The E-learning Curve at Edublogs

I received an interesting communication from Virginia Yonkers in response to my July 7th post Web 2.0 technologies and learning professionals’ opportunities and challenges. In my post I asserted that in theory learning professionals could start with themselves and help to develop it Web / Learning 2.0 technologies throughout organizations, in my experience, building a strategy around personal motivation and initiatives is fraught with difficulty.

Organizations typically view such innovations as the “throw it over the wall and see where it lands” approach. While learning professionals are typically highly-motivated individuals who expend personal time and effort staying “ahead of the curve” in terms of their own skills and competencies, a “viral approach” to learning in this domain can only have success if the learning professional in question is highly influential within an organization (and probably a C-level executive).

For a “footsoldier” to attempt to modify work practices within a large organization would meet high levels of resistance, particularly from managers who have no desire to change production processes that probably work very well, given the potential disruptions entailed in transitioning to a more collaborative environment.

Virginia has obviously deeply considered this topic and was good enough to respond to my post with her own experience in this area. As she wrote to me:

My current dissertation work is finding that the organizational framework and political climate has a lot to do with what and how workers learn and access knowledge. I am finding that “knowledge” is based on what departments define as knowledge. The “foot soldier” as you term it, can try to advocate all they want, but in the end it only causes tension and frustration from all sides. Changes need to be developed organically throughout the organization, aligning with organizational strategies and worker’s tasks. Strictly top down and bottom up approaches don’t work unless there is a shift in organizational resources for the change (human, time, financial, and support services).

Virginia further described exactly what it feels like when the level of support she had become accustomed to when her organization “changed the infrastructure without changing the support structures needed to implement the change” and how subsequently the “infrastructure within the organization” let her down: she was left facing the ire of “students, department heads, and ITS.”

Similarly, she described being left in a situation where an unanticipated extra workload was left on her shoulders, as it was discovered that with the new infrastructure limited present courseware migration to the new environment, forcing teachers to contemplate re-authoring their content to be compatible with the new platform.

In my view, this example of poor communication, planning and execution of an initiative - which I’m sure we’re all familiar with to a greater or lesser degree - demonstrates how a change can have unintended effects across an organization. In this informal case study, it seems that the unintended outcome was that a decision was made to implement a new system with little or no consultation for those who actually have to use the solution regularly, yet it is those “on the ground” who have to re-assemble the pieces of a once functioning solution.

Typically this  is what occurs when you  “throw it over the wall” - it breaks.

So today, I’m asking the question - how can learning professionals in organizations and institutions become involved in plans to implement learning solutions in their organizations?

We all know the short answer: get board-level support for the strategy. Which leads me to the next question: how do we go about attaining this level of support, particularly in strictly hierarchical organizations where individual contributors may not have access to decision makers?

I’ll be interested to hear your stories - failures, lessons learned, and triumphs.

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