Abstract. As social media tools are increasingly used in e-learning in the workplace, there is also a growing need for case studies to allow us to understand the underlying dynamics in order to develop best practices and to avoid potential pitfalls. Using qualitative approach, we studied a pilot training tailored for a large insurance organization that was conducted largely with chats, blogs, voice conferencing, and discussion forums. Our results show that despite challenges, social media use can produce value to e-learners and thus lend credence to many, so far weakly substantiated claims about their potential. In particular, synchronous tools enabled peer support, experience sharing, and networking. Still, the results also show that interactive learning process does not emerge automatically from adding social tools but needs to be designed and maintained. Based on learner views, we discuss how to improve the overall learning experience and make learning more efficient. Also, we discuss how to improve social media tools to better meet learner needs in e-learning in contrast to their recreational use.
As social media features are increasingly added to e-learning, we urgently need more case studies of their use to ground practices in actual experience rather than hype. Using ethnography-based approach, we studied five continuous pro-fessional development pilot trainings where learning largely took place at workplace through wikis, blogs, forums, chats and voice conferencing. Learners valued interactivity, peer support and abundant, instant feedback offered by synchro-nous features. Simultaneously, however, asynchronous fea-tures were often treated as chores and overall interactive learning culture failed to emerge. Instructors, while explicitly encouraging social learning approach, implicitly reinforced teacher-centered learning, leading learners to stick to conven-tional learning culture. Also, training designs often failed to engender interaction. Moreover, at general level, group sizes were too big, moderation was not used efficiently, and differ-ing skill sets of learners were not evened out. The lessons learned from these trainings offer us insight into how to design e-learning enhanced with social media and how to avoid po-tential pitfalls. Particularly, we discuss designing interactivity into the e-learning process
Abstract. As social technology use is increasing in e-learning, so is the need to complement theoretical work with studies of learner experiences of the new dynamics of e-learning to guide this development. We studied how 15 learners experienced social media tools in a long continuous professional development (CPD) pilot training tailored for a large insurance company. While the training included some contact lectures, it was mainly conducted through blog, wiki, chat, and discussion forum tools. As we have already discussed forum and chat use in another paper on a shorter CPD training (with 40 learners) and this study confirmed the results, we focus here on learner experiences of wiki and blog. While the wiki process was widely misunderstood, wiki and blog experiences organically led learners to consider their uses as a personal learning environment. As to blog, the learners who saw it as a tool for self-reflection perceived it positively while others did not, underlining that the benefits and goals of using social tools need to be explicated. Furthermore, social learning process needs to be designed and maintained, as busy workplace learners tend to focus on fulfilling requirements. Simply adding social technology does not necessarily lead to social e-learning.
Abstract-Working life requires employees to continuously update their competences, making lifelong learning an important but challenging part of professional development. This study aims to look for solutions to uncover the tacit and implicit knowledge within the enterprise by the means of social media. Our interest is specially focused on challenges on informal learning and refining and sharing of the tacit knowledge among these expert companies. We have so far collected data from two enterprises about their current knowledge sharing habits and procedures and found out the pitfalls they have experienced in their working culture concerning finding and sharing knowledge.The main challenges (apart from lack of time, which is quite obvious result today) are defects in storing information in a way that enables its easy rediscovery and the huge amount of information from which to filter the relevant pieces of knowledge. Particularly the centralized experts in an insurance company find the lack of regular vertical interaction between the decentralized claim handlers a drawback. There exists a lot of overlapping effort as they need to tell the same issues many times to various claim handlers. Taking these challenges into account new working models will be put into practice utilizing collaborative tools, like wikis and chat forums.
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