DESIGNING MORE EFFICIENT E-LEARNING IN THE WORKPLACE

The Knowledge Society made the concept of lifelong learning a continuous objective, necessity and challenge driving changes in the way we learn. Today lifelong learning became an essential “way of life” for many individuals permanently engaged in personal self-development by seeking new ways of extending their knowledge and skills. For them lifelong learning is a tool for better and faster professional development thus building a sustainable career.
In parallel, lifelong learning helps organizations to find or develop human resources needed for the constant evolution of their activities in the ever changing market. For them lifelong learning in the workplace is just a tool that should deliver the best employee performance.
In itself, lifelong learning sets new requirements to learning – to be faster, cheaper and better. But to be more efficient lifelong learning needs new concepts, approaches, integrated solutions and flexible tools that can be easily adapted to various informal training needs and models.
Obviously today there is a critical need of significantly improved concepts and methodologies to guide a new instructional design and development of more efficient e-learning/e-training processes.

The paper describes a new instructional design, course development and learning process management methodology based on Lean principles making e-learning more efficient by:
- shifting from the “passive” book paradigm to a new “active” e-learning content structure and information workflow conveying the knowledge
- integrating measurement and control elements into the digital content workflow and thus improve the efficiency of the whole e-learning process and its management.
This new approach is targeted to help instructional designers to apply technological innovations creating more efficient ways of e-learning. It enables instructional designers produce “autonomous” courses integrating knowledge and management of the process into the learning content and thus no “external” learning management system is required. This approach enables organizations to set up “learning as a service” (LaaS) delivery model whereby the training provider licenses access to “active” learning content to self-guided learners for use as learning on demand. The “active” content helps the learners to follow the shortest pre-designed learning path(s) on the knowledge map acquiring the required knowledge thus enhancing efficiency and quality of the whole e-learning process. The major advantage of the proposed innovative methodology is that the well performed self-guided learners get the exact required outcomes (=knowledge) with no waste of time (=improved efficiency). That time is planned carefully by the instructional design experts during the design phase and is under control throughout the whole e-learning/training process. Those self-directed learners who need any help get the exact support they need “just-in-time”.

The described methodology is well suited to all learning areas, but it has clear advantages in learning applications with precisely predefined learning goals (the exact knowledge and skills to be acquired at the end of the course). It can be applied successfully and seamlessly integrated into many learning/training areas such as corporate training, defence and security, healthcare, etc. areas especially in those with highly structured workflow (e.g. Lean-based work environments).