the job market and needs some coaching and guidance to get through the interview in a professional and confident manner. Often when candidates don’t have much experience, they tend to be extremely nervous during interviews and don’t provide sufficient or the most significant responses to questions.

Take advantage of the digital tools available

With a virtual interview, you have the benefit of having a number of tools at your disposal that you otherwise would not. You can share presentations, graphs, reports, videos, and images to illustrate or accentuate your skills and experience. This may not be practical or applicable to all careers, but some examples of how it may be useful include:

Example 1

You are applying for funding to do post-graduate studies in Film and Media and you are meeting with different bursars to show why you are an excellent candidate. Having a 3 short sound and video clips of topical discussions you hosted as a campus DJ, conference facilitator, and event MC to share during your interview would be very useful. You would of course have evidence of your experience in your portfolio of work that the bursars review outside of the interview, but having a few small samples during the interviews is also useful. While one can share these in a face-to-face interview setting, the seamlessness of already being on a digital platform and sharing digital files has better execution in a virtual interview.

Example 2

You are applying for a mid-weight Project Manager role at a company and currently you are working as a Project Coordinator. You can prepare graphs to show how the work you do, or innovations you have introduced have improved the efficiency, deadlines and economy on projects. If you are working in a product-based environment, you can show images of the end results of your projects for example new construction developments, FMCG products developed by your team, retail interior, books, etc. Putting all this information into a well designed presentation will show your capabilities as a project manager and your technological proficiencies.

Ask if the interview can be recorded and shared with you, so that you can review how you performed and make improvements where you pick up that you didn’t respond to the best of your ability. When we see ourselves on video (or hear ourselves in an audio recording), it is quite different to what we imagine we look and sound like. Seeing a playback of yourself in an interview will give you an objective view of how you look and sound to others. Based on that you can work on areas of improvement. For example using speech fillers too often (uhm, like, er) can be very distracting in a formal setting such as an interview. If you find that you were doing this frequently during your interview, but had not noticed it while you were talking, you can be mindful of that going forward so that you can stop yourself while your doing it. Reviewing yourself in this way will help for your future interviews, virtual or in person. Another benefit of having a recording of your interview is that you can examine how employers ask questions, what information they prioritise and whether there were questions they had to ask you in multiple ways to get the desired response. Note that not all companies will agree to this as they may discuss sensitive or confidential information during the interview.

Less stress in getting to and being at the interview

Getting to an interview generates a lot of stress, as does actually being in the room with a number of strangers asking you questions. All the tension of finding the interview location, carrying in files or documents, meeting a host of people before you actually get into the interview room, walking into an unfamiliar space to meet people who are there to judge your skills and competencies – all these non-core stresses are eliminated. In fact, you now have the benefit of being very familiar with the physical environment where you will be conducting your meeting. You will have the chance to set it up to your preferences so that you can be viewed in the best way. Additionally, you will not forget the names of your interviewers (due to nerves) because they will be identified on the screen.

Conclusion

Having access to your digital assets such as files, documents, reports, and presentations during your interview can help you come across as well prepared without your interviewers having to see all the resources you are referring to. You have the opportunity to customize mini-presentations for your interview, that are focused on how your skills and experience align to the requirements of the new role and presenting them in a more continuous way than would be possible in a face-to-face meeting at the company’s office. With a virtual interview, your role is closer to a co-creator rather than a guest.