Putting blended learning to work

Betty Collis

his chapter describes a type of course for professionals in a multinational organization that blends formal and informal learning. The portions of courses carried out in the workplace are not e-learning but rather are based on work-based activities that involve the supervisor and others with relevant expe­rience as learning partners. A Web-based course management system is used to support all aspects of the course, including studying of conceptual material, com­munication, collaboration, and submission and reuse of contributions from the participants. There may or may not be a face-to-face portion of the course, but there is always considerable interaction between participants, with subject mat­ter experts, with the course facilitator, and with workplace colleagues. The goals of this kind of blended learning are to capture and build on experience within the company and to integrate work and learning while retaining the strengths of a course with a competent leader. This sort of blended learning is seen in close to one hundred course events within the Learning and Leadership Development (LLD) unit of Shell International Exploration and Production, B.V. (Shell EP).

Global Perspectives

Two particular issues face many multinational companies, particularly those that operate in technical or production domains. The first relates to keeping em­ployees up to date with rapidly changing developments in the field and within the

The Handbook of Blended Learning

company. Even if a new course can be developed quickly, employees cannot get to the course fast enough to meet the company's need. The second is the change in the demographics of the workforce and marketplace as companies operate more and more globally. As highly experienced senior staff near retirement or move to another company, those who replace them often represent a wide range of regional, cultural, and professional backgrounds. In this context, key issues are that there is scant opportunity for experienced senior employees to work in face-to-face mentoring and coaching roles in order to pass on their knowledge, and members of the same company, the senior employees who are leaving and the junior employees who will be moving into their places, are likely to live in differ­ent parts of the world, making face-to-face interaction among them not feasible.

Dealing with Rapidly Changing Developments

With regard to the problem of keeping up to date with rapid developments, form-of e-learning are often seen as a solution. Employees can stay at the workplai and learn " just in time" with access to an appropriate selection of learning object-Because of the time lag in designing and developing an entire course, the use of a learning management system (LMS) combined with a learning content managi -ment system (LCMS) is often seen as a way to build a repository of relatively small learning objects, index them with appropriate metatags, save them within the LC^ 1⁴ and call up different combinations of the small objects with a learner profiling tcx ■ ". in the LMS. One assumption of this approach is that building the smaller objei I will require less time than designing and building a course as a whole. Howevt: for the approach to work, many different components must be in place.

Collis and Strijker (2004) have analyzed six stages in the life cycle of learn objects (obtaining, labeling, offering, selecting, using, and maintaining) and doc­umented many human and technical issues in each stage. In the case of rapidK emerging knowledge, particularly knowledge that is sensitive to the company in­volved, the initial step of obtaining even small learning modules fast enough Я serious challenge. Professional developers are needed to create modules that arc interoperable and compliant to the standards needed for learning object man­agement in an LCMS and LMS. These developers will not be the in-house ез perts who are creating the new knowledge within the company and are the m. source of fast-breaking developments for their colleagues. Bringing the exp together with the software developers in order to create accurate but also engag­ing content resources can take considerable time.

For this reason, most large organizations maintain various knowledge-shariiij activities, such as global communities of practice supported by forum soft* and best-practices databases (Allee, 1997). These knowledge-sharing resour

Putting Blended Learning to Work

typically are not seen as part of courses offered by a learning department but rather are associated with human resource or knowledge management units. Learning through these resources represents best practices within the company shared often by those involved in creating the new knowledge, and shared at the speed of typing the reports into one of the knowledge-sharing systems. This form of informal sharing stimulated by knowledge management units leads to informal learning that is typically not associated with courses or repositories of learning objects managed by an LCMS.

Dealing with Changing Demographics in the Workforce

The second major problem facing multinational companies is that of changing demographics within their own workforce and customer base. The knowledge sharing that occurs within the informally organized knowledge environments in the company can provide some of the cross-fertilization needed for passing on the tacit knowledge of experienced persons in the company regardless of geograph­ical location. However, not all persons are regular contributors to such commu­nities of practice. Adding to the problem is the lack of support for the sorts of coaching and mentoring that are necessary for learning from persons with expe­rience. Cultural differences among senior employees and new professionals also can be barriers to informal electronically mediated personal interactions.

