workplace learning
On-the-Job E-Learning: Workers’ Attitudes and Perceptions
This article was originally published on the International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, Volume 14, Issue, 1.
This paper analyses workers’ perceptions and attitudes through an online survey of 2,000 employees of a leading European savings bank on training habits, perceptions, motivations, and disincentives of undertaking face-to-face or online instruction.
The results reveal that workers perceive e-learning as a more flexible and up-to-date training methodology. On the other hand, face-to-face training continues to be perceived as a more motivating methodology compared to virtuality and with better explanations from the course trainers. As regards motivations given by the workers when it comes to training, there are three main groups of attitudes: those which are more affective and social, those which reveal poor adaptability or fear of the new training requirements, and, finally, those linked to the knowledge society.
Such results state that while the benefits of distance methodology can be clearly identified from the company’s point of view (i.e., as a flexible and efficient methodology to develop the employees’ skills and knowledge), from the employees’ standpoint, the advantages of virtual training are not so clear and depend to a great extent on their attitude towards the use of virtuality.
Learning Technologies eXchanges 2013
This is the second year that Learning Technologies and Learning and Skills are hosting an official eXchange to give the learning and development community a chance to meet, network and collaborate at the event. eXchanges will provide a unique opportunity to get up close and personal with speakers from the conference.
The eXchange provides an opportunity for L&D practitioners who are visiting the show to directly meet the conference speakers to exchange practical ideas and experiences around themes being discussed in the conference.
A chance to get up close and personal with conference speakers!
The feedback that we received last year was unanimous: What a great idea! Like all great ideas, it's simple and straight forward, but incredibly effective. Each eXchanges will take the form of an informal, face-to-face group conversation looking at answers to practical questions that will stimulate innovation and creativity in learning and development. The eXchanges will last over an hour and their USP is that each one will be lead by an industry-leading expert who is speaking at the conference.
Every eXchange will give you unprecendented access to much respected industry leaders and conference speakers. Here's your moment to air your questions, problems and even solutions to your e-learning colleagues.
EC-TEL 2013: Eighth European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning
The European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning (EC-TEL) is a unique opportunity for researchers, practitioners, and policy makers to address current challenges and advances in the field. Through EC-TEL, established and emerging researchers as well as practitioners, entrepreneurs, and technology developers explore new collaborations, strengthen networks, and complement their core experience. This year's theme is "Scaling Up Learning for Sustained Impact". We invite contributions for demonstrations, workshops and project meetings, as well as original research papers. A doctoral consortium will also be organized concurrently with the workshops. Please find all details at the EC-TEL 2013 website.
Scaling up Technologies for Informal Learning in SME Clusters
Learning Layers develops a set of modular and flexible technological layers for supporting workplace practices in SMEs that unlock peer production and scaffold learning in networks of SMEs, thereby bridging the gap between scaling and adaptation to personal needs.
By building on recent advances in contextualized learning, these layers provide a meaningful learning context when people interact with people, digital and physical artefacts for their informal learning, thus making learning faster and more effective.
Building on mobile learning research, we situate learning into physical work places and practices to support situated, faster and more meaningful learning.
Learning Layers provide a shared conceptual foundation independent of the tools people use and the context they are in.
Learning Layers are based on a common light-weight, distributed infrastructure that allows for fast and flexible deployment in highly distributed and dynamic settings.
We apply these technologies in sectors that have been particularly hesitant to take up learning technologies, i.e. health care and building and construction.
Involving two representative and large-scale regional SME clusters allows us to involve end users in co-design of the system and later scale up the approach to more than 1,000 learners within 4 years.
By inviting a larger set of stakeholders to adapt and build on our solutions and through research in sustainable business training models, the project will generate significant impact by boosting the ability of regional innovation systems to adapt to change and thereby remain competitive, on the individual, organisational and regional level.
We demonstrate the impact in the two chosen sectors, but widen the scope to other sectors and regions towards the end of the project.
Technology Enhanced Learning Livinglab for Manufacturing Environments
The TELL-ME project (Technology Enhanced Learning Livinglab for Manufacturing Environments) aims to develop and trial in authentic contexts (SME-driven human-centric and service-oriented manufacturing workplaces) an innovative cross-enterprise methodology and IT platforms for continuous education and training in heterogeneous business ecosystems, blending Precision Teaching (PT) lifelong learning and Living Lab (LL) participative co-creation aspects in ways that can address more business needs than traditional training
This responds to several EU 2020 Strategy indicated in several Flagship Initiatives like "An Agenda for new skills and jobs", "An industrial policy for the globalisation era", "Innovation Union" and "Digital Agenda for Europe" and summarised in the two questions below:
- How can SMEs blue collar workers in less advanced industrial sectors keep the pace of innovation of technologically advanced ones?
- How can TEL-based training be positioned and improved, in order to have more impact on industrial sectors' innovation and resilience?
Five main challenges have been identified as fingerprints of the TELL-ME proposal:
- Human-centred manufacturing and the increasing need to consider human factors and workers wellbeing in the production processes;
- Service oriented Manufacturing and its increasing need to open, breed and govern globalised business ecosystems;
- Learning Ecosystems are the new frontier of collaborative value networks on a global and cross-sector market;
- Living Labs of SMEs and their need to constantly develop business-technical-social-market innovation via co-creation and inspirational environments;
- Learning at the Workplace and its need for fast, punctual and personalized life-long learning that takes account of fluency-driven approaches to training, and trends in using TEL and OER for self-regulated learning.
Fra e-læring til m-læring
Denne artikel handler om de udfordringer, den professionelle sektor møder, når den bliver mobil. Rapporten diskuterer rollen, mobilenheder spiller i medarbejderstaben og tager fat på udfordringer som kompatibilitet, sikkerhed og uddannelse. Den giver også en omfattende gennemgang af det mobile landskab og vurderer nuværende bedste praksisser inden for mobil læring.
