Informal Workplace Learning: KMs and virtual environments

Concluding our overview of influences which are contributing to the emergence of informal and non-formal learning in the workplace. Yesterday, I discussed three of the five change factors influencing how learning activities are being implemented in the workplace:

1. Blended learning
2. Talent management
3. Web / Learning 2.0
4. Knowledge centers
5. Immersive learning simulations (serious gaming).

Today, I'm going to look at the remaining change factors.

Knowledge Centers
A knowledge center provide a central, just-in-time location for information. It is a single-focused interface with information about a specific topic, like IT applications, sales, or project management. A knowledge center is often a portal or part of the company intranet (like Moodle or SharePoint), or it is the knowledge management component of an LMS like BlackBoard. Knowledge Centers are where information workers go for FAQs, the latest tips, tricks and how-to's, links to external resources, relevant information, and other resources about a specific topic that may not be directly related to a formal course (see Figure 1).

Figure 1 Employees Find Help In A Knowledge Center

Sites must be useful, up-to-date, and responsive to employee needs. An organization must decide on the most important knowledge center topics, create a user-friendly site, and populate it with information. A designated person must be responsible for maintaining the knowledge center portal and identifying new information and material for the site. Survey employees about their needs and provide a feedback box on the site.

Immersive Learning Simulations: Serious Games
Simulations are models of the real world. Add pedagogically sound content, learner interaction and involvement, and a gaming element — all focused on achieving a learning goal — and the result is an immersive learning simulation (ILS).

The challenge is getting the right mix of learning and gaming. Today’s most immersive learning simulations are custom creations from a specialized vendors, and they are more obviously expensive than traditional e-learning content development. Achieving the right balance between the gaming and learning components takes expertise from three professionals: a subject matter expert, an instructional designer, and a game developer, all working closely together.

As more immersive 3D social networking environments like Second Life (2L) become available, serious gaming will become a more common modality for non- and informal learning. There are some problems associated with the environment, however. According to Bill Brandon (2007, p.7)

for typical non-students (employees) sitting through a slide-presentation-and-lecture in Second Life is no more effective (and likely less so) than sitting through the same dog and pony show in a physical space.

With this in mind 2L does have potential; e-learning practitioners can use it to create effective constructivist learning environments. For example, if you have a requirement similar to this for sales training, negotiation skills, diversity training, or any other communication- based skill, Second Life might be all you need. Interactive learning activities (like simulations, immersive learning, and gaming) put employees in virtual yet authentic situations, where they can learn the skills and materials while also making decisions and getting immediate feedback on their choices.

The transformation of workplace learning means that organizations must develop informal learning as a resource for employees. As the younger workforce becomes a more significant part of organizations and moves into management positions, these people will demand different kinds of learning opportunities and tools to get to learning resources quickly.

Figure 2 VLE on 2L

They expect to control much of their own learning, so learning professionals must offer an range of useful up-to-date resources inside and outside the organization for information, knowledge, and training. If employees don’t see these learning resources as part of their organization's talent management and development programs, the chances are that they will move to more progressive companies that will acknowledge their learning and career development needs.

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References:

Brandon, B. (2007) ‘Give Your e-Learning Some (Second) Life: Simulation Made Easy.’ eLearning Guild. [Internet] Available from: http://www.elearningguild.com/articles/abstracts/index.cfm?action=viewonly2&id=246 (subscription required). Accessed 19 March 2009

Schooley, C. (2008) Informal Methods Challenge Corporate Learning [Internet] Available from: http://www.forrester.com Accessed 12 March 2009

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A Virtual Learning Environment gets grounded

Strange to tell, Microsoft has been at the forefront of producing popular, immersive learning environments for over 25 years. Sadly, it looks as though their involvement in this domain is about to end.

Is this goodbye, Microsoft Flight Simulator?

Microsoft has decided to close its ACES Studio, which developed the simulator series. The ACES Studio was shut and its 150 staff laid off as part of 5,000 planned layoffs to control costs. Since 1982, Microsoft Flight Simulator (FS) has been one of the most popular serious games available. However, in my view, it is less a game and more an immersive virtual environment; it provides the user with a highly sophisticated and realistic human-computer interface (HCI) that enables "players" to learn according to a non-linear constructivist model.

For those who would assert that FS has little or nothing to do with learning and development, remember that early e-learning specifications emerged from the aerospace world: in the late 1980's the Aviation Industry Computer-Based Training Committee (AICC) developed guidelines for the development, delivery, and evaluation of CBT, WBT, and related training technologies. The AICC specifications were designed to be general purpose (not necessarily aviation-specific) so that learning technology vendors could spread their costs across multiple markets and provide products needed by the aviation industry at a lower cost. This has resulted in AICC specifications gaining broad acceptance and relevance to non-aviation and aviation users alike long before IMS, SCORM, and QTI.

In FS, the user "flies" accurately-modeled aircraft in an open microworld. The flying area encompasses the whole of the real world (in varying levels of detail) and even (in FSX) low-earth orbit, including over 24,000 airports. Individually-detailed scenery can be found representing an ever-growing number of towns and cities, and geographical major landmarks. The latest versions of FS include complex weather simulation, as well as the ability to download real-time weather data. There is also a air traffic environment with interactive Air Traffic Control, player-flyable aircraft ranging from the WWI aircraft to the modern Boeing 777. In addition, the two latest versions of Microsoft Flight Simulator have a “kiosk mode”, which allows the application to be run in kiosks. It is the wide availability of upgrades and add-ons, both free and commercial, which give the simulator its great flexibility and scope.

