The Trusted Learning Advisor
7th March 2024
Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners!
Book of the Month
The Trusted Learning Advisor: The Tools, Techniques and Skills You Need to Make L&D a Business Priority, Keith Keating. With the advent of generative AI, we feel learning and development (“L&D”) is one of the hottest areas around. After all, L&D experts can now point employees not only toward the vast array of learning platforms available nowadays—but also toward the new opportunities created for employees to do even better at their jobs if they learn the judicious use of generative AI. Keating’s book lays out the strategies and best practices for learning and development professionals to build trust and credibility within their organizations so they are seen as reliable, go-to advisors on matters related to training, capability building, and upskilling the workforce for the future. The current state of L&D tends to be order-taking rather than advising. However, there are growing risks and problems if L&D teams do not evolve into trusted learning advisors, including lack of integration with the business, misalignment between learning strategies and business strategies, and inability to demonstrate awareness and prioritization of business needs. Relationship building through understanding the language and culture of stakeholders provides a strong foundation for trusted advisors to make an impact.
If you are looking to understand the L&D industry, whether as a quick overview or to do a deeper dive, you couldn’t do better than to read The Trusted Learning Advisor.
Added Value!
Posture Town, by Shweta Kapur, a book for children illustrated by Catherine Suvorova. This is such a unique, quirky subject and book with beautiful rhyming and illustrations! Author Shweta Kapur is a physical therapist and researcher who is passionate about promoting healthy behaviors in a fun and engaging way. As a clinician, talking with hundreds of her patients about posture, she realized that the habit of slouching can begin early on–and we can help kids avoid this by early coaching. How we here at LHTL wish we’d had this book when we were little. If you’re a parent or coach for youngsters, you will greatly appreciate this delightful book!
Our very own Terry Sejnowski wins one of the most important prizes in all of neuroscience
The world’s largest brain research prize is Danish and is awarded and founded by the Lundbeck Foundation. Each year, 10 million Danish krone (approx. 1.3 million Euros) are given to brain researchers who have had a ground-breaking impact on brain research. This year, Terrence Sejnowski is accorded this extraordinary recognition. Read more about it here!
Sprouts and chunking
Jonas Koblin, a former student of our Learning How to Learn MOOC, was inspired by our course to start Sprouts—a YouTube channel that makes videos lessons for teachers to use in class and now reaches over 2M students a month in over 10 languages Take a look at this wonderful video that explains chunking in an elegant, desceptively simple way.
To learn more about Jonas’s work, visit sproutsschools.com.
SF brings back 8th-grade algebra, admits the failure of reform math approaches
As Silicon Valley journalist Joanne Jacobs reports: “For years, San Francisco Unified claimed ‘equity math’ was improving minority students’ success rates. [But] As critics had predicted, forcing students to wait till ninth grade to take algebra has reduced the number of students taking higher-level math courses in high school. Now, the district admits that algebra for none was a flop.”
Once again, we see that superficially appealing approaches to helping others—“pathological altruism”—can surprisingly often backfire. Thank goodness for the behind-the-scenes researchers willing to do necessary debunking.
The most up-to-date article we’ve seen on Khanmigo and AI tutoring
This Washington Post op-ed by Josh Tyrangiel, “An ‘education legend’ has created an AI that will change your mind about AI,” provides superb insight into the future of AI tutoring. Key grafs:
[Sal Khan’s team] team drilled down on GPT’s math issues and discovered that it was decent at computation but easily bullied. If a user told GPT that 5 + 7 = 90, it would shrug and agree. This was largely because OpenAI’s original idea of a helpful assistant was one that’s always subservient — which makes a lot of sense when you have cutting-edge tech, and you don’t want to freak out your users. But in an educational context, second-guessing humans is kind of the point.
By infusing GPT with its own database of lesson plans, essays and sample problems, Khan Academy improved accuracy and reduced hallucinations. The full archive of Khan Academy math problems is now baked into GPT — “Our service to the broader AI community,” says Khan. But that still left a ton of work to do around interactivity. Khan and a small team provided hundreds of hours of feedback, gently retraining GPT to be less of a know-it-all that spits out answers, and more of a patient and knowledgeable companion. Like, say, Sal Khan.
The result is Khanmigo, a safe and accurate tutor, built atop ChatGPT, that works at the skill level of its users — and never coughs up answers. Khanmigo is the best model we have for how to develop and implement AI for the public good.
That’s all for now. Have a happy week in Learning How to Learn!
Barb, Terry, and the entire Learning How to Learn team
- Uncommon Sense Teaching—the book and Coursera Specialization!
- The LHTL recommended text, A Mind for Numbers
For kids and parents: Learning How to Learn—the book and MOOC. Pro tip—watch the videos and read the book together with your child. Learning how to learn at an early age will change their life!
