It was on a local job noticeboard that Melissa came across a dentistry apprenticeship – with encouragement from her parents, she dived right in.
“I remember sitting there thinking, I cannot come to work everyday and watch people having their teeth taken out” laughs Melissa, recalling her first impressions. But luckily, oral health grew on her, and despite shifting roles over the years, Melissa is committed to making her mark in the public health industry.
Melissa is currently working as the Manager of Oral Health Agencies (Western Victoria), for the organisation Dental Health Services Victoria. “We facilitate dental treatment for vulnerable Victorians – low income earners, people that have any sort of concessions, priority access groups” explains Melissa. To succeed in her role, Melissa must have the ability to listen, be patient, and above all, have empathy in order to understand the perspective of patients. “I think everybody has the right to have the best treatment they can afford” says Melissa.
“I remember sitting there thinking, I cannot come to work everyday and watch people having their teeth taken out!”
With the desire to move from hands-on dental assisting, into a more communications-based role, Melissa was drawn to Curtin University’s Graduate Certificate in Health Promotion. The course has helped Melissa to better understand health motivations and behaviours – what drives patients to neglect their oral health, and what techniques/habits can help them get back on track.
Studying online through OUA has afforded Melissa the freedom to keep working, and caring for her two children. Initially, she was worried she wouldn’t be able to manage the workload, but she took it slowly one subject at a time, and found that she could load on more as she grew more confident. If life ever gets too hectic, Melissa feels at ease knowing she can put study on hold, and resume when she’s ready.
Melissa sees a master’s degree in her future, but for now, she’s got her sights set on finishing her degree, raising her young children, while doing her part to help people in need achieve the good health they deserve.
Gain knowledge, do good.
If you’re aching to make positive change in the world, set yourself up with knowledge, and get yourself out there. There’s no need to give up your day job to get started, because with Open Universities Australia, you’re free to study online in your own time and space.
Through Open Universities Australia (OUA), you can:
Find the right course – Choose from over 270 degrees and 1600 single subjects from universities across Australia.
Earn the same degree as on-campus – Enrol through us, then study online with your chosen uni (and graduate with them too).
Study, regardless of your history – Start with single undergraduate subjects without any entry requirements.
Gain credit towards your degree – Apply for credit for past study or work experience, and finish faster.
Feel supported from start to finish – Get help from a friendly student advisor, right through to graduation.
To express your interest in this course, or any that we offer – fill out the form on this page, and we’ll put you in touch with a friendly student advisor. If you’re keen to explore on your own, simply head over to our website to browse the extensive catalogue of courses from universities across Australia.
I recently had the pleasure of attending the 2019 Coursera Partners Conference in London, where we brought together academic, business and tech pioneers in a two-day celebration of learning. Amongst guest speakers were Thomas Friedman, Yale University, the Abu Dhabi Dhabi School of Government, AXA, Novartis, Coursera Co-Founder Andrew Ng, and many more.
Throughout the event, I met with over 40 Coursera business customers who exchanged insights with executive leaders in our enterprise track. The experience and results were truly inspirational, and worth sharing in the spirit of learning.
Here are my five key takeaways:
1. Technological change is outpacing human adaptability, and not just jobs are at stake.
As a result of global competition, AI and technological acceleration, it’s no longer viable to simply do what we did before. Virtually every job is undergoing change and is at risk of being outsourced or automated out (in full or part). We need to adapt to the changes around us or risk being left behind. To do so, we need to engage in smarter learning, collaboration, creativity, and critical thinking. Wherever you are, you need to invest in developing and transforming skills at an increasingly sophisticated rate, as the useful lifetime for a skill continues to diminish over time. Where previous generations could look forward to a future of learn, work, retire, the current world of work is far more cyclical. For many employees the pattern is a more continual flow of learn, work, change, learn, work, change – and with longer life expectancy, this pattern will take us through a longer work journey than ever before. The concept of lifelong learning has been around for some time, but we’re seeing more and more organizations embracing this philosophy and building a social contract where employees who invest in self-development will have greater opportunities for longevity in the workplace.
2. To stay in the game, L&D leaders must foster a self-learning organization.
Empower your teams to be lifelong learners and you empower lifelong employees. During one of our classroom breakouts, Stephanie Ricci, Chief Learning Officer at Axa, explained, “If you can build a lifelong learning journey that can improve daily work and lifelong engagement, you unlock the secret to success.”
