Reading about educational ecosystems

Somehow there is often talk about educational ecosystems and everybody seems to have an intuitive idea of what that means. I decided I needed to find some references that actually provide definitions or at least more context, and that wasn’t as easy as I had thought! I am summarizing two papers below, though.

First paper: Schilstra et al. (2021) on an “Ecosystem Approach to life-long learning”. They say that educational ecosystems as more resilient to disruption, and are one way to prepare the world to be resilient in the face of unforeseen challenges. Standardized education can only prepare students for what is known by the time they graduate (if that, seeing that implementation of new knowledge or topics into teaching takes a looong time, as we see with sustainability, and that learning outcomes are often centralized and take forever to change), and only life-long learning can empower people (both private citizens and teachers) to react to current developments. So Schilstra et al. (2021) develop their “Ecosystem Approach to life-long learning”, motivated by the disruptions of basically everything by the covid-19 pandemic. It builds on cooperative learning, and they highlight evaluation as crucial to ensure coordination and alignment of diverse actors.

Lifelong learning depends of course on learners having the right attitude towards learning, basically the conviction and motivation to do it, but also the skills to find, evaluate, integrate new information and learn new skills. But learning is not just knowledge transfer, and the more uncertain a situation is, the more important it becomes to co-create an understanding of what is going on. This means that it is not just individual learners that need to be prepared for lifelong learning, but society more broadly. Schilstra et al. (2021) point out, regarding cooperative learning, that “[i]mportant aspects in this respect are for example open communication, active engagement, no hierarchical arrangement and members should feel safe and respected” (or, no dumförklaring as in our study, or no dismissing of opinions as in MacInnes et al. (2026)). Cooperative learning can (and probably should) be trained in formal education, so that people can use it later, or generally outside of formal learning, as part of their lifelong learning.

Schilstra et al. (2021) then discuss adaptive cycle of resilience, which consist of four states. In the equilibrium state, “normal” ways of learning work. But as soon as an unforeseen challenge arises, we need to look for new ways of working, combining actors etc in new ways. This typically then leads to an operationalization of those new ways, which at some point become the “new normal”, typically without much of an evaluation. Especially for the challenge- and finding-new-ways-of-working phases, it is important that teams work well together.

Now to an “ecosystem approach”: Schilstra et al. (2021) write that “[i]t is often discussed to what extent ecosystems naturally arise or whether they are the result of careful planning and structuring”, but they can definitively be planned and facilitated to some extent, for example by recruiting and integrating new stakeholders. This requires organisations, for example, to organize around “what emerges”, not around interest groups, and individuals to be open to this. For this to happen, different system levels (from the individual, over the group and institution, to the global systems) need to first become aware of how they are habitually operating, then of the transactions that are occurring, the different stakeholders and relationships, and finally the whole ecosystem.

Integrating all these ideas, Schilstra et al. (2021) point out that “society requires learners, not doers”, and that lifelong and cooperative learning go hand-in-hand (both of which need to be fostered both by individuals and organisations). For that, educators should be explicit about how they prepare, facilitate and evaluate cooperative learning, and what they do to create a climate in which it can happen, so that learners can make transfer outside of formal learning settings, and ecosystems can be planned and constructed.

Schilstra et al. (2021) highlight the importance of evaluation at different points in the process, but this is the part that I find most difficult to imagine if an ecosystem is dynamic and co-created. Who is evaluating what and how, especially in a centralized way (the decentralized evaluations of individual courses or even institutions I can imagine), and what are they doing with that information? 

Another approach to ecosystems comes from Chang & Tan (2013), who present “An ecosystem approach to knowledge management” in companies, based on the premise that proactive knowledge management is “vital to attaining competitiveness”, where “knowledge is a strategic corporate asset” which has become the resource rather than just a resource. The ecosystem idea here means that ideas can cross-fertilize and feed one another in interactions between individuals, but also that knowledge is ever evolving and that a framework needs to be able to capture that evolution.

They focus on just-in-time collaborative learning within the organisation, which is facilitated by networking face-to-face or online, but also needs

• Technological infrastructure for collaboration on a large scale, which obviously needs continuous development, maintenance, …
• Knowledge-friendly culture defined by trust, collaboration and learning to enable sharing of insights and expertise
• Communities of practice and social networks across organizational boundaries

They suggest the CLES (“Collaborative Learning Ecosystem”) framework, which emphasizes “a holistic approach that highlights the significance of each component, their behaviour, relationship and interactions, as well as the environmental borders in order to examine an existing system or form an effective and successful system“. The three key components of CLES are

• learning utilities or knowledge management tools, i.e. hardware, software, etc
• learning stakeholders or knowledge workers, i.e. the learning communities and other stakeholders who contribute or benefit from the ecosystem
• collaborative, dynamic learning environment

The CLES framework (and this whole article) are really on companies and not education institutions, but nevertheless are interesting to consider for my case. Chang & Tan (2013) present a table with different knowledge management processes and the kind of information technologies that would support them: knowledge creation would be supported by data mining tools and learning tools, knowledge storage and retrieval by e-bulleting boards, repositories, databases, search and retrieval tools, knowledge transfer by e-bulletin boards, discussion forums, knowledge directories; and knowledge applications by expert and workflow systems. All four are supported by platform technologies ranging from the internet to instant messaging, emails, etc.. It shouldn’t come as a surprise, but I find it interesting to consider that knowledge storage and retrieval only partly uses the same tools as knowledge transfer, where knowledge transfer needs co-creation of meaning in discussions…

The autors then discuss specifics of the learning stakeholders (like learning preferences (and learning style, oh no!!), prior knowledge and experience, expectations, motivation to learn and share knowlege), internal and external influences (management and leadership support, kind of knowledge culture, strategy, and commitment to IT infrastructure (love that point! And what is it with information security suddenly popping up in everything I read?)). They then test this framework on a small company to identify aspects that support or hinder a good knowledge sharing, and from that make recommendations for improvement of organizational learning. Would be fun to do a similar analysis on our ecosystem!

Schilstra, T., Takács, E., & Abcouwer, T. (2021). Ecosystem Approach to life-long learning.

Chang, V., & Tan, A. (2013). An ecosystem approach to knowledge management. In 7th international conference on knowledge management in organizations: Service and cloud computing (pp. 25-35). Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer Berlin Heidelberg.

Featured image is my desk this morning, mostly because I needed to document the kvikklunsj that my colleague brought me from Norway because she remembered our awesome poster!