E-learning Event 2013
As a professional one (next) step with e-learning in your organization? This event provides you all the latest developments in e-Learning!
The E-Learning event is an opportunity to meet internationally reknowned experts: entrepreneurs, educators and researchers with whom you will be able to share experiences and learn from them. There will a alson be a boardroom meeting, during which you will have the opportunity to talk to CEO's share knowledge during (expert) sessions.
The programme contains keynotes such as 'Revolutionary developments in training in the workplace' and 'Self Organised Learning'
The New Learning and Technology Architecture. Ten trends from leading companies
As part of the research for the Report, Kineo conducted over 30 interviews and meetings with leading companies, including Aviva, BT, BP and Vodafone, in order to explore the trends and challenges being faced by L&D departments, and how they were dealing with them. 10 key trends emerged from this research, and these are explored in the report which opens with a foreword from e-learning guru, Clive Shepherd, and ends with a 2013 e-learning to-do list based on the Report's findings.
LLLight'in'Europe
An EU study has been launched to research the importance of lifelong learning and its impact in the workplace.
Among all Europeans between 24 and 65 years old who had a tertiary educational degree in 2010, 82.8% were working. In the same age group, 68.3% who completed secondary schooling were working. Only 46% of those who did not complete secondary schooling were working. It is apparent that if Europe wants to be working, higher education is the necessary foundation for being competitive in the labour market.
Since this is not only true for generations of future workers currently in school, but equally so for those who are in their 30s, 40s and 50s today, Lifelong Learning must be essential to continued employability, from an individual and economy wide point of view.
Lifelong Learning is important for businesses too. Facing increasingly volatile environments, quick technological change and fierce national and global competition, companies today more than ever depend on an educated and creative workforce to achieve success. As employees across developed countries work longer due to the increase in retirement age, and as young, skilled workers are increasingly hard to find because of demographic change, supplying high-quality Lifelong Learning opportunities is crucial for companies to ensure the optimal productivity of their ageing workforce. Furthermore, as the competition for talent intensifies and employee mobility continues to increase, Lifelong Learning offerings become more and more important in determining a company’s ability to attract and retain talented employees.
The challenge
Given the importance of Lifelong Learning, individuals, companies and governments across the world seek to invest in it. The cumulative investment necessary to generate higher education degrees alone for adults over the next two decades across Europe may be 3.5 trillion euros, or 1.4% of the European GDP per year. Even higher investments will be required in non-formal and informal Lifelong Learning to take place across an employee’s working life.
Despite the undisputed need for this investment, research to date has generated little actionable evidence on how human capital is created through Lifelong Learning activities by individuals, companies and public bodies across Europe. We consequently have little evidence to guide investments in Lifelong Learning.
The European Commission has therefore granted the LLLight’in’Europe project four years and 25 researchers to investigate the following urgent questions:
- How do successful enterprises actively employ Lifelong Learning for their competitive advantage?
- Which public policy environments facilitate Lifelong Learning for such enterprises and entrepreneurs?
- How does Lifelong Learning interact with and promote innovativeness on the enterprise level?
- How much of which skills do European adults actually have?
- What are the actual learning mechanisms in adult life that lead to these skills?
- What are the causal effects of these skills on growth, competitiveness and social cohesion?
The LLLight’in’Europe project is part of the European Commission’s 7th Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development (FP7), an initiative supporting high-impact projects crucial for “responding to Europe‘s needs in terms of jobs and competitiveness, and to maintain leadership in the global knowledge economy”. The project is a cooperation of nine European and international research institutions, and is furthermore supported by the OECD and Cedefop. It will run from January 2012 until September 2016.
Adopting a new approach
As part of the project, a new and innovative approach to measuring human capital will be employed. Traditional measures of human capital, including for example years of education, numeracy and literacy, focus on skills obtained mostly through formal education at early stages of life, and pay little attention to the applicability of human capital in daily and working life. These measures can therefore make few meaningful predictions about how human capital is created and maintained through Lifelong Learning at later stages of life, especially at work, and what the social and economic impact of the human capital thus created might be.
To address these issues, the LLLight’in’Europe project uses Complex Problem Solving skills (CPS) as a measure of human capital. CPS refers to an individual’s ability to solve complex and quickly changing problems. It is not only a valuable skill in itself, as it helps individuals to solve problems commonly encountered in daily life and at work, but it is also a foundation skill for the acquisition of further skills, especially high-value job specific skills. These are economically and socially important as they result in job security and high salaries for individuals, high performance and competitive advantage for companies, and overall competitiveness and low unemployment levels for economies.
Beyond establishing the importance of CPS skills, research also indicates that this skill is trainable across life. The LLLight’in’Europe project aims to develop recommendations for individuals, companies and economies on how to best invest their Lifelong Learning resources to maximize individual and collective economic and social well-being.
To develop a sound understanding of the level CPS skills possessed by adults across and outside of Europe, and to grasp how these skills were developed through Lifelong Learning, the LLLight’in’Europe project embarks on an extensive series of CPS assessments. Over the course of four years, the CPS abilities of a total of 4150 individuals will be recoded. Of these, 3850 will be employees from 50 successful companies, sampled from across 5-6 highly competitive industries in15 EU countries and 4 EU competitors. The remaining 300 will be entrepreneurs from across the EU.
Outcomes and publications
All results and recommendations of the LLLight’in’Europe project will be published in our “Publication Suite”, consisting of a synthesis report, 21 policy reports, 7 thematic reports, and corresponding videos. The entire publication suite will be available on the LLLightineurope website for download and also via other multiplication levels. The expected publication time is June 2015.