How can we build on our existing foundations to become a self-learning culture?
Start with a learner-first mindset, and personalize your employee’s learning paths to their unique needs and career aspirations.
Allow them to access their program anywhere, anytime, and try pairing video lessons with interactive assessments, quizzes, and peer-reviewed assignments to offer an intuitive experience.
This is not a simple goal to achieve. Fostering a self-learning culture in many organisations involves cultural change, and learners need guidance, support and encouragement. An individual employee needs both the ability to learn (the right tools, capabilities and environment) as well as the desire to learn. Desire is fundamentally a function of “What’s in it for me?” Why should the employee learn? Identifying motivation is key and there are many reasons that could apply (including job security, internal mobility, longevity, opening up new career paths, greater pay and promotional opportunities).
Linking the value of self-development for the employee in terms they recognise to the value for the business that can be derived from transforming skills creates a powerful connection between intent and outcome. It links employees endeavours to business outcomes, helping individuals to feel their work and their learning is meaningful to their organisation.
Companies who are successful in fostering a self-learning culture will reap considerable benefits. Improvements in staff retention arise from staff feeling their employer is investing in their development and providing options for career growth and change within the organisation. Talent acquisition costs can fall as hard-to-find skills can be grown internally rather than acquired externally. The potential for improvement in business outcomes is also huge — improvements in customer service, leadership, productivity, time to market or market competitiveness — translate to the bottom line driving increased revenue growth and margins.
Watch how Telenor fostered a culture of self-learning here.
3. Transformative learning will close the skills gap more sustainably than micro learning.
Micro learning is a growing trend in the world of L&D, principally intended as an approach to learning to combat the minimal amount of time we have as employees to invest in our own development and ever shortening attention spans. Micro learning is usually associated with foundation content that supports the current operation skills of the organisation. Employees needing a reminder or refresher on a topic relevant to their current role may well access micro learning content on how to build a pivot table or tips for presenting skills (or more likely simply search for relevant content on YouTube).
However, such learning is going to close the skills gap where what is required is entirely new skills or a significant change to the existing skill set of employees. You can’t teach someone how to be a data scientist by watching a 10-minute video. It requires a significant investment of time — multiple hours of learning, assessments, application of learning through peer reviews and practical application. This is the domain of transformational learning. While at face value it seems a more daunting challenge, many companies are not just embracing transformation learning, they are succeeding in driving a transformational learning culture where employees see learning as part of work, not separate to it. When this is done well, engagement levels can be very high, because the value to the employee of transformational learning is commensurately higher than simply supporting the role they do today. By definition, if learning is not transformative, then neither the individual nor the business is adapting to technological change and the risk of failure increases exponentially over time.
Find out more on identifying and investing in your skills gap with the Global Skills Index, here.
4. Hit pause.
As eloquently articulated by Thomas Friedman, “When we hit pause on a computer, it shuts down.” When we hit pause on a human being, that person starts. Navigating today’s business and personal landscape requires businesses, not just individuals, to reflect, reimagine and re-engineer our skills, and connect with a higher purpose. When we’re engaged with our day-to-day activities at work, there is little opportunity to do this. It’s only by creating space for ourselves within our working time that we establish an opportunity to reflect, to invest in our development, to consider the changing world around us and how we should respond to it. For many organisations this requires a shift in culture and mindset, but building capabilities around adaptability, critical thinking, and application of evolving technology is critical to our survival, both as an individual looking forward to the future of work, and for organisations facing ever increasing global competition and disruptive new entrants to the market.
Build your team’s capability with our AI for Everyone course.
As eloquently articulated by Thomas Friedman at Partners Conference, when we hit pause on a computer, it shuts down. When we hit pause on a human being, that person starts. Navigating today’s business and personal landscape requires businesses, not just individuals, to reflect, reimagine and re-engineer our skills, and connect with a higher purpose. When we’re engaged with our day-to-day activities at work, there is little opportunity to do this. It’s only by creating space for ourselves within our working time that we establish an opportunity to reflect, to invest in our development, to consider the changing world around us and how we should respond to it. For many organisations this requires a shift in culture and mindset, but building capabilities around adaptability, critical thinking, application of evolving technology and skills evolution is critical to our survival, both as an individual looking forward to the future of work, and for organisations facing ever increasing global competition and disruptive new entrants to the market.