As is the case in good e-learning design, introductory orientation ("flying lessons") provides the player with a virtual instructor who, through a modular series of tasks and activities that are understood and responded to by learners within in the game context. This combines the elements of content and display to present the instructional content in a way that promotes learning through organized instructional resources, and a user interface that is not confusing, dissatisfying, or cognitively taxing. As well as interactive lessons, the simulator also provides missions, airport maps, navigation aids / GPS, and even aircraft checklists to enable the advanced user (and this can even include learner pilots with a very reasonable facsimile of the piloting experience.

To create this immersive world that meets the needs of players as learners, several interface attributes are be integrated into the HCI design. Generalizing from usability evaluations of eleven applications and about 250 usability problems Nielsen (1994, pp. 25-62), described these ten heuristics for usable design:

1. Visibility of system status
2. Match between system and the real world
3. User control and freedom
4. Consistency and standards
5. Error prevention
6. Recognition rather than recall
7. Flexibility and efficiency of use
8. Aesthetic and minimalist design
9. Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors
10. Help and documentation

When considering the pedagogic value of microworlds I would agree with Roe, Pratt & Jones (2005) when they assert

We believe that this paradigm has much to teach developers of e-learning platforms and that reflection on the design of our microworlds can help to crystallize what those lessons are.

(Putting the learning back into e-learning, p.3)

The authors of the paper "distil" the characteristics of microworlds as a means of providing context and motivation for engaging with learning content:

Characteristic	Description
Quasi-Concrete Objects	Turkle and Papert (1991) have referred to the way that the computer offers access to formal ideas in a concrete way, since abstract mathematical ideas, represented in iconic form on the screen, can be manipulated directly by the user.
Using Before Knowing	In our everyday lives, we typically use artefacts for particular purposes. Through that use, we learn about the effectiveness of the tool, its limitations, how well it serves that purpose and sometimes we may gain some understanding of how it works. In schools, mathematics is a subject where you learn how to generate the object before you use it. In practice, more often than not, the former task proves too difficult, especially when disconnected from purpose. The computer offers the possibility of turning the learning of mathematics round so that use precedes generation (see the Power Principle, Papert, 1996).
Integrating the Informal and the Formal	diSessa has suggested that we incorporate versions of the formal representations of the mathematical objects in such a way that the child may be able to make connections between the various formalisations and their informal use (diSessa, 1988).
Dynamic Expression	When Papert proposed the turtle as a tool for constructing a dynamic notion of angle (and of course much else), he acknowledged that the computer offers a medium which unlike paper and pencil can incorporate dynamic representations of the world. He suggests that the use of systems which are expressive of dynamic and interactive aspects of the world are more engaging to learn than static and abstract formalisms.
Building	Constructionists base their approach on a tenet that encouraging the building of artefacts is a particularly felicitous way of teaching mathematics. Pratt (2000) has demonstrated how this approach can be modified into related approaches such as mending.
Purpose and Utility	In so doing, emergent knowledge is imbued with utility (Ainley, Pratt & Hansen, in press), in which the abstractions are seen as useful and the limitations of those abstractions are gradually discriminated.

So powerful is the FS platform that Microsoft turned in into a commercial off-the-shelf simulation platform called ESP. As they say themselves:

Microsoft ESP is a visual simulation platform that brings powerful, high-fidelity simulations to widely available, low-cost Microsoft Windows®-based PCs. Organizations that rely on Microsoft ESP can improve their workforce readiness more efficiently and cost-effectively than with traditional computer-based animation or simulation tools. Combined with its developer-friendly Software Development Kit (SDK), Microsoft ESP provides government and commercial entities and modeling and simulation specialists with an affordable, portable, and highly extensible platform for training and learning, decision support, and research and development modeling.

According to industry analyst James Governor the implications of this are "stunning:"

...once you know what the world actually looks like and behaves, you can begin to model changes to the system. What if we deforested this area? What if we removed all the natural predators from a particular marine ecology? What if we banned all car traffic from a city? What might the alternatives look like?

At the end of the 2006 movie Snakes on a Plane, a passenger whose only aviation training was playing video games successfully lands a jumbo jet. While this is of course a cinematic fantasy, you can be sure in the wake of the recent Hudson Miracle simulations like FS are being used to replicate the situation that the plane, crew, and passengers encountered to provide training that will maximize others' chances of survival in such a scenario.

I might just fire up my copy of FS9 and take a trip from Newark myself...

Postscript:

One of the best things about writing an e-elearning blog is its flexibility of the medium to mould itself to accommodate new events.

These days, I'm regularly interrupting one series of posts to discuss new developments in another e-learning related topic: this is a consequence of the ongoing financial crisis. So, dear reader, I'll return to Josh Bersin and the emergence of informal learning presently.
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References:

Governor, J. (2008) Living In De-material World: On Microsoft, Train SIM and the Virtual Everything. [Internet] Available from: http://www.redmonk.com/jgovernor/2008/09/25/living-in-de-material-world-on-microsoft-train-sim-and-the-virtual-everything/ Accessed 2 February 2009

Nielsen, J. (1994). Heuristic evaluation. In J. Nielsen & R. L. Mack (Eds.), Usability inspection methods. New York: John Wiley & Sons.

Roe, C.P., Pratt, D., Jones, I. (2005) Putting the learning back into e-learning. In Proceedings of CERME4, Sant Felix de Guixols, Spain [Internet] Available from: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/wie/courses/degrees/docs/who/students/edrfae/publications/roe-pratt-jones_puttingthelearningbackintoelearning.pdf Accessed 2 February 2009

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