Blending Formal and Informal Learning in Courses with Work-Based Activities

A response to these two sets of problems—rapidly changing in-house knowledge and barriers to knowledge sharing and learning from the experiences of others in the company—can be addressed by a new form of course experience that com­bines the strengths of both formal and informal learning and is facilitated by tech­nology through courses that focus on work-based activities, carried out as part of the participant's job. Courses oriented around work-based activities may or may not include classroom components but will include different types of learning activities (with a focus on work-based problems), different types of learning resources (with a focus on reuse of experience from within the company), different times and places for learning activities (with a focus on activities being carried out in the workplace), and different ways that people work and network together (with a focus on collaboration in the process of doing work-based activities). The key to this learning approach is authentic work-based activities, the sharing of experiences related to these activities, and guidance by experienced facilitators (course instructor and workplace coaches and other learning partners) using a Web-based learning support platform (Collis & Margaryan, 2003).

The Handbook of Blended Learning

In this context, authentic work-based activities are learning activities that are anchored in workplace practice and are focused on developing the participants' ability to solve problems in their everyday professional job roles (Merrill, 2002). Knowledge and skills that learners acquire while carrying out the work-based activities are acquired in the situation and context in which they will be used rather than in an abstract way. In contrast to well-defined textbook problems, work-based problems are complex and ill defined and need to be solved in social settings, involving others for team working, and with coaching and scaffolding by an expert (Fox, 2002; Reeves, Herrington, & Oliver, 2002). Within this form of learning, not only are work-based activities emphasized but also the submissions by the participants of different types of reports and reflections based on those activities become important additions to the learning resources of the course. Such activities help make cognitive and problem-solving processes explicit and serve as a basis for reflection and feedback. Furthermore, follow-up activities can build on these submissions and be structured to involve contacts and interactions with others in the company, regardless of location. Externally developed content objects are still available, but are seen as resources for the activities, not as the ini­tial drivers of the activities. Selected learner submissions are reused as valuable content objects for others. Just as learning from experience is shared within the informal communities of practice, learning is also shared and reused within the courses.

This type of blended learning is currently operating in practice in one of the business units of a multinational oil company, growing in extent since 2001 from several pilot courses to approximately one hundred different course events in 2004. with continual requests for help in redesign coming from the instructors in the re­maining courses as well as in other units of the overall company.

Putting Blended Learning to Work in Shell EP

Shell EP business activities include exploring, assessing, and producing hydrocar­bon reserves. The Exploration and Production business has interests in exploration and production ventures in over forty countries and employs over twenty-five thou­sand people. The technical professionals in Shell EP are predominantly univer­sity graduates who represent the areas of wells engineering, field engineering, production engineering, petroleum engineering, and geoscience disciplines. Two major problems facing the company are the rapidly changing developments in oil production technology, and the " big crew change" that is occurring as senior tech­nical professionals, typically from the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and the United States, are retiring and being replaced by new professionals from the

Putting Blended Learning to Work

Middle East, Malaysia, Nigeria, and other non-Western countries. To deal with these two key problems, the form of blended learning focused on courses with work-based activities has been evolving since 2001. A collaboration with educational technologists and researchers from the University of Twente supports the evolution.

Blended Courses with Work-Based Activities

As part of this research collaboration, an instructional design method, the Shell Blended Learning Development Path, based on research and best practices in using technology to support activity-based learning, has been developed and validated. A suite of innovative tools has been built to guide each course team through the process of course redesign (Bianco, Gollis, Cooke, & Margaryan, 2002). The key steps in the design and delivery process are:

1. Begin each course with an identified business need or competence gap; then restate that need or gap into terms that indicate measurable performance in the workplace.

2. Design the course around a multistep work-based activity, not around sequences of content. Content serves as a resource for the work-based task, not as the driver.

3. Lead each participant and his or her supervisor to the completion of a learning agreement for the course in which they jointly identify a workplace prob­lem or opportunity related to the overall course topic. Express this in terms of the individual's competence development by indicating the sorts of performance that should be demonstrated during and by the end of the course. Guide the partici­pant and supervisor toward the selection of a locally relevant problem that is man­ageable within the course period and relates to the general business need that has motivated the course. This is to ensure enough parallelism among the different work-based activities that will be occurring so that peer interaction can occur dur­ing the course even though participants each have their own specific work-based situations.