5. The journey is greater than ourselves.
Many business executives I spoke with at Conference expressed a shared sense of mission and purpose with the attending universities. I received feedback that spending time with the education and tech partners of Coursera was inspiring and helped them step back as business leaders, and realize that beyond trying to improve individual companies, we are all on a much greater journey together to transform lives and build a future model for workforce development.
For me, it was inspiring to see how many of our partners share our vision of providing universal access to the world’s best education. At Coursera, we seek to provide life transforming learning to anyone, wherever they are in the world, and are in a unique and privileged position to work with so many leading educational providers and provide access to their incredible training content to consumers, governments, companies and organisations around the world. It is the connection between education partners, learners and customers that drives the greatest change, as each empowers the other.
It’s an incredibly exciting period to be engaged in the world of learning and there has never been a better time to be involved in L&D. Skills development combined with digital transformation are the key drivers for success within the fourth industrial revolution. By focusing on creating a self-learning culture within our organisations, we are also contributing to a global focus on education and lifelong learning which quite simply has the power to make the world a better place.
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About the author Leah Belsky is the Vice President of Enterprise at Coursera, where she runs the company’s business solution team. She has served on President Obama’s Technology Policy Committee and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She also sits on the Boards of Engine Advocacy and Public Knowledge, leading technology and startup policy organizations that promote freedom of expression, innovation, and access to knowledge. Leah is a graduate of Yale Law School and received her undergraduate degree from Brown University. She loves building, identifying, and scaling amazing teams and products and has served as a GM and leader of teams in sales/BD/revenue, operations, new product development, GTM, engineering, professional services, and international. Leah is based in Mountain View, California.
Leah Belsky is the Vice President of Enterprise at Coursera and runs the company’s business solutions team globally. She is based in Mountain View, California.
Last week, Coursera announced their Series E round of $103M, led by Australia’s SEEK group. And this week FutureLearn announced that they raised £50M ($65M) from the same investor. In the case of FutureLearn, SEEK was the sole investor and took a 50% stake in the company.
SEEK group is Australia’s number 1 job matching site and also owns a number of different job related properties around the world. With these investments in two of the largest global MOOC platforms, SEEK is moving aggressively into the global online education space.
Coursera
With this new round of funding, Coursera is now worth more than $1 billion, achieving so-called “unicorn” status. The total amount raised by Coursera now is $313.1 million. The last time the company raised funds was back in June 2017, with a $64 million Series D.
Just a few weeks after the Series D, Coursera announced that Jeff Maggioncalda would become the new CEO, taking over the reins from Rick Levin. Since taking over, Jeff has solidified Coursera’s strategy, while finding a balance between its free-to-audit courses and its paid offerings. In 2018, Coursera reportedly made over $140 million dollars in revenue.
According to Jeff, “The additional funding gives us the resources and flexibility to further expand internationally and to accelerate the development of a learning platform that currently serves 40 million learners, 1,800 businesses, and over 150 top universities.”
To learn more about Coursera’s evolution, check out Class Central’s Year in Review series.
FutureLearn
Last year, according to the Financial Times, FutureLearn, the UK-based MOOC provider wholly owned by the Open University, was looking to raise £40M. It had hired IBIS Capital to help with the raise, and the Open University had pledged to chip in £10M.
With the £50M investment, SEEK Group has become the joint owner of FutureLearn along with Open University. The new partnership with SEEK will include contractual arrangements to protect the University’s academic independence, teaching methods and curriculum.
FutureLearn’s revenue touched £8.2M in the last fiscal year (to the end of July). The last reported investment in the platform was £13M by Open University, at the end of 2015.
To learn more about FutureLearn’s evolution, check out Class Central’s year in reviews.
1. After looking closely at the image above (or at the full-size image), think about these three questions:
• What is going on in this picture?
• What do you see that makes you say that?
• What more can you find?
2. Next, join the conversation by clicking on the comment button and posting in the box that opens on the right. (Students 13 and older are invited to comment, although teachers of younger students are welcome to post what their students have to say.)
3. After you have posted, try reading back to see what others have said, then respond to someone else by posting another comment. Use the “Reply” button or the @ symbol to address that student directly.
Each Monday, our collaborator, Visual Thinking Strategies, will facilitate a discussion from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Eastern Time by paraphrasing comments and linking to responses to help students’ understanding go deeper. You might use their responses as models for your own.
