How to Create Enterprise Learning Environments

Much of the learning that people do during their lifetimes 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 what prior formal education we may have received. Yet, the workplace is notorious in its lack of support for this informal learning environment. The enterprise sits atop of a wealth of unstructured data and informal processes, so far no one has been able to harness these to take their organizations to the next level of productivity and efficiency. This represents the next great challenge for Information Technology—and learning will be in the forefront of the solution.

Each day in and in every organization knowledge is lost—it is lost because most of all organizational knowledge is retained not in our systems or learning materials but in the minds of those who work in the organization. Human knowledge capital is an informal resource and by nature unstructured data. Today the only way to reach that information is through a translation layer that abstracts or generalizes such experience to produce a very small subset of learning. For every 1000 such experiences we’re lucky to capture 1 and of course not all knowledge captured in this manner is ever shared. The cost of going through this translation layer is extremely high, in fact the cost of education of all types is greatly outpacing the rate of inflation in this country and most others.

Some years ago, close to the dawning of the Internet age, many researchers, engineers and educators realized a variety of immediate educational opportunities posed by emerging technologies. It seemed as though the challenges of education cost and knowledge exploitation were about to be solved. The benefits seemed obvious; greater access to information, combination of learning materials in novel ways, the ability to extend the classroom into every home just to name a few. Yet as Internet technology has matured and new capabilities expanded within it, the anticipated Learning Revolution has failed to materialize. The conceptual framework for exploiting this new infrastructure simply never developed, this missing framework involves both philosophical and pragmatic considerations. The framework in many ways already exists if we choose to acknowledge it, and it can be referred to as the Enterprise Learning Environment. This environment comprises the sum of any number of cultural, organizational or personal level learning ecosystems or perspectives. So how do we exploit these learning environments that already exist ?

The Enterprise Learning Environment is an ecosystem of related capabilities

First let’s explore the concept of what a Learning Environment is. A learning environment is any space, virtual or actual, that facilitates the discovery and assimilation of knowledge. This is a broad definition; it applies equally to a library, the Internet, television, a school or a corporate intranet portal. If the environment allows individual learners the ability to search for, or otherwise discover information and assimilate it within their own personal context, it constitutes a learning environment. Within that simple definition lies a revolution in our approach to learning. Once we acknowledge that learning can and does occur in a multiplicity of environments rather than merely within formal learning approaches, then we can begin to devise lower-cost solutions towards mining human capital and we can also turn every organization into a continuous learning medium. This does not mean that current formal learning strategies need to be replaced; it does however open the door to a much larger set of learning opportunities – and precisely the type of learning opportunities that most people tend to find useful in their daily lives or careers. 

So what is a Learning Opportunity ? A learning opportunity is a potential learning experience for any given learner. Before the advent of recent technological breakthroughs it would have been impossible to consider capturing the knowledge capital of all or even a significant percentage of the members of any typical organization. If those members did not write papers or books or did not have a team of course developers tap them as a subject matter expert, their knowledge would walk out the door with them as soon as they left the organization. If we multiply the learning environments that exist within the larger framework of a connected Global Learning Environment, then the sum of potential learning experiences may eventually grow to the millions or hundreds of millions or more.

Now we must consider the philosophical impact of these suggestions as this will be critical to developing technical solutions. The implication here is that there are different levels of learning experiences available. There are two primary categories: formal and informal. Within the formal category are the courses we tend to be familiar with using some instructional design approach. Formal learning tends to be characterized by its emphasis on outcome-based assessment. The cost of providing formal learning experiences is well documented and the per-hour creation and delivery expense is relatively high. This 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 every harnessed to provide learning experiences

These problems are not just an issue for any one learner or organization, these are society-wide issues. As education becomes more expensive, we lose operational efficiencies, competitive advantages and productivity. This in fact may be the single most costly factor any organization faces today. Recent surveys have shown that a typical employee spends as much as 20 hours per week looking through various unstructured data sources to find the information necessary to do their jobs. Few employees are provided with educational opportunities in today’s workplace.

