Case study 4: Technology enhanced workplace learning

Abstract

Within the ROLE research project it has been evaluated how personal learning environments (PLEs) perform in different surrounding conditions. Companies do often lag behind in the state-of-the-art developments from research especially in terms of Technology Enhanced Learning. Festo therefore observed on its internal test bed how PLEs can be implemented in business contexts and how to involve the learners in this process. Since there is already a broad variety of tools to organise and manage formal learning processes within companies the test bed didn’t start by scratch either. The focus was thus on how to open up an existing learning management system (LMS) towards a PLE. During this process many experience from both learners as well as administrators, and training organisers have been gathered. One of the lessons learned is that a pure PLE doesn’t fit the requirements on personnel development in business context, but certain PLE aspects can improve individual learning processes significantly. One showcase is the Festo LearningTube which was developed during ROLE. This is an example for the successful integration of user generated content into a corporate LMS.