SPOC Craftsmanship at UWV
Aart Vrolijk and Alex Mesman deal with learning, development and talents. They do this at UWV: the organization that provides national implementation of employee insurance and provides labor market and data services. They prefer to make learning, development and professionalism as innovative and effective as possible.
Senior Advisor Performance Development Alex deals with effect measurements and evaluations of learning and development interventions and their added value. Colleague Aart is currently working on a talent program, has immersed himself in the topic of Craftsmanship - on which UWV has created a Small Private Open Course (SPOC) - and serves as a showcase for SPOCs.
"We are very curious ourselves. That's our second nature, right Alex?" laughs Aart. "Definitely," agrees Alex. "We constantly focus on innovation. How can things be done differently and better? And from that curiosity, we started experimenting with MOOCs and SPOCs."
How it began
"When I started here thirty years ago, the UWV still offered traditional in-house vocational training," Alex says. "Classroom, not on the job, lots of theory, little practice. Over time, we modernized our learning and development tools. By now, it's not just training and development that is central, but more importantly what you do with it: hence the name 'performance development,' which has replaced our UWV Academy."
How it is now
"Since the 'Confidence in Craftsmanship' project, the 'SPOC' concept has landed in our organization," describes Aart. "Over 800 participants engaged in a conversation on Next Learning Valley's online platform about what craftsmanship actually is, when you are a craftsman and how to 'keep up'. It is a wonderful complementary tool to use organization-wide: employees from all kinds of departments discussed their vision of craftsmanship together in the SPOC, which inspired management. They took the input into their policy and strategy."
Alex: "From the data Max (data analyst at NLV) provided after the SPOC, we saw that the SPOC created cross-pollination in the organization: people from different functions, departments and columns started talking to each other. That was one of our objectives. A successful one, then. We also wanted to create a connection within UWV, deal with a current strategic theme (i.e. craftsmanship) and get acquainted with a new way of learning.
The power of this new learning tool? Thanks to the data we collected with the explicit consent of the participants, we can see if we are actually achieving our goals of the pilot. That remains important: proper use of learning tools to achieve your goals. The SPOC is a very welcome new tool within the palette of our learning interventions."
What's coming
"There is more to come," says Aart. "We have enough topics that we can address through an SPOC in our organization. Most of the participants were positive, so there is support there as well. In addition, we and a few other colleagues have taken our role as moderators seriously and established seven golden moderator rules. Still, the rule remains: one learns by doing. The experiences from this SPOC, as well as the collected evaluations we use again for future SPOCs."
Alex: "The platform is very accessible for participants and also for us it is nice to notice that Next Learning Valley is always ready. Max for the technical part and Jos and François in the whole cooperation. They really think along with us about our specific situation. Here's to more SPOCs and MOOCs!"
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