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Online Learning
General trends
Brandon Hall, kicking off the conference with his 'State
of the Industry' address, painted a picture of an industry moving
into its adolescent phase, emerging beyond the earlier hype and
facing the 'chasm' before the technology achieves widespread adoption.
He recognised the need for a more integrated approach to managing
people within organisations, suggesting that drawing together the
disciplines of e-HR, knowledge management and e-learning under the
banner of Human Capital Management (HCM) will provide a more holistic
solution going forward.
Industry analyst and columnist Clark Aldrich, reporting
on findings from the First Annual Supplier Summit, provided a perhaps
more interesting perspective. He argued that innovation was being
driven from the bottom up within organisations; especially where
budgets for large-scale investments remain elusive. Enterprise-level
solutions, he argued, could well fail to provide adequate returns
to organisations. The smaller, more niche solutions coming from
a new generation of innovative companies might in fact offer better
value. His assessment of the marketplace was that there was still
much turbulence within the supply side, but that new start-ups were
still coming through, and increasingly focusing on supporting the
bottom up approach to change management within organisations. He
also predicted the increasing influence of higher education and
government-led initiatives across the industry, as the education
system continues to be (slowly) reformed.
Conference Chair Gloria Gery, long time exponent of performance
support, continued to emphasise the importance of maintaining the
focus on human performance and business results rather than on technology
for its own sake. This still rings true, leading us to believe that
well-targeted solutions that are designed to remove complexity from
the workplace are far more likely to yield success than technology
platforms that only contribute to the cognitive overload experienced
by most people within organisations both large and small.
Indeed, this issue of overload is even more of a problem now that
more work is demanded from fewer people within organisations. With
this pressure omnipresent, it becomes ever more likely that people
will find themselves in situations where they must decide whether
the time and effort it takes to learn something new is worth their
while. When the act of learning becomes too costly in terms of time
and effort to countenance, people are more likely to change their
goal, delegate if they can, improvise (and run the risk of being
wrong), abandon the situation altogether, or blame others and complain
about their predicament. Where this occurs, the work environment
swiftly becomes hostile to people performing at peak levels.
Before more targeted solutions can be designed we need to understand
the work environment through the following attributes:
- Context
- Processes
- Policies
- Demographics
- Structure
- Tolerance levels
- Desired outcomes
We need to recognise that people move between different modes of
activity which all contribute to performance improvement:
- Doing
- Referencing
- Learning (as a conscious activity)
- Collaborating
This suggests that solutions designed to generate better performance
need to support all of these modes.
Next>>
Integration, performance,
collaboration
John Seely Brown
Gloria Gery
Portals
Case study: Dupont Nylon
Flooring Division
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