VOLUME 5 ISSUE 3
Special Issue ICEL New York 2007

Competency - and Process-Driven e-Learning – a Model-Based Approach

Katrina Leyking, Pavlina Chikova and Peter Loos
German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, Saarbruecken, Germany

As a matter of fact eLearning has not really caught on for corporate training purposes. Investigations on the reasons reveal that eLearning modules often miss any relevance for the tasks to be accomplished in the day-to-day workplace settings. The very learning needs both from an organizational and individual perspective are neglected. Content brought to the learner very often meets neither the individual competency gaps nor the organizational learning goals. Time passed between acquisition and application of knowledge is too long. In short, business processes and learning-related processes are not aligned adequately. Thus, we see an urgent need for concepts on how to derive technology-enhanced training actions from business tasks in order to improve employees’ business performance. This paper presents business processes as potential linkage between learning and business. Business process execution and thus process performance are decisively influenced by the employees` knowledge and competencies. A business process provides the context information necessary to identify learning needs and design matching learning material that is meaningful for organizational business goals and individual learning goals. The fulfilment of the vision, achieving innovative and extended methodologies, architectures, frameworks and tools that support the process-oriented deduction, retrieval as well as the distribution of relevant knowledge to the workplace learner, will be tackled by the activities of the “Process-oriented Learning and Information eXchange (PROLIX)”. Having identified the competency gaps these can be taken over by the authoring team as learning goals to be addressed by eLearning courses. Thus, a learning module can be adjusted to the learner’s immediate needs what facilitates reducing his time-to-competency. These issues have been elaborated within the research project EXPLAIN, which focuses on content development processes and aims at an intelligent ICT environment that empowers organizations to flexibly implement their learning objects in the course of their business processes.

Keywords: authoring, business process management, competency development, learning content, learning objectives, learning processes

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