Staff edutainment on a corporate intranet‐lessons learned

This paper discusses the results from a case study of an intranet‐based staff education programme at the national Swedish telecommunications corporation. The programme attempts to convey the environmental benefits of telecommunication services, aiming at increased staff awareness and new business opportunities. A multidisciplinary production team packaged the factual content in a rich mixture of audio and video clips, text, images, animations, quizzes, games, tests and polls. A standard Web browser with downloadable plug‐ins is used to view the material. The self‐paced studies on the intranet are followed by a seminar, combining the advantages of individual and teacher‐assisted education. The impact of the programme has been studied partly through a questionnaire distributed to a number of users, and partly through interviews. The results show that intranet‐based ‘edutainment’ is a practicable and successful tool for organizational learning. Ease of use, interactivity, ease of distribution and renewal, flexibility in time and space, are just some of the benefits offered. However, a number of pedagogical, organizational and technical requirements must be met in order to succeed Context, pedagogical aims and standards, content, information structure, user characteristics, management commitment, technical platform, media types, the production team, user interface and user tests are just a few of the important factors that must be considered This paper attempts to identify some of the factors essential to successful staff education on the corporate intranet, discussing observations and lessons learned from the case study

Email & Online Interactive Communication

Higher education has entered an information age in which power comes to those who have information and know how to access it. However, as more and more classes rely upon the integration of these technologies in classroom activities and assignments, instructors have discovered a pedagogical bonus - more frequent communication from the students using electronic mail (Email). However, with the use of these new electronically enhanced tools comes the need for assessment. Teachers who use electronic communication tools in distance learning programs want to know how effective these tools are in terms of student outcomes. Additionally, administrators want to know if the cost of the new technologies is justified in terms of student learning

A avaliação de contextos de aprendizagem organizacional por E-learning pelos diferentes estilos de aprendizagem individual

JEL Classification System: M5 Personnel Economics; M53 TrainingO espaço formativo online apresenta-se como um ambiente flexível que deverá procurar acomodar os diferentes estilos de aprendizagem. A aprendizagem efectiva acontece quando as actividades propostas neste contexto implicam a dimensão dominante de inteligência, contexto preferido e grau preferencial de ordem e método (Hamid, 2002). Do ponto de vista organizacional o e-learning é, actualmente, uma solução inevitável para o desenvolvimento de recursos humanos eficiente, revelando-se essencial conceber e desenvolver cursos de formação que atendam aos diferentes estilos de aprendizagem e preferências. Igualmente estas soluções tecnológicas deverão, de um ponto de vista humanista, ser de fácil integração e utilização pelos colaboradores. Estudou-se numa amostra de e-formandos em contexto organizacional, as avaliações individuais do contexto de aprendizagem real e desejado pelos diferentes estilos de aprendizagem preferenciais presentes, definidos segundo o modelo de aprendizagem experiencial de Kolb (1984). Verificaram-se algumas diferenças significativas na percepção dos estilos de aprendizagem particularmente para a dimensão Autonomia do e-formando.The online training space presents itself as a flexible environment that should accommodate different learning styles. Efficient learning happens when the proposed activities on that context attend the dominant dimension of intelligence, preferred context and preferable level of order and method (Hamid, 2002). From the organizational perspective the e-learning is, nowadays, an inevitable solution for the efficient development of the human capital, and thus is essencial to conceive and develop training courses that attend to the different learning styles and preferences. Also, these technological solutions should, from a humanistic perspective, be easily integrated and user friendly to the employees. This study investigated, on a sample of e-learners from an organizational context, the individual appraisals of the actual (e-learning) and preferred learning context by the different preferred learning styles as defined by Kolb's (1984) model of experiential learning. Some significant differences occurred on the perception of the different preferred learning styles particularly with the e-trainee Autonomy dimension