E-learning and the Workplace

Abstract

Many work arrangements discourage learning. In organizations, classroom instruction is obviously not the most efficient method. However, if e-learning is to justify the publicity that surrounds it, there is a great need to understand its organizational environment and to evolve design principles.

In a Word Many work arrangements discourage learning. In organizations, classroom instruction is obviously not the most efficient method. However, if e-learning is to justify the publicity that surrounds it, there is a great need to understand its organizational environment and to evolve design principles.

Geneses of Lifelong Learning

The Talmud enjoins well: Do not confine your children to your own learning, for they were born of another time. Then again, the flipside these days is that parents themselves must cross the generational divide and embark on lifelong learning.¹ It is not news that Information Age, digital technology now pervades our lives and occupations; but it is less often remarked that it has also begun to change the ways we (must) learn from the cradle to the grave.

Learning is not a product of schooling but the lifelong attempt to acquire it.

—Albert Einstein

E-learning,² taken to mean all forms of electronically supported learning and teaching, entered formal higher education in the mid- to late 1990s, riding on the wave of interest in the knowledge economy (and thereafter the learning organization ).³ (This is not to say that the experience has been an unqualified success: early attempts in universities, up to the mid-2000s, miscarried because e-learning ventures somehow failed to appreciate that education is not just a business, students are not mere consumers, and obtaining a degree is not quite the same as shopping online.)⁴ Currently, because the delivery of content through electronic information and communications technology expands the realm of how, where, and when learners can engage, e-learning is also being mooted as a cheap and effective (just-in-time) way to provide private and public sector organizations the everyday learning opportunities they need to improve organizational outcomes.

We now accept the fact that learning is a lifelong process of keeping abreast of change. And the most pressing task is to teach people how to learn.

—Peter Drucker

Organizations have a vested interest in attracting, engaging, and retaining talent; but they also need to help personnel perform at the top of their game after they are hired. What is more, because the shelf life of information is shorter and forces each one to constantly take on new roles, the rules of the game change daily. When it comes to learning, what is good for personnel is good for their organization. Training programs that are well managed can have a measurable effect.⁵ (That might be gauged at several levels, namely, reaction and satisfaction, learning results, on-the-job application, business impact, intangible benefits, and return on investment.)⁶ Since the need and associated rhetoric of flexible learning has been strongest in adult and continuous education , and explains in large part the attention given to communities and networks of practice in recent years, e-learning at the workplace augurs well.⁷

The New Learning Paradigm

Certainly, many work arrangements discourage learning––never mind lifelong learning ––and any attempt to overcome roadblocks is welcome. Many organizations have a habit of herding learners, but not senior management, in a room—sometimes for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, and instructing the same generic, standardized training programs––as if each had identical prior knowledge, learning styles, and knowledge needs.⁸ This does little to encourage indispensable interactivity, taken to be the active involvement, participation, and engagement of an individual in the learning process. (Good interaction and the motivation it sparks do not just happen—these have to be designed.)⁹

An organization’s ability to learn, and translate that learning into action rapidly, is the ultimate competitive advantage.

—Jack Welch

Classroom training is no longer the most efficient training method. (It definitely cannot be when increasingly dispersed personnel must be brought out of their offices from multiple locations, at high direct and indirect costs, to attend classes.) No one claims that corporate universities¹⁰ are the be-all and end-all of training. (They are better described as a state of mind or, if that is deemed too ambitious, a system of interest.) To begin, they demand e-literacy.¹¹ But, given that, they can build in learning organizations what Meister (1998) calls the 3 C’s of Corporate Citizenship, Contextual Framework, and Core Workplace Competencies. The new learning paradigm emphasizes the following critical issues:

• a shift from training to self-responsible learning;

• self-organized learning, based on metacognitive learning strategies for the development of lifelong learning skills;

• process-oriented learning, focusing on learning to learn, not product-oriented learning;

• highly flexible, personalized, and individualized learning based on different learning types and personal preferences); and

• individual- and team-oriented methods of collaborative learning based on constructive and connective learning theories using communities of learners, experts, facilitators, coaches.¹²

Notwithstanding, the lessons of past experience in e-learning ––at least in higher education since documented studies of the labor market are still sparse––must be heeded: to create sustainable enterprise, corporate universities (and learning and development units in human resource divisions) must eschew quick-fix e-learning solutions, commonly masquerading as technology-driven learning management systems¹³ that automate the administration, tracking, and reporting of training events but ignore the organizational learning environment.

For effective structuring and administration of e-learning solutions, organizations must develop vibrant and committed formal learning organizational cultures and supporting virtual and traditional infrastructure that grow customized training programs, flexibly tailored to the needs of personnel, using good practices from both inside and outside. (Increasingly, such responsibilities are ascribed to chief learning officers .)¹⁴ To note, given the evolutionary nature of e-learning and its innate diversity, articulating a viable one-dimensional universal solution is impossible. E-learning is an immature but quite dynamic enterprise characterized by established brand names, continuing convergence, market consolidation, and requirements for scalable business models on the one hand and modularization and standardization, demand for one-stop shopping and added-value services, the establishment of e-learning partnerships and strategic alliances, and the emergence of new learning models that involve communities and networks of practice on the other. If most agree that e-learning should not be seen as isolated events taking place in parallel to an organization’s practice but, instead, as an integrated part of the organization’s environment, context, relationships, and knowledge, it is assuredly neither easy nor cheap.¹⁵ However, design principles can help.

