AD-HOC Learning - Acquiring Skills on Demand - Know-Center

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Hyperwave White Paper Hyperwave Information Management, Inc. 68 Tadmuck Road Westford, MA 01886 USA Tel: +1 978 392 2101 Fax: +1 978 392 8849 Email: info@us.hyperwave.com http://www.hyperwave.com Hyperwave AG Humboldtstrasse 10 D-85609 Munich Germany Tel: +49 89 94304 0 Fax: +49 89 94304 199 Email: info@de.hyperwave.com http://www.hyperwave.com 2
Abstract <strong>AD</strong>-<strong>HOC</strong> <strong>Learning</strong> - <strong>Acquiring</strong> <strong>Skills</strong> on Demand Johannes Farmer, Stefanie Lindstaedt, Georg Droschl, Peter Luttenberger The fast-paced economy requires increased flexibility not only from companies but also from their employees. Consequently, learning has become an integral part of daily work. Or stated differently: <strong>Learning</strong> is a new form of work. But learning at the workplace is fundamentally different from “school learning” as we know it. Generally seen as a conscious process, learning at the workplace is rather unconscious: people want to acquire knowledge and skills that are necessary to accomplish work tasks quickly and effectively. Most of the time they have no time for and are not interested in the underlying principles and available theories as long as they can get their task done. The <strong>AD</strong>-<strong>HOC</strong> approach bridges the gap between everyday work and learning situations. It integrates training into the work processes by offering various resources to learn from each step. <strong>AD</strong>-<strong>HOC</strong> uses the work processes as a navigation aide to link work, knowledge, and learning resources task-specifically together. In doing so, <strong>AD</strong>-<strong>HOC</strong> helps to reduce the search space for work aides and at the same time provides further information when it is needed. In order to implement the <strong>AD</strong>-<strong>HOC</strong> approach within an organization, a flexible and versatile technical platform is needed. Hyperwave provides an integrated knowledge management platform which supports the document management needs of the work space, the collaboration infrastructure of the knowledge space, and the didactical needs of the learning space. It is crucial that these three spaces can be implemented on one technical platform in order to help overcome the cognitive and structural divisions between them. This White Paper presents the <strong>AD</strong>-<strong>HOC</strong> approach and how it works in practice. A case study shows how <strong>AD</strong>-<strong>HOC</strong> was implemented on Hyperwave’s knowledge management platform and how it now supports users at their project management tasks. Bridging the Gap Most people have experienced it at some point in time: applying new methods or skills acquired during a seminar or an e-learning course to work tasks is not easy. For example, arriving back at work from a week long seminar, the resulting workload can be overwhelming. Stacks of papers on desks, hundreds of unanswered e-mails in mailboxes, minor emergencies, and so on. And before we realize it months have gone by without us having applied much of what we have learned and were so excited about. Reasons for this “not applying” typically are not only the work overload on arrival back to work but equally significantly, the difficulty of applying the general methods learned to environment and special context. Courses tend to convey the subject material in a fairly general way. This first has to be adapted to ones company, context, and specific work tasks before it can be used effectively. On the other hand, today’s knowledge work requires a fair amount of spontaneous search for relevant information, using examples to understand how to apply it, etc. Unconsciously, much of the work we do every day is learning. This unconscious learning is of a different nature and has many different properties and goals than the conscious one experienced in a seminar. These two types of learning represent the two extremes of a spectrum: on the one hand, many short task-oriented unconscious learning experiences and on the other hand, few long general conscious learning episodes. In order for an organization to function effectively and efficiently, it needs to provide its employees with both ends of the spectrum but also with a means to bridge the gap, to guide them to the type of information they need at specific moments to complete their tasks. The <strong>AD</strong>-<strong>HOC</strong> Approach The <strong>AD</strong>-<strong>HOC</strong> approach closes this gap by offering the worker (learner) a variety of different information relevant for his or her specific work tasks. This information ranges from simple example documents and templates, checklists, how-to descriptions and skill-profiles, to e-learning courses and information about seminars. <strong>AD</strong>-<strong>HOC</strong> is task-oriented learning at the workplace and aims to be as application-oriented as possible. Relevant, knowledge intensive business processes are used as a navigation metaphor that provide the context of the knowledge transferred. <strong>AD</strong>-<strong>HOC</strong> allows a different form of navigation through a knowledge worker’s environment. To understand this, let us first regard what a typical workplace looks like. Figure 1 shows such a workplace and its structure consisting of three separate spaces: A workspace, a knowledge space, and a learning space. 3
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