4. Design, according to research-based, best practice guidelines, a Web-based learning support environment to serve as the common electronic work space, the environment for collaborative learning and discussion, and for submissions from the participants, all under the leadership of a skilled instructor.

5. Build in (1) peer interaction, (2) use of the Shell Global Networks (the soft­ware environments that support informal knowledge sharing within communities of practice throughout the company), (3) contacts with experts outside the course, (4) reuse of submissions from previous participants, and (5) carefully crafted

The Handbook of Blended Learning

interactions with the supervisor throughout the course into the instructions for the activities. Retain records of all interactions, submissions, feedback, and assessment in the Web environment.

6. Integrate evaluation from different perspectives (participant, supervisor, instructor, course design, and technology-design experts) into every course. Use the evaluation not only for course improvement but for cross-course analyses and impact measurement.

7. Coach the supervisors and instructors in how to plan for and manage this new type of course, including building on teachable moments that arise from participant submissions.

8. Reuse selected participant submissions as resources for the next cycles of the same course or other courses, thereby increasing the local relevance of the course materials (Collis & Strijker, 2004).

Over one hundred different course events, involving approximately sixty-five fully redesigned courses, have occurred at Shell EP since 2001 following this model. As the process is also evolving, not every course event demonstrates each of the eight steps but the general orientation can be seen. Approximately half of the courses blend work-based activities with a classroom component, while tht other half of the courses take place only in the workplace, with no classroom com­ponent. Satisfaction with the courses is high, and the general response from all involved is that the shift toward work-based activities has made the courses more relevant as well as increasing the learning that has occurred (Collis, Margaryan, & Kennedy, 2004).

Categories of Work-Based Activities at Shell EP

Various analyses of the work-based activities in the Shell EP courses with work-based activities have occurred, carried out by the LLD Research Team (see Collis et al, 2004; Margaryan, Collis, & Cooke, 2003; Margaryan, 2004). Analyses of work-based activities in these courses shows that they can be grouped into the fol­lowing generic categories:

Orientation

Collecting information from the workplace

Product development

Sharing and reflecting

Comparing and contrasting

Self-analysis

Reflections

Putting Blended Learning to Work

Orientation. Orientation activities include the learner's signing a learning agree­ment with his or her line supervisor, getting acquainted with the ground rules for the course (expectations in terms of participation in discussions, regularity of checking out the course site, and completion requirements, for example), and reflecting on his or her own knowledge gaps and learning needs and expectations from the course in terms of addressing those needs. It also includes posting in­formation related to his or her background and work experience as well as per­sonal details to help learners get to know each other.

Collecting Information from the Workplace. Activities in this category begin with a problem related to the subject matter of the course and involve steps for finding in­formation about that problem in the participant's own workplace. Examples of these types of activities include participants' finding pertinent equipment (for example, valves, joints, hardware) in their own environment, similar to a scavenger hunt. The activities could involve conversations with subject matter experts, enabling dialogues on use, maintenance, and repairs, thereby establishing a link between new content and real-world applications. From a broader Shell EP perspective, the activities may encourage interaction with a discipline community using the Global Networks. By integrating these informal knowledge-sharing channels within a formal course en­vironment, learning is expanded beyond the boundaries of the course, and learners are stimulated to make use of various existing company resources (people and tech­nology) to solve their particular problems. Once the report on the results of the ac­tivity is submitted to the course Web environment, follow-up activities can occur. These activities often include the participants' comparing and contrasting uieir prob­lems and solutions or giving feedback to each other's submissions. Figure 33.1 shows a portion of the Web environment supporting a course in this category.

Product Development. The third category of work-based activities appearing in Shell EP courses relates to developing a product that can be directly used in the workplace. The products can range from the development of an online bidding project for the workplace to the development of technical models or inventories or personal leadership development plans. The work (and hence the learning) here can get quite complex and engaging, as these are often multistep activities following a systematic procedural framework (assess-plan-design-develop-implement-evaluate). After each step, reports summarizing the results in that step are sub­mitted to the course Web environment, and the course instructor and the other participants can give feedback on those submissions. This category of activities sometimes involves a midcourse checkpoint with the participant's supervisor to discuss participant learning progress and performance. Figure 33.2 shows a portion of the Web environment supporting this sort of course.