A Pragmatic Solution
So how does an organization begin to exploit the unique connected learning environments that have arisen within the context of their IT infrastructures? It merely involves viewing those infrastructures in a new light and applying a practical methodology. The methodology could be referred to as learner-centric continuous learning. Continuous learning encompasses several basic assumptions:

• That people don’t stop learning when school is finished
• That improving skills and expanding knowledge makes people more effective workers
• That an organization, a culture, a society can learn from its experiences just an individual can, continuous learning lends itself to continuous improvement. 

Learner-centricity is a concept that has been around for some time but in the context of how we might exploit learning environments, the key elements of this 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 thus contribute to the evolution of the content.
• The ability for learners to build learning experiences from separate content elements (which ultimately can be linked through recommendations, and / or thematic or scenario-based relationships, but this should not occur though application level integration or if it does any such development should follow generic standards rather than employing or creating news specific to “learning” – this will have the effect of opening up development across a much wider range of potential content providers).
• The ability to easily mesh these learning experiences within collaborative learning communities
• The ability to quickly and easily capture one’s own knowledge-base as learning experiences that can be shared with others.

An Enterprise 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 infrastructures would need some content management approach and more than likely the ability to archive and compress that content while still retaining text level search functionality. 
• A converged approach towards content in general. Separating out other forms of data discovery from learning content makes little sense; workers require a wide variety of resources to solve problems and accomplish their tasks, providing them all under one framework makes it more likely that they’ll find what they need and will help organizations adopt a continuous learning process.
• The ability to rapidly build learning content from simple templates covering multiple presentation and media formats.
• The ability for the content to ‘connect’ the learner to the expert or experts who produced it through embedded collaborative technologies (in most cases this would take the form of links to relevant wikis, commons, newsgroups or other similar features).

All of these capabilities already exist in one form or another in most IT infrastructures and are supported by well established technical standards. The difference in this approach is that systems that are today considered separate stovepipes are considered as a single view into the enterprise and that learning as process is integrated within in it.

The key with this approach is that the learner centric content development and discovery is not deterministic or outcome-based but rather dependent upon provision of 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 help accomplish their job, be it step by step instructions, diagrams, an audio interview of expert’s description of some topic, is more likely to be assimilated as it is discovered and used in the context of real world scenarios. In essence, what this amounts to is the convergence of all structured and unstructured data / content within a unified discovery framework. Within that converged environment, members of the organization can then input their knowledge using templates and simple taxonomies of organizational topics which can be built into either a portal structure, included as metadata or both. The idea of ordinary members of any organization contributing their knowledge as potential learning experiences is not very common and would likely represent the greatest hurdle to exploiting learning environments. Thus lessons learned or knowledge capture efforts would need to be encouraged and built-into the routines of most employees. The added benefit of doing this means that 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.

Perhaps the best way to understand how the Learning Environment might be exploited is to follow a typical use case by someone within an organization that has deployed a continuous learning paradigm. The user enters a central portal to gain access to all of their content, including documents, archived email, systems and collaboration. The data for all of these capabilities are stored centrally thus allowing for optimized storage and retrieval across the entire user base. The user then enters the discovery section of the portal to search for information related to an issue they must resolve – in this case a network systems configuration troubleshooting situation. The unified search pulls results from newsgroups, knowledge-bases, documents and both formal and informal learning content, each designated as to source and data type. The user then selects those topics pertinent to the situation aggregating and saving the results within a unique experience folder. The experience folder then can be connected or embedded in hierarchies of other experience folders which combined represent a learning path through a particular topic or set of related topics that needed to be addressed to resolve a real life situation. They can then add their own lessons learned and expertise through capture templates and make those and their learning paths available to the entire organization for reuse.




Copyright 2012  - Technovation Talks, Semantech Inc.