Week 4: Trends & Issues in IDT

Part A. Chapter in Section V- Chapters 18, 19, 20, 21, 22 (Trends & Issues in Various Settings)

Upon the conclusion of my readings I decided to address IDT in the context of business and industry, military, and post-secondary education.  Making a comparison and to contrast these three IDT approaches an understanding of each works best. In the business and industry areas the role of IDT is to help businesses to design a sales team that is organizationally strong to produce a product that is sellable in the world markets. The breakdown of roles is vital to the industry’s ability to do this so the IDT must put together a team of experts so roles are clearly defined. The Organizational Project Manager (OPM) task is the work closely with the ID to create a team of organizational leaders who will see that the project is completed in a timely fashion, and close to on or below budget as possible. (Shrikhande, 2014) This team of expert’s work closely together to see to it that the project or projects are coordinated in such a way as it will be mutually beneficial to the company. Of the three types of teams that can be developed there can be a virtual team, cross-functional team and a contractor-led team.  In that team, the responsibilities are divided into the Portfolio Manager, who works to achieve a strategic set of objectives.  Then there is the program manager, who manages the team project manager(s). The Project Manager is the backbone to ensure that all projects, trainings, and compliances are in order.

The unique thing about reading this whole section is that all these strategies hits close to home for me.  My daughter has been a PMP (Professional Manager Projects) for more than ten years and she works as a part of a PMO (Project Management Office); which I did not clearly understand until I started reading these chapters from the text.  All the dinner table conversations went over my head though I thought I understood, but until I read the break down in simple terms from the text I did not have an “ah, ha” moment. Suddenly, the conversations of years began to make sense. Such things as creating a detailed operational plan of all steps in any given process made sense.  I recall of her conversations how things fall apart if each step in a process is not properly and sufficiently documented and how difficult it is to make the company and their staff understand the value of documentation. The value of operational templates, and responsibilities of all end users must be clearly outlined in the whole process or there will be chaos and the cost to the company can be astonishing.  There are roles that must be performed and this team must make sure that the company understands the value of detailed documents to all task so that it can be easily reproducible.

The main reason I chose these three contexts is I can relate it to real life and how it has impact my family as the workers who must help make the process happen from planning, to follow through to employee training. This family has a long history of military service and several of my family member where high-ranking officers. They talked about following military protocol and the value and need to have training that is concise and quick.  All the men and women involved in the military must learn a task fast and be ready for the next step in any procedure. The military has a history of encouraging its personnel to maintain and improve so that they can have a strong workforce that must be ready to do double duty for country and themselves.

After W.W.II the military offered veterans an opportunity to get educational training after service. This was a part of The Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944 (GI Bill), which had many very good components to it, but the main component was to train a new workforce for the coming highly technological new era. After the war, many Business Colleges sprang up offering education and training for the new GI veteran. My own mother worked as a director of one of those private business schools that trained ex-military men for the modern changing world. The skills offered back them where considered the cutting edge for the time. It gave veterans an opportunity to go for jobs that they never could have gotten before their military service and with the help of the GI Bill. The beauty of this was the government was paying them to do so. Millions of benefits where paid out during that period that made a difference in many young men and women’s lives, especially men of color.  With this training, they could apply and get better paying jobs that required skills that they would never have earned had it not been for the GI Bill (History.com, 2017). My mother left working for the business school later to become a keypunch operator for the civilian workforce of the Air Force. She worked with Fortran data systems when computers were as large as rooms and had to be kept extremely cool.

My youngest son works as a financial reporting analyst that analyzes financial data and puts it in a usable format for management decisions and runs detailed financial reports using specialized programs and computers.  This is another clog in the business machine that helps it run effectively to produce their product whatever that product might be. A protocol is required for financial matters for that part of the business to operate. My other son is at the operational/trainer level where he trains new employees the best practices and most cost-effective way to do the job after having done the job without incident for more than 13 years.  He falls in the category as the military trainer who is skilled at the job and is trained by the company to follow their practices to teach all new hires for that field. I work with college professors to train new geology students about meteorites. This is a part of their freshman science class which is important for all students who are going into geology or some area of science where they have a knowledge of rocks and minerals. In this case the prescribed information that they need to learn is spelled out in the teachers plans which are directed by the department of curriculum. The roles have different titles but they function the same. There’s the professor, the AP (Associate Professor), lecturer, and TA (teacher assistant), who conducts all the labs. The alignments are the same even if they are called by differing names. The final analysis is training the end users to use the technology and understand how it works in producing the final product that is to be sold.  Be it a goods or services.