Putting Blended Learning to Work

Sharing and Reflecting. This category of activities relates to sharing experiences on a given topic, by posting reflective reports in the course environment. This is followed up by synchronous and asynchronous group discussions of the submit­ted issues in the discussion areas of the web environment. The course instructor participates and monitors these discussions, and gives feedback or guidance when needed.

Comparing and Contrasting. These activities involve comparing and contrast­ing each other's submissions, comparing course content with the real situation in the learner's own workplace, or comparing the learner's own experiences and ideas on the subject matter of the course with company standards.

Self-Analysis. In this category of activities, participants are guided through a mul-tistep process of self-analysis and reflection activities to identify their own knowl­edge and skill gaps and development needs.

Reflections. Although this is also part of many of the other categories of activi­ties, the final type of activity, reflection, is emphasized here as a separate category since it is often used as the final course activity. Reflective tasks might ask learners to reflect on what they learned and recognize key applications in their workplace. Many times the final activity of the class is to check with their supervisor on the learning agreement and determine how closely their learning experience has met or exceeded expectations and defined business challenges.

More Traditional Learning Activities

In addition to the work-based activities, more traditional learning activities also occur in the workplace portions of the Shell EP LLD courses. These include ac­tivities such as studying the conceptual material related to the subject matter of the course available in the course Web site. Calculation exercises, quizzes, case studies, and working with simulation software are also familiar types of activi­ties carried on outside a classroom setting with the support of the course Web environment. Case studies and simulations are used in courses where, because of time, manageability, or safety constraints, it is not possible to use real work­place situations or tasks as the main project of the course. However, such courses often use some of the above-described work-based types of activities to ac­company the use of the simulation and make the learning as relevant to work as possible.

In Shell EP LLD courses built on the work-based model, many of the activ­ity types are used in combination. In the next section, a specific example of a

The Handbook of Blended Learning

course redesigned using the work-based approach will be discussed to illustrate this sort of combination.

Example Course: Health Risk Assessment

This course is focused on health risk assessment and incorporates a number of the types of work-based activities described in the previous section. The interface of a portion of its Web environment was shown in Figure 33.2. Health risk assess­ment (HRA) is a complex and critical process in Shell EP. Health risks for em­ployees associated with potentially dangerous tasks such as drilling or handling chemicals must be regularly monitored and prevented. In addition, health risks associated with Shell processes for the local environments must be managed at all times with great care to prevent environmental disasters. HRA is a carefully doc­umented process in Shell EP. Hundreds of Shell professionals worldwide must be trained each year to take responsibility for the assessment process in their work­places. The person carrying out the assessment never works in isolation, but must lead a team that includes the drilling foreman and superintendent, technicians, company physicians and physiotherapists, workplace team leaders, plant man­agers, security advisers, and general asset managers.

The course typically used to take place in a one-week classroom setting, but there were difficulties in participants' not being able to travel to the classroom ses­sions or in the instructors' being able to travel to individual regional sites. Also, the classroom sessions did not provide the opportunity to carry out a health risk assessment as it actually happens in the workplace and get guidance and feedback from an expert or peer collaborators helping one another during this process. The need to access fast-breaking information about the risks in new drilling or chemical-handling processes could not be met with a face-to-face course that some­times had a waiting list of many months. A decision was made to redesign the course so that the activities could be carried out in participants' individual work­places. The participants would take responsibility for carrying out a health risk assessment in their own workplaces as the main activity of the course.

The result of the redesign process is a course that involves a number of work-based activities that progressively build on each other to take the learner through an actual HRA process. Such activities naturally include HRA preparation, in­cluding the identification of a competent HRA team to coach and assist the learner with the work-based assignments during the course; planning; and getting permission from the manager of the assessment team to perform an HRA. Other course activities include the identification and rating of HRA hazards, assessment of health risks to the business, application of identified hazard and exposure rat­ings, effective documentation for the HRA results, and reviewing the HRA and

Putting Blended Learning to Work

assurance process. For each step, participants are coached by experienced persons in their own workplaces but also in other locations within the company over the Web environment. Also, for each step, participants submit their working docu­ments into the Web environment, study each others' submissions, and provide feedback and support for each other. Although they never meet face-to-face, con­siderable knowledge sharing occurs. The study resources that had previously formed the base of the face-to-face course are electronically available using the Web environment, to serve as conceptual guidance for each step of the HRA process.

