Abstract:

Nowadays, new technologies and knowledge emerge at an increasingly fast pace. The demographic shift, globalisation and the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic are causing a change in the labour market. For these reasons, workers need to be more agile and navigate the labour market, improving their skills, competencies and learning new ones. Lifelong Learning (LLL) embodies these principles, highlighting how learning takes place at all stages of an individual's life, not only at school or university but also at home, in communities or workplaces, in formal and informal ways.
E-learning can meet workers’ needs and LLL objectives, offering different degrees of freedom and flexibility. The potential of e-learning for workers raises the need to define a set of strategies that could guide professionals in designing these courses, starting with analysing similar cases to understand which elements make them effective. However, it is not possible to find literature sources that undertake comprehensive case study analysis of e-learning courses aimed at workers, but only single case studies. This article seeks to cover this gap by taking a snapshot of the state of the art of e-learning platforms and courses aimed at workers and available in Italy. The critical interpretation of the data made it possible to develop six strategies to guide professionals in designing a course.
In total, 24 case studies were analysed, including both platforms and specific courses. This choice was dictated by the wide diffusion of platforms such as Domestika and Coursera, which offer many courses with a similar structure and fixed constraints. Through this sample, it was possible to focus the analysis on the most significant and recurrent elements necessary to design a course, e.g. the format, duration, type of interaction and verification, among others. The research included data triangulation through expert interviews and a conceptual literature review, allowing a critical interpretation.
The results show that the most popular format is video lectures, usually aided by integrative formats like podcasts and tutorials. Seventy per cent of the courses provide lessons longer than 10 minutes, but critically analysing the topic, it emerges that most recent courses are trying to shorten them to meet participants’ scheduling needs and attention span. Moreover, although most courses offer individual learning experiences, interaction with peers or tutors is becoming increasingly popular to increase participants’ motivation and engagement.
The above-mentioned results and further critical analysis allowed the research to be synthesised into six design strategies. These can guide professionals in structuring the course by setting the identified key parameters. The proposed strategies can be summarised as follows:
- Guide participants in the definition of their personalised learning path
- Enable participants’ freedom of choice through multi-formats path
- Enable users’ communities to support the learning process
- Enhance the educational value through consolidation tests and live feedbacks
- Propose short contents through micro-learning approach
- Ensure that participants can practically exploit the learned skills
To verify the applicability of the defined strategies, future work will focus on field application by designing a course for a trade association in collaboration with learning designers. The research team will then develop and test it to verify its effectiveness.

Keywords:

Lifelong Learning, e-learning, Workers, Design Strategies, Case Study Analysis, Adult Learning.