E-learning in education vs. corporate sector
E-learning allows both students and business executives to learn
anywhere and at any time. You can learn from virtually any place with a
computer or mobile device and internet connection, meaning you can study from
home, on vacation or in your break. But e-learning is more than about
convenience and there are fundamental differences between e-learning in the corporate
sector and in education.
What happens in the
corporate environment?
The role of corporate training is to ensure an employee has the
knowledge and skills to undertake a specific operation to enable an
organization to continue to operate. Fundamentally, corporate training is
centered on knowledge transfer. For example, conferences and workshops are an
essential yet expensive part of business and e-learning makes it affordable and
efficient - sales people, for instance, can receive their training on new
products and sales strategies online. E-learning can be translated to lower
costs to deliver training in a shorter period of time, especially when
employees are spread worldwide.
Corporate education however adds another dimension and depth to
training by involving learners as participants in generating new knowledge that
assists an organization to develop and evolve.
The main characteristics of corporate learning are:
Fast-paced: Enterprise learning is
mostly "fast paced" because "time is money" in the
corporate world. Training needs to be delivered in as short a time frame as
possible with maximum results.
Career-related: Enterprise learning helps
employees gain new skills to advance their careers inside the company.
Enterprise LMSs have additional modules to facilitate that process.
Benefits organization: Enterprise learning focuses
mainly on pragmatic issues with immediate benefits for the organization rather
than just individual benefit. Ultimately training is required for the
organization to function correctly, and corporate education in order for it to
evolve and develop.
Training vs. Education: Enterprise is mostly
focused on training, while education is mostly about learning though
"igniting curiosity. Training usually means the act of being prepared for
something, of being taught or learning a particular skill and practicing it
until the required standard is reached. This has obvious practical implications
for the workplace.
Return on investment: An enterprise needs to be
able to calculate the ROI of its learning investment. In an educational context
this ROI is difficult to calculate and usually the effects of learning take
years to show.
What happens in educational
institutes?
In comparison with corporate learning, learning in the education
sector focuses primarily on knowledge transfer and not on training i.e. in
education we mainly strive to learn things with global scope (e.g. a subject
such as mathematics) whilst corporate e-learning is more focused on business
needs (e.g. new recruit induction). The word education means to gain general
theoretical knowledge and this may or may not involve learning how to do any
specific practical work, tasks or skills. Please note that there is some
overlap and that the word ‘education’ can also refer to a process of training
or receiving tuition. For example, basic training in a field such as health
services is usually a combination of theoretical, educational and practical
learning skills.
Convergence
Corporate e-learning professionals can learn from academic
e-learning initiatives and vice versa, and we are currently seeing a
convergence of academic and corporate e-learning needs. For example, the academic
space is starting to gravitate towards incorporating corporate methods in the
classroom on how certain topics are taught. And on the corporate side they’re
shifting the model of utilizing technologies in a way that supports the
traditional classroom of academics especially with regards to blending
technologies.
There is obvious overlap: mobile learning for example is becoming
increasingly popular with learners having one if not more mobile devices in
their possession and taking these devices to school or work. Learners have
access to the internet and social networks via these mobile devices so all the
technologies required to gather information, create content and communicate
with other people are readily available and naturally create an environment conducive
to learning. Currently both the education and corporate sectors are struggling
to answer the exact same questions: how do we use these for learning? How do
instructional design, and teaching methodologies and theories apply to
delivering content via mobile devices? It’s only natural for knowledge to be
shared across the table.
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