Organizational Learning Environments

An organizational learning environment is conditioned by the external environment, within which organizational context, inter- and intra-organizational relationships, and organizational knowledge interact. Usefully, Dealtry (2005) has itemized the individual elements that, across functions and departments, constitute an intervention platform for strategic management of e-learning. The following draws from his work to share them.

In this age, which believes that there is a shortcut to everything, the greatest lesson to be learned is that the most difficult way is, in the long run, the easiest.

—Henry Miller

• Corporate strategy The formulation of corporate strategy must elevate adult and continuous education as a foremost input to the development of organizational capability. Interpreting the organization’s vision, mission, and goals in terms of learning needs across all major functions and departments has a strong bearing on sustainable competitive advantage and provides the foundation for detailed planning of and funding for learning.

• Learning policy The provision of quality learning on demand drives organic individual and collective development. A learning policy would specify the goal to build a learning organization as well as the core values and objectives for that. The core values might, for instance, state that (i) an investment in staff learning is an investment in high organizational performance; (ii) learning, coaching, and mentoring are shared responsibilities; and (iii) equitable access to training opportunities is critical for renewal. The objectives could, for example, include (i) the creation of a learning culture that encourages learning, creativity and innovation, and the acquisition, transfer, and use of knowledge; and (ii) training programs that meet the needs of personnel. A learning charter would demonstrate commitment: learning charters are a touchstone against which provision and practice can be tested and a waymark with which to guide, monitor, and evaluate progress. First-level managers must participate in learning policy development: they should therefore be able to distinguish learning needs from current business-as-usual realities; they should have the skills to plan performance development in relation to the learning policy as it affects their activities. Moreover, learning performance management should play a greater role in direct reporting relationships.

• Funding for learning The approach to funding for learning must move the financing of interventions out of the annual budgeting process and affirm learning as a major component of investment for organizational development. (This involves rigorous formulation of the business case for investments in human capital , the scheduling of resourcing, monitoring, and evaluation.) It must be based on a clear understanding of the relationship between an organization’s intellectual capital¹⁶ and its place in the market.

• Learning portfolio The learning portfolio must define the provision of internal and external, formal and informal training for technical, supervisory, and managerial development strands. Program curriculum development, timing, on-call infrastructure support, and the provision of distributed e-learning solutions must meet changing needs flexibly with quality content.

• Personnel development The overt introduction of a learning component in the work of individuals injects a very different perspective on professional occupations. Changing psychological contracts in a positive way cannot be achieved simply by introducing an e-learning system. Hence, the alignment between an individual’s desire to learn and an organization’s learning requirements needs careful balancing.

• Knowledge, skills, and competencies Most organizations have developed specifications of desired knowledge, skills, and competencies. Knowledge is a most critical organizational resource: making sure that knowledge workers have both the capability and the maximum number of opportunities to release their potential is a key objective of strategic learning management.

• Talent development In a learning organization, the meaningful joint exploration of interest-based relationships, mutual learning needs, expectations, and working objectives is fundamental to the nurturing of talent once it is onboard. Personnel, especially top talent, quickly become actively disengaged, or at least not engaged, if they are not allowed to achieve.

• Performance management Learning performance management has many different strands, involving monitoring and evaluation at individual and organizational levels. Learning about the dynamics of the external and internal organizational contexts and ensuring that first-level managers and personnel have the decisional power and related capability to sustain high performance is a strategic imperative for success, if not survival, that senior and middle management must seek to act on.

Design Principles for E-learning

For sure, e-learning is not the key to organizational nirvana. The generative learning perspectives that must accompany its introduction—and with which training programs must converse—include continuous improvement strategies and methodologies; business process design and implementation; business process improvement tools; community and network of practice models; knowledge management systems and tools; specific training provisions; physical and virtual learning spaces and delivery channels; branding; cadres of skilled facilitators, process builders, and implementers; and recognition and rewards programs (Campbell and Dealtry 2003).

E-learning per se is not without challenges: it is a costly and time-consuming enterprise. Organizations must overcome three generic impediments to its introduction and continuing use: (i) the cost of developing (or purchasing) software applications at the onset, compounded by running costs once e-learning interventions are under way; (ii) (perceived) lack of time to devote to workplace learning and to formulate and maintain e-learning solutions; and (iii) content issues—quality content is not available on the market or is not suited for e-learning and must therefore be developed. Extensive research and careful planning will help circumscribe requirements and surmount these barriers.

To kick-start effective e-learning design, the simple questions that beg answers are: What objectives must the training satisfy? What is the audience for which the training is intended? Does the content already exist or must it be created? What technical limitations exist, if any? What data must be tracked to a learning management system ? What interactivity level is applicable? What type of training is required? Is the e-learning solution part of a blended solution?¹⁷ How long should the training be?

Usefully, Brown and Voltz (2005) have determined that six elements, combining skills and tasks associated with lesson planning, instructional design, creative writing, and software specification, lie at the heart of e-learning design itself. They pertain to (i) activity––paying attention to the provision of a rich learning activity;¹⁸ (ii) scenario––situating this activity within an interesting story line; (iii) feedback––providing meaningful opportunities for student reflection and third-party criticism; (iv) delivery––considering appropriate technologies for delivery; (v) context––ensuring that the design is suitable for the context in which it will be used; and (vi) impact––bearing in mind the personal, social, and environmental impact of the designed activity. If e-learning is to justify the publicity that now surrounds it, more efforts need to be devoted to explicating these.