ایجاد یک محیط آموزش الکترونیکی عملکرد گرا: روش علمی طراحی

E-learning is now being used by many organizations as an approach for enhancing the skills of knowledge workers. However, most applications have performed poorly in motivating employee learning, being perceived as less effective due to a lack of alignment of learning with work performance. To help solve this problem, we developed a performance-oriented approach using design science research methods. It uses performance measurement to clarify organizational goals and individual learning needs and links them to e-learning applications. The key concept lies in a Key Performance Indicator model, where organizational mission and vision are translated into a set of targets that drive learning towards a goal of improving work performance. We explored the mechanisms needed to utilize our approach and examined the necessary conceptual framework and implementation details. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach, a prototype workplace e-learning system was developed and used to evaluate the effectiveness of our approach.

Organizations face a permanent changing environment due to new challenges such as globalization, economic pressures, and the changing nature of work. To be successful, employees must learn to cope with such changes. E-learning is being used by many organizations, especially SMEs but most applications are performing poorly and employees are not motivated to learn new methods. Thus significant gaps exist between corporate interests and learner needs when e-learning is provided. Individuals generally do not feel that e-learning is helpful since the knowledge learned does not help improve their work performance. Indeed, e-learning is generally implemented without considering the organizational vision and mission. As a result, most e-learning applications fail to meet user needs and ultimately fail to serve the organization's quest for success in the knowledge economy. Moreover, e-learning systems tend to focus on technical issues and ignore pedagogical and organizational issues necessary for effective e-learning. Most applications lack a sound pedagogical underpinning and fail to understand the learning behavior in an organizational and social context [14]. The dominance of technology-oriented approaches makes e-learning practice less goal-oriented, and thus they are perceived as being poor in quality. A further review of the root cause of the problem reveals that much e-learning research is based on formal courses in educational institutions. Corporations as learning arenas are different from schools, although educational institutions are extending their reach to workplaces by introducing new pedagogical models such as problem-based learning, project learning, and case studies. Workplace learning is built on practical tasks and work situations that meet organizational goals. Learning in the workplace takes place in the context of use and application, and the result often remains implicit and embedded in work practices. Moreover, learning is more collaborative in workplace settings, where sharing individual knowledge with co-workers is an important part of the learning environment. To solve this problem, pedagogical principles and organizational learning theories should provide the basis for the design and implementation of e-learning applications in work environments; indeed a systematic and rational approach is vital. This underscores the need for structuring learning activities to meet corporate interests, individual needs, work performance, and the social context. The development of e-learning in the workplace should consider the alignment of individual and organizational learning needs, the integration of learning and work, and communication between individuals. In our study, we provided a performance-oriented approach intended to improve e-learning development in the workplace. We used performance measurement to clarify organizational goals and individual learning needs, and linked them to e-learning applications. The key idea lay in a Key Performance Indicator (KPI) model, where the organizational mission and vision were translated into a set of performance targets that drive learning towards the goal of improving work performance. The model therefore helps an employee identify performance measures for his/her position, capabilities needed to be developed to improve performance, knowledge about the capability, and learning resources needed. This conceptualization helps accomplish organizational goals by showing a clear picture of what is important and what is needed to learn it. To implement the KPI-oriented learning environment, ontology- and intelligent agent-based functionalities were added to the e-learning system. Ontology is a formal representation of a set of concepts and their relationships in a domain; it uses machine languages and semantic annotations to achieve this [8]. We used ontology for an explicit representation of the KPI model, as a foundation for guiding performance-oriented learning. Intelligent agents act autonomously and perform tasks that depend on the context and user preferences. A set of intelligent agents was developed in our study to assist learners perform adaptive learning activities. With the support of these technologies, real-time personalized instructions and recommendations were continuously generated and sent to participants to facilitate and direct their learning processes to improve their work performance. The KPI model can also be used to identify each individual's work context, expertise, and proficiency, as well as to organize knowledge assets, with a view to facilitating knowledge sharing and social networking in a learning community. Our study aimed at improving organizational performance through the design and implementation of an IT artifact for e-learning in the workplace. Two research questions were examined: (1) how should an e-learning system be designed to align learning with work performance in the workplace? and (2) to what extent is such an e-learning system effective for learning in the workplace?

The use of technology to deliver learning has become a trend in industry, and has been termed ‘e-learning.’ Our study addresses the problem by recommending that workplace e-learning should consider: (a) the alignment of individual needs and organizational interests, (b) the connection between learning and work performance, and (c) the communication between individuals in a social learning context. To achieve this, we considered the design and evaluation of a performance-oriented approach for developing e-learning systems. To demonstrate and evaluate our approach we developed a KPI-based learning system. Using it, experiments were conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the approach. The results indicated positive feedback and comments from learners, experts, and training managers. For technology-oriented audiences, the key contribution of this work is investigating the underlying mechanism of a performance-oriented e-learning environment by modeling and implementing the KPI framework, as well as by reasoning and guiding individual and social learning processes according to the learner's performance gap and learning progress. For management-oriented audiences, this study has presented the importance of understanding and aligning the needs and requirements towards learning technology from the viewpoints of both organizations and employees. Although e-learning provides a new way to deliver training programs, it cannot remain that way if it is not able to support the stakeholder’ needs. To leverage the potential of e-learning, a sound business and people-centered strategy is essential. We proposed a performance-oriented approached using KPI to clarify and align the learning needs of organizations and employees and drive the learning process towards a goal of improving performance. The generalizability of our findings should be noted that the study was conducted in a software company and within the software testing section; however, the approach can be applied to other organizational contexts. The construction of performance-oriented learning ontology needs shared conceptualization of the stakeholders and professional knowledge from domain experts. There are, of course, limitations that must be noted: the evaluation of the system was mainly on users’ perception of the system based on surveys and interviews. Although learner reaction was found to have an impact on learning, the final outcome reflected in individual and organizational performance requires more than a case study such as this, with a sizable system and many more participants.