The course has run eleven times in this blended learning format, with eval­uation results from the participants consistently high (Collis & Margaryan, 2003). Some of the participants reported that they had already moved on to new job roles as a result of their increased competence or were entrusted with new projects of high business impact, in either their own operating unit or other parts of the organization, as a result of the course even before it was completed. As one participant noted, " I worked virtually with HRA teams in Shell Egypt sister companies and now am supervising their HRA processes." Overall, the results of the evaluations show that the work-based activities in this course resulted in increased competence, application of learning, and sharing of knowledge in the workplace and globally, as well as significant work­place impact. However, there is a need to continue to improve some aspects of the course, such as interaction among the participants, which could be more strongly integrated into course activities, and ensuring that the participants are given enough time and resources to carry out course activities such as study­ing resource materials, preparing reflections and analyses of other participants' work, and interacting with other participants to share experiences. While the participants have not complained about these aspects in the HRA course, both are important issues being studied in all Shell EP courses in order to improve the impact of the courses.

Key Issues

The Shell EP example indicates some of the key issues and challenges in re­designing courses to this new form of blend. Many types of changes must occur, particularly in the expectations of all involved with regard to what constitutes a " course." Work-based activities by their very nature are more difficult to manage in terms of time expectations, compared with a preset number of days for a classroom-only course. The new expectations for the workplace supervisor will meet with resistance because they will be seen as new work unless the

The Handbook of Blended Learning

supervisors are carefully supported by the course instructor team (Bianco & Collis, 2004). The work-based activities must be directly relevant and valuable in the workplace. In a shift from content delivery to activity management, instructors must learn new roles. The Web technology used must be simple, flexible, and easy to access, yet make sharing and communicating as transpar­ent as possible. An integrated approach to implementation and course design is needed to manage these complex interrelated requirements. All of these as­pects are being tackled simultaneously at Shell EP. And for company support, the approach to blended learning must reflect corporate strategy and needs, which also is the case at Shell EP.

References

Allee, V (1997). The knowledge evolution: Expanding organizational intelligence. London: Butterworth-Heinemann.

Bianco, M., & Collis, B. (2004). Tools and strategies for engaging the supervisor in

technology-supported work-based learning. In T. M. Egan, M. L. Morris, & V Inbakumar (Eds.), Proceedings of theAHRD Conference 2004 (pp. 505-512). Bowling Green, OH: Academy of Human Resource Development.

Bianco, M., Collis, В., Cooke, A., & Margaryan, A. (2002). Instructor support for new learning approaches involving technology. Staff and Educational Development International, 6(2), 129-148.

Collis, В., & Margaryan, A. (2003, September 9). Work-based activities and the technologies that sup­port them: A bridge between formal and informal learning in the corporate context. Presentation at the conference LearnIT: Information and Communication Technologies and the Transformation of Learning Practices, Gothenburg, Sweden.

Collis, В., Margaryan, A., & Kennedy. M. W. (2004, October 11). Blending formal and informal learning offers new competence development opportunities. Paper presented at the 11th, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.

Collis, В., & Strijker, A. (2004). Technology and human issues in reusing learning objects. Journal of Interactive Media in Education [Special Issue], 9(1). Retrieved August 1, 2004, from https://www-jime.open.ac.uk/2004/JIME-2004-EduSemWeb.pdf.

Fox, S. (2002). Studying networked learning: Some implications from socially situated learn­ing theory and actor network theory. In C. Steeples & C.Jones (Eds.), Networked learning: Perspectives and issues (pp. 77-92). London: Springer-Verlag.

Margaryan, A. (2004, April 8). Course scan results. Presentation to the Knowledge, Innovation and Design Leadership Team, Shell EP LED, Rijswijk, the Netherlands.

Margaryan, A., Collis, В., & Cooke, A. (2003). Activity-based blended learning. Human Resources Development International, 7(2), 265—274.

Merrill, D. (2002). First principles of instruction. Educational Technology Research and Development, 50(3), 43-59.

Reeves, Т. С, Herrington, J., & Oliver, R. (2002). Authentic activities and online learning. Retrieved August 1, 2004, from https://elrond.scam.ecu.edu.au/oliver/2002/Reeves.pdf.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR