Using personal learning environments to support workplace learning in small companies

Abstract

Small companies play a crucial role in developed economies. In order to address new challenges they have to fill promptly their competence gaps, when these appear. To achieve this, suitable forms of informal learning at the workplace are usually needed. As a possible solution we have developed a customized Personal Learning Environment for this purpose and evaluated it in the German Information Technology sector. Our experimental study has shown that although it is not easy to get small companies involved in this kind of piloting, the approach can be viable and has a potential for further improvements.