A few months ago, a malaria guy showed me the $20 dumb Nokia phones he buys in a Geneva convenience store and then gives out to trainees who then use it to collect data via SMS text messages. ARM says that the US$20 smart phone (read: Android with an ARM chip) will arrive this year. At stake: how to get the next four billion people online.

So, you are unhappy with a five percent completion rate. Hire tutors (lots of them, if it is massive). Try to get machines to tutor. Use learners as tutors (never mind the pedagogical affordances, you only care about scale and completion). Set up automated phone calls to remind people to turn in their homework. Ring the (behaviorist) bell. Or not. Google’s Coursebuilder team has an interesting take on completion rates.

Demure, soft-spoken, personable, affable, no-nonsense. All those things, in that peculiarly North American way. Those words don’t do justice to B., the uniquely compelling individual I met for the second time last night in Divonne-les-Bains. To describe him as a living legend in the world of learning and development is accurate, but far from complete.

“In a knowledge economy, the flow of knowledge is the equivalent of the oil pipe in an industrial economy.

Six months after starting to develop LSi.io, I have 64 ongoing conversations with 150 interlocutors, connecting humanitarian and development learning leaders, Chief Learning Officers and academic researchers. Being independent has given me a unique vantage point from which to examine the humanitarian and development sector’s learning, education and training strategies.

This is the third in a three-part presentation about learning strategy for development and humanitarian organizations. It was first presented to the People In Aid Learning & Development Network in London on 27 February 2014.

This quote is not new. Given the increasing focus of MOOC debates on corporate MOOCs, it is interesting because bridging gaps in knowledge and skills is needed to address global health and poverty gaps. However, these twin strands of the Gates Foundation have, so far, been led by separate teams.

I’m looking forward to being back in London on Thursday 13 March for People In Aid’s Learning & Development network meeting. This group meets four times a year to discuss issues in which there is a shared interest across organizations. Previous topics have covered how to “measure” learning or the design of competency frameworks, for example.

I’ve just published my presentation (25 minutes with slides) about the urgency of scaling up humanitarian education on LSi.io. This is a recording with both slides and my narrative, that looks at a number of issues: Training like it’s 1899 – and why we need to think about learning beyond training The need for scale – some indicative figures What is broken about humanitarian education VUCA – What has changed about the nature of knowledge and why

I first heard her described as the “lady who did MOOCs in a refugee camp”. It was completely ambiguous what that meant, but certainly sparked my curiosity. Barbara Moser-Mercer is a professor at the University of Geneva and a  cognitive psychologist who has practiced and researched education in emergencies. I finally caught up with her at the Second European MOOC Summit.

International organizations already deliver training at a massive scale, but they do it mostly the old-fashioned way – one workshop at a time. The urgency of scaling up learning, education and training (LET) is real: with 320 million people affected by climate change-related disasters in 2015, 30 million deaths from non-communicable diseases (NCDs), and many more such grim numbers, it is clear that the challenges need to be met at scale.