E-learning and knowledge management (KM) have always been considered as the two sides of the same coin of organisational learning. But their relationships have been restricted to either preparing for future needs (e-learning/e-training) or learning from past experiences (KM) from either people or documents. This narrow view needs to be expanded, as it does not take into consideration the real power of embedding one in the other. In this article, we shall probe several areas where e-learning can be embedded in KM practices.
KM Cycle
Before we see how e-learning and KM can work together, let’s take a look at the steps in a typical KM cycle in organisations. One of the best manifestation of a KM cycle comes from Learning to Fly, a wonderful, practitioner oriented book by Chris Collison and Geoff Parcell. They give us this diagram.
- the activity or practice creates stories, which
- have to be discovered and captured into lessons learnt, these
- then have to be distilled, validated and shared in the community
- once they find acceptance, they are then put back into work processes, and
- applied back in the form of new work practices
Let’s now see how these fit together.
Knowledge Assets
Knowledge management is all about knowing and learning from the organisation’s collective work experiences. Most of these experiences are in the form of untold stories. The main task for KM is to firstly unearth these stories, and secondly, to represent them in a suitable format for analysis. These representations, or assets, can be explicit stories, case studies, after action reviews (AAR), retrospects, critical incident review, etc.
The process of unearthing these untold stories is known as knowledge elicitation. There are many methods of knowledge elicitation, but many of them are just variations of the interview method. David Snowden of Cynefin.net uses anthropology techniques and story circles as a method to elicit stories. Gary Klein, who has spent decades analyzing marines and fire fighters uses cognitive task analysis as a means to elicit stories and the decisions that were made in them.
So where does e-learning come in? E-learning can best help in representing the knowledge assets in an easy to understand and visual manner and by providing a framework for analysing them. Let’s see how this can be done.
(A note of caution here: the quality of the stories elicited largely depends on the skills of the facilitator. Good facilitation techniques often elicit subtle details of stories and decisions that at times even surprise the storyteller! It is these subtleties that often provide the ‘real’ understanding and learning.)
Using E-learning to Analyse Knowledge Assets
Currently, many organisations represent knowledge assets in text format. For example, if a team in an organisation did an AAR just after an important implementation, all of the learning is recorded in the form of MS-Word or PDF documents and archived, in the hope that it will be retrieved whenever anyone finds a need for it.
There are a couple of things that would discourage potential users from reusing the AAR document:
They are in a text-heavy format. In this day and age of quick understanding, this is a sure put-off
They don’t have context to fall back on
An e-learning AAR module that captures the event together with audio notes and drawings and driven by the narrative of the facilitator provides a much richer understanding of the AAR than plain text documents.
Let’s consider another example: a critical incidence review. When a critical incidence occurs, a review is done to unearth what went wrong and what can be learnt from it so that it does not happen again. This practice is quite common in the armed forces and is slowly gaining inroads in business organisations too.
Again, as in the case of an AAR, the entire review is currently captured in text documents. E-learning can help here too by not only providing a visual medium to understand the material and context better, but also to provide a layer for analysis.
To get a picture of what I am talking about, I would like you to see this interactive module by the New York Times on the recent Beslan tragedy in Russia.
The NY Times interactive only provided a narrative to better understand the events that led to the Baslan tragedy. But the e-learning module can take this further. It can provide a framework for analysing the narrative in order to understand the decisions that were made and why. (Click here for some business frameworks) For example, the Johari Window can be used to understand the information demands required during the critical decisions of the tragedy.
In essence, e-learning can enhance the knowledge artifacts in two ways:
Representing the artifact in a visually rich form to help build easily understandable context, and
Analysing the context for critical decisions and judgements that were made, key learning points, etc., with a set of interactive frameworks
Conclusion
If all you have is a hammer, everything else looks like a nail. If you use this perspective for e-learning, you will get boring and ineffective courses that have the same form and function. But it need not be this way. E-learning can help in every aspect of the learning organisation; we just have to know what the learning demands are and how to match them up against the affordances of e-learning. In this article we’ve seen some preliminary examples of e-learning matching up against KM’s demands. You can think of others!
