Improving Organizational Learning: Defining Units of Learning from Social Tools

Abstract

New technologies, such as social networks, wikis, blogs and other social tools, enable collaborative work and are important facilitators of the social learning process. Many companies are using these types of tools as substitutes for their intranets, especially software development companies. However, the content generated by these tools in many cases is not appropriately organized. Therefore, this information is often not accessed by the company. Learning objects and units of learning are two e-learning concepts that allow content to be organized in a suitable sequence, thus improving its learning and reuse. Therefore, an approach is proposed to generate learning objects and units of learning from social tools in order to organize information for easy reuse. To evaluate the proposed approach, an experimental study was conducted and subjected to discursive textual analysis. The results show that the approach is viable for improving organizational learning in software development teams. Furthermore, the approach is efficient, especially in terms of the acquisition of new knowledge. It also helps to maintain the organizational pattern and minimize the reinvention of solutions and the repetition of errors.

Keywords

• improving organizational learning
• knowledge management
• earning objects
• unit of learning