Academic Education or Organisational Learning?

Extract from IDEAS! Whitepaper November 2002
Author: Nicole Dixon

Early corporate adopters of eLearning products and solutions often sought cost savings in education management and delivery or increases in skills and capability. More recently, requirements for corporate take-up of eLearning are positioned as one of the pillars of an organisational knowledge management capability. That is, eLearning provides a cost effective and responsive mechanism for distributing knowledge through the organisation.

While the demand in corporate organisations is increasing, the available solutions are becoming less and less attractive.

Many organisations are finding that centralised, academic oriented learning applications fall short of meeting the adult learning requirements within business workplaces. The costs are often extensive and the provision of administration and accreditation go far beyond the needs of an organisation.

Over the decades it is doubtful that the average corporate organisations would have sought to establish offline VET based products and services to meet their education and training requirements.

In today’s environment of providing easy access interfaces, self-service applications, flexibility working conditions, etc. the eLearning needs of the corporate organisation can differ greatly from a traditional enrollment, participation, assessment, accreditation process. In most corporate organisations the learning focus is a combination of job-based skills development, self-serve, self-paced learning and supplementary face-to-face training. Administration focuses on registration and learning history.

At a product level, the other major concern for many organisations is that a large percentage of system capability provided in current Learning Management Server (LMS) products duplicate a range of capability that exists within their Content Management or Document Management Environment. Additionally, storage of user access and participation information within the LMS conflicts or duplicates data within the organisations HR systems.