How will changes in the way education is done affect the culture of the company you work for?
Reading the predictions for 2009 in this eLearn magazine article, which I came across through this blog posting by Jane Hart, I noticed not least what Mr. Saul Carliner, Mr. Brent Schlenker, and Mr. Matt Bovell said:
A question for you:
How do you think changes in way education is done will affect the culture of the company you work for?
“As organizations try to stretch their learning budgets in hard times, e-learning will become an attractive option. For some organizations, a basic transfer of content from classroom to online will suffice. For others who are concerned that students are actually learning, experimentation with creative approaches to e-learning might occur. In addition, organizations will use the bad economy to assess the costs and benefits of their enterprise technology, and might make changes if they feel costs exceed benefits."
"2009 will be "The Year of Implementing 2.0." Previous years have been spent getting our industry to see new Web technologies as having powerful learning applications. Early adopters have experimented with mobile, gaming, wikis, social networks, and others, and they have paved the way for others to follow. My advice to the e-learning community this year is to pay very close attention to the culture in which you are implementing. Ignoring the impact on culture will be the Achilles' heel of e-learning implementations in 2009."
"There are three reasons why e-learning will continue to grow in 2009: (1) The economy is tanking. More and more companies will be attempting to achieve cost savings using e-learning technologies. (2) As students attempt to make better use of their time and money, they will continue to avail themselves of e-learning opportunities. (3) As more and more companies try to establish a reputation for being eco-friendly, they will use e-learning as part of their green initiatives."
A question for you:
How do you think changes in way education is done will affect the culture of the company you work for?
Comments
Courses and trainings that need to be passed by all employees (e.g. trainings concerning risk management and independency rules) are offered online (self-study). Employees appreciate the liberty given thereby and for the company it is of course less cost-intensive. Also technical and individual job trainings are offered online. However, presentation skills, communication training and other soft skills, all of which are important in the consulting business, need personal contact and/or group interaction. There are also other trainings that need more introduction, explanation and guidance by a teacher – features that in my opinion cannot be replaced by an e-learning programme. Therefore, it will not be possible to replace all kinds of trainings and educations by e-learning.
I think the company I work for provides a good mix of e-learning / personal training for the courses and educations offered and that the people responsible for the different offerings carefully evaluate whether it is possible i.e. reasonable to offer a training online. Due to this I do not think that further changes will be made to this and, hence, the culture of the company will not be affected.
I find this remark of yours interesting. My question is whether you or other people, who read this, think that meeting in person / in a physical room is more important in some cultures than in other cultures? Also, I'd like to ask how you think that it'll be like in 2-3 years from now? To which degree do you think that communication technologies will be able to replace meetings between people in a physical room?
I think that some communication technologies such as video conferencing will replace meetings to a certain degree in 2-3 years from now. It is a good solution for meetings that take place on a regular basis involving the same people. Some advantages of video conferencing are for example that it reduces travel time and costs and of course that it has less impact on the environment. In the company I work for video conferencing is promoted in connection with a CO2 neutrality initiative. However, I think that not all meetings can be replaced by video conferencing, especially if a person from a high context culture is involved and if no personal meetings were arranged before.