4. On Thursday afternoons, we will reveal at the bottom of this post more information about the photo. How does reading the caption and learning its back story help you see the image differently?
By the time I’d showered and headed to the restaurant for breakfast, the symptoms were largely gone. So when Jeff called to say I was having a stroke, I think I laughed and said, “You’re a bad doctor.”
Besides, I had Yahoo’s Jerry Yang coming to the conference, I had Alibaba’s Jack Ma coming, I had Al Gore coming. I had no time.
That much was very true. Because he was actually a very good doctor, he insisted in an increasingly urgent tone that I go to the hospital right then. That’s because when it comes to strokes, time is critical. You have to get the blood flowing back to the part of the brain that is not getting it.
So I listened, for once, sidelining the obstreperous little sister, and took a car to get an emergency M.R.I.
What do you think this image is saying? How does it relate to or comment on society or our world today? Can you relate to it personally? What is your opinion of its message?
Tell us in the comments, then read the related article to learn what this illustration is all about.
Find many more ways to use our Picture Prompt feature in this lesson plan.
Included in the free download are two desktop options – one with the calendar and one without the calendar. The others include one wallpaper per device.
Trees can live without us, but we really cannot live without trees. They produce oxygen. They provide wood for our furniture and for the buildings in which we live. They bear fruit that we eat. And they are great to sit under and read. (Just to name a few things.)
Did you know that trees can also tell us about our past?
Let’s give it a try: Look closely at the photo of a cut tree below.
• What do you notice about the rings?
• What do you wonder about them?
• What story do you think they tell about the tree?
• How old do you think this tree was when it was cut?
Now, look at these two diagrams explaining how to read and analyze tree rings.
Return to the photo of the cut tree above: What new things can you discover about the tree and its history? Do you want to revise your guess on the age of the tree?
1. What causes the appearance of rings on trees? What secrets about the past can be found in them?
2. How do the rings of a tree provide a far more complete historical picture of climate variations than instrument data alone, according to the article? What climate change findings that have been discovered from tree rings do you think are most significant?
3. What does the author mean by “Trees, it seems, are giant organic recording devices that contain information about past climate, civilizations, ecosystems and even galactic events, much of it many thousands of years old”? Give three examples the author provides to support this statement.
4. Why has the growing field of dendrochronology become so important? What new technologies and techniques have recently emerged? What are some of the practical uses of the study of tree rings?
5. What other types of valuable information do trees hold? Give one example from the article.
6. How can the study of tree rings help us understand the history of human civilizations? What have tree rings revealed to help explain historical events such as the declines in the Ming dynasty, the Ottoman Empire and the Jamestown colony in Virginia?
Finally, tell us more about what you think:
— What did you learn about trees and tree rings? What was most interesting, surprising or fascinating in the article? Does the article change how you think about trees and their importance to the world?
— Look at photos featured in the article. What story do they tell us about how dendrochronologists work? What do you find most interesting about this field of study? Would you want to study trees and tree rings?
When trees die, people invariably mourn. And when trees are planted, people become demonstrably happier. Rhitu Chatterjee of National Public Radio recently reported on a randomized study designed to discover the effect of urban green space on mental health. The study found that cleaning up vacant lots and planting grass and trees was associated with a significant improvement in the mental health of nearby residents: According to the report, “feelings of depression and worthlessness were significantly decreased.”
Do you agree that trees make people happier? What are your experiences with trees? How have they affected your life? Do you think we take trees for granted?
— Did you know that teeth, seashells and coral reef have layers or rings like a tree? Imagine if the human body had layers or rings; how might they record the events in your life and reveal the history of the natural world around you? Draw and label a picture to illustrate your life in rings. Be creative!
A detour at a Victorian cemetery seemed an appropriate setting for a fast-rising star with goth-leaning inclinations in both his music and style. “It’s an interesting subject,” Juice WRLD said of death. “It’s an enigma.”
…The atmospherics at Green-Wood were an easy segue into discussing the morbid bent of his music.
“I talk about stuff like that because those are subjects that people are a) too scared to touch on, or b) don’t do it the right way where people can learn from your mistakes,” he said. “I cherish every mini-second of this life.”
Tell us about a memory from your own life that this illustration makes you think of — or use your imagination to write the opening of a short story or poem inspired by it.
Then, read the related essay to learn what the image is all about.
Find many more ways to use our Picture Prompt feature in this lesson plan.
