Learning Environment Exploitation
By Stephen Lahanas
Exploiting informal information and processes represents the next great challenge for information technology—and learning will be in the forefront of the solution.
Many argue that the bulk of learning occurs in the context of informal, job-related discovery or mentoring situations. What we learn on the job determines how well we do in our careers, regardless of any prior formal education. Yet, the workplace is not known for its support of an informal learning environment. Instead, the enterprise sits atop of a wealth of unstructured data and informal processes that few have been able to harness. Therefore, knowledge is lost each day in every organization.
Knowledge is lost because most organizational knowledge is retained in the minds of the people—not in the organization’s systems or learning materials. Human knowledge capital is an informal resource, and by nature, unstructured data. The only way to access that information is through a translation layer that abstracts or generalizes such experience to produce a very small subset of learning. For every 1,000 such experiences, we’re lucky to capture one. Of course, not all knowledge captured in this manner is ever shared. The cost of developing and sorting through this translation layer is extremely high.
Finding the framework
Some years ago, researchers, engineers, and educators recognized the variety of immediate educational opportunities posed by emerging technologies. The benefits seemed obvious: greater access to information, combination of learning materials in novel ways, the ability to extend the classroom to every desk, just to name a few.
But as Internet technology matured and new capabilities expanded within it, the anticipated Learning Revolution failed to materialize. It seemed that the conceptual framework for exploiting this new infrastructure simply never developed. However, the framework, which we’ll refer to as the Global Learning Environment, already exists—if we choose to acknowledge it.
The learning environment comprises any number of cultural, organizational, or personal learning ecosystems or perspectives. It’s any space, virtual or actual, that facilitates the discovery and assimilation of knowledge. This is a broad definition, and it applies equally to libraries, the Internet, television, schools, corporate intranet portals, and so forth. Basically, if the environment enables individual learners to gather information and assimilate it within their personal context, it constitutes a learning environment.
Within that simple definition lies a revolution in our approach to learning. Once practitioners acknowledge that learning can and does occur in multiple environments, rather than merely within formal learning approaches, then we can begin to devise low-cost solutions for mining human capital. This does not mean that current formal learning strategies should be replaced. But it does open doors to a larger set of learning opportunities.
Next question: What is a learning opportunity? A learning opportunity is a potential learning experience for any given learner. Until recent technological breakthroughs, it seemed impossible to capture the knowledge capital within any typical organization. If employees failed to manually record information—or did not have a team of course developers tap them as subject matter experts—their knowledge walked out the door with them. Therefore, if we multiply the number of learning environments within the larger framework of a connected global learning environment, then the sum of potential learning experiences grows exponentially.
Philosophical impact
The implication of the global learning environment is that there are different levels of learning experiences available. There are two primary categories: formal and informal. Within the formal category are traditional courses. Formal learning tends to be characterized by its emphasis on outcome-based assessment. The cost of providing formal learning experiences is documented, and the per-hour creation and delivery expense is relatively high, which leads to three core problems:
· Fewer people can afford to gain access to these learning experiences.
· Fewer learning experiences are captured, providing incomplete pictures of most topics.
· Organizational knowledge capital is seldom—if ever—harnessed to provide learning experiences.
These problems are not an issue for any single learner or organization; they are society-wide issues. As education becomes more expensive, companies lose operational efficiencies, competitive advantages, and productivity. Indeed, this may be the most costly factor facing any organization.
Pragmatic solution
How does an organization begin to exploit the unique connected learning environments that occur within the context of its IT infrastructures?
The organization must begin to view those infrastructures in a new light and apply a learner-centric, continuous learning methodology. Simple, right?
Not so fast. The key elements of an effective learner-centric approach include
- the ability for learners to select and aggregate their own learning experiences and build their own learning paths
- the ability for learners to rate learning experiences and thereby contribute to the evolution of the content
- the ability to easily mesh learning experiences within collaborative learning communities
- the ability to quickly and easily capture one’s own knowledgebase as learning experiences that can be shared with others
- the ability for learners to build learning experiences from separate content elements that can be linked through recommendations and thematic or scenario-based relationships.
Now, let’s consider continuous learning. To start, continuous learning encompasses several basic assumptions:
- People don’t stop learning when class is finished.
- Improving skills and expanding knowledge makes people more effective workers.
- An organization, culture, or society learns from its experiences the same way that an individual does.
The continuous learning environment must support several key technical capabilities.
- The ability to support universal discovery. This implies search access to all content types that may be aggregated together to form a learning experience. In order to facilitate this capability, an IT infrastructure needs to employ a content management approach, as well as the capability to archive and compress content while still retaining text level search functionality.
- A converged approach towards content. Separating out various forms of data discovery from learning content makes little sense; workers require a wide variety of resources to solve problems and accomplish tasks. Providing all data types under one framework increases the likelihood that workers will find what they need.
- The ability to rapidly build learning content from simple templates, covering multiple presentation and media formats.
- The ability for content to connect the learner to the expert(s) via embedded collaborative technologies. In most cases, this would take the form of links to relevant wikis, commons, newsgroups, or other similar features.
Typically, each of these capabilities already exists—in one form or another—in most IT infrastructures. This approach is different in that rather than view systems as separate stovepipes, they are considered a single view into the enterprise and learning is a process integrated within in it.
The key to success is to avoid making learner-centric content development and discovery deterministic or outcome-based. Instead, it should depend on a wider array of options and the learners’ ability to find them, much like we use the Internet. What a learner finds in order to accomplish his or her job, whether it’s step-by-step instructions, diagrams, or an audio interview with an expert, is more likely to be assimilated if it is discovered and used in the context of real world scenarios. In essence, this amounts to a convergence of all structured and unstructured content within a unified discovery framework. Within that converged environment, members of the organization can input their knowledge using templates and taxonomies that are built into a portal structure.
The idea of ordinary members of any organization contributing their knowledge as potential learning experiences would likely represent the greatest hurdle to exploiting learning environments. Organizations would need to encourage employees to share lessons learned or have knowledge capture efforts built into work tasks. The added benefit: knowledge is captured and shared on continuous basis without the need to scramble at the end of employee’s tenure to obtain bits and pieces of a larger picture.
Stephen Lahanas is chief information officer for Navastar. Contact him at SLahanas@navstar-inc.com.