The differences are subtle but the organizational layout are relatively the same. Each one of these have technological skills that must be mastered to do the task and do it efficiently and cost-effectively.

Part B. Chapters VI – Chapters 23, 24, 25 (Global Trends & Issues)

Questions to ponder: 1. How can we prepare our youth to address the problems of living in a world with 9 billion people when the earth’s resources cannot sustain that many? Sometimes you just cut to the base line and say they must learn new ways of production in order to meet this change that is obviously going to happen.  We need to have ideas and plans in place to address the issue of feeding that many people on the planet and making sure agriculture can keep up, therefore industry must find unique ways to address these concerns. (National Geographic Magazine, 2014)

2. Does our current educational system, curriculum, and instructional practices help learners foster the complex problem-solving skills necessary to tackle these issues?  We are trying to help young learners to obtain the skills through the work of IDT professionals who see the problems and are trying to address it through innovative ideas in how industry perceives our academic needs to meet the demands of the world markets. Through their efforts a solution can be obtained but as I stated earlier it is sometimes difficult to make industry see the whole big picture when their immediate concern is how much money, now!

3. Are there methods and practices used in European and Asian countries that we should use here in the US? Why or why not? The United States has pictured itself as global academic leader until one day they looked up and other countries such as Asia and Europe were out educating their students for the new global world and the US was grossly behind.  What a shock? Our students were low-performing in the areas of basic proficiency in reading, mathematics and science.  We had fallen behind, we were no longer global leaders. The statistics are scattering and embarrassing for the US; according to the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) we had fallen below the average of 64 countries in these key areas (OECD, 2017). We fell far below the average major industrialized countries. Our students have consistently fallen below in those key STEM (Science Technology, Engineer, and Mathematics) subjects along with reading for more than twenty years and the gap is getting wider instead of smaller.

So what is the problem according to an article written just one year ago that states “in the American system, as students start to fall behind, they find it harder and harder to comprehend what is going on in class and fall even farther behind as they go through the years.” Their morale sinks, their embarrassment rises, they stop coming to school, and then they drop out.” (Tucker, 2016). The author of this article goes on to say what the East Asian countries do is stop the momentum before it starts its downward drop by believing that "all students can and will meet the high standards that they set as they progress through their years of education." What they know is if “students are allowed to fall behind, failure will feed on itself.” We need to be of that same mind set. We can’t afford to let them fail!

While in European countries their emphasis is on “critical thinking and reasoning” skills is their main focus that helps them to remain on top of their game. The key components of their education there is a) not memorizing the definition, but getting the concept right; b) results are a very private thing; c) less hierarchical system within their school districts; and d) more available resources to create high-tech classrooms. (Shawon, 2014) (Schleicher, 2014)

America can definitely learn from other countries methods but will they swallow their pride and if they do it so remains to be seen.

References

History.com. (2017, June). G.I. Bill - Worl War II. Retrieved from History. com: http://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/gi-bill

National Geographic Magazine. (2014, June). The Future of Food: A Five-step Plan to Feed the World. Retrieved from National Geographic Magazine online: http://www.nationalgeographic.com/foodfeatures/feeding-9-billion/

OECD. (2017, June). OECD Policy Outlook. Retrieved from OECD: http://www.oecd.org/education/policyoutlook.htm

Schleicher, A. (2014, February 3). Opinion: What Asian schools can teach the rest of the world. Retrieved from CNN-: http://www.cnn.com/2013/12/03/opinion/education-rankings-commentary-schleicher/

Shawon, S. R. (2014, November 21). Differences in education systems of Europe and South Asia. Retrieved from Wordpress.com: https://epiinside.wordpress.com/2014/11/21/differences-in-the-education-systems-of-europe-and-south-asia/

Shrikhande, N. (2014, May 16). Instructional Designer Vs Project manage - 5 Tips to Manage This Crucial Relationship. Retrieved from Jilbee.com: http://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/gi-bill

Tucker, M. (2016, February 29). Asian Countries Take the U.S. to School. Retrieved from The Atlantic.com: https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/02/us-asia-education-differences/471564/