Just Google it, Organizational E-learning. Everybody wants to know how it works, what the best techniques are to implement an E-learning environment and more importantly, everybody wants to state how great these platforms are when it comes to organizational development. Yes, E-learning provides a solution for, mainly big corporation, employees to develop themselves and to keep track of the constant changing environment, but it also has its downside.
Basically, an organizational e-learning platform obliges employees to get back to the (online) study books and acquire knowledge, which should be useful to contribute to the company. The organization where I work for tests its employees every month about various subjects in the form of an online exam. This is what bothers me. At university we say that students are here to develop themselves and create new knowledge, which can impossibly be tested with an exam. The only reason that students are tested by an exam is because we have the urge to couple some sort of grade to the effort and knowledge of a specific student.
While working for an organization, there is no need anymore to grade the efforts and results of an employee, the results speak for themselves. If a certain project is successfully completed, management will notice this and the other way around. While working on the project the employee will acquire the relevant knowledge gradually and no time will be wasted with studying global subjects, which are not even connected to the real business environment.
From my own experience I can state, that employees often see this tests as obligated formalities which cost time and most of the time do not add any value to his or her core function. It also increases the workload because employees need to work on their E-learning in their spare time otherwise it will press the operational figures. Every organization has employees who do not have any affection with their job and that are certainly not happy to study for monthly tests at home.
It would be better to apply the concept of the long-tail phenomena on the process of E-learning. Even though this platform is based on an online environment, companies are struggling to focus on the niche segment of employees within the company. Basically every employee studies the same subject and this is one of the main reasons which causes dissatisfaction and slacking behaviour. Employees would be more eager to use the E-environment when they can focus on a project which is of his or her concern.
I am not saying that the E-learning platforms need to vanish from the organizational environment, but I do argue for the fact that these platforms need to be embedded more effectively. It is the management’s task to make sure that the platform is connected to the real-world business tasks so that employees only gain extra knowledge, which is relevant for this specific task. This way the appraisal of the employees work also be much more reliable and the spirit of parochialism will be restricted.
Hi Youri,
I think it is a very interesting topic and I do agree on the fact that many E-learning environments are even disadvantageous for the companies themselves. It looks like many firms use E-learning to retain their employees. Employers can use this tactic to say that they care about their employees and have something to offer for their personal development. However, in a good work environment you will learn by doing the job, and feedback will be generated by the results and outcomes from your tasks. Supervision/management should be able to give specific training and feedback regarding the tasks and objectives you were given. Don’t get me wrong, I do believe that education is good, but it should be voluntarily and employees should be given a choice in which subjects they can get courses/training. An ideal situation should be an organization in which employees can choose between multiple course/training subjects. It is only possible to register for these courses if you achieve the agreed targets in your daily tasks. These courses are mainly given to broaden your knowledge pool and not per se in-depth training. Obligated and general E-learning programs aren’t the best way to motivate and educate your employees in my opinion.
Hi Dave,
Thanks for your comment. Indeed I agree that there are still a lot of possibilities for companies to improve their E-learning systems. Like you said, we need a lot more personalization options in this systems as we see in other industries. When this happens, E-learning can add a lot more value to an organization than it does in a lot op companies at the moment.