E-learning compliance- new ways to do it.

Introduction 

E-learning would be, if used properly, not only an instrument for learning in the XXI century but also a basis for innovative learning developments. The knowledge based society could be constructed only on the bricks of efficient, out of the box, borderline learning processes.

Task oriented, objective oriented knowledge structured in order to perform educational purposes, called also eduknowledge could be the frontline for actual e-learning, mainly regarding learning of specific good practices in industry. Essentially eduknowledge is a knowledge, learning oriented, management tool.

One of the main challenges regarding e-learning is represented by knowledge, more exactly by:

-the usage of the existing knowledge (already available on the Internet and/or stored on the PROMIS platform);

-capture of new knowledge, mainly resulting from personal experience of the learner, assessment of such knowledge and if valuable, including this experience knowledge into the e-learning (eduknowledge) chunks as best practice procedures or case studies;

The e-challenge addressed mainly in this paper is to develop, improve and orient e-learning specific processes and instruments in order to achieve the implementation of awareness and commitment of compliance notions into SME, so that such a trained SME could boost around a perfectionist organizational and safety culture and became a seed for other SME in the same economic activity or in other domains.

Objectives 

The main objective of the paper is to show new  research regarding the tailoring and optimization of e-learning structures called eduknowledge in  efficiently learning compliance (and developing a compliance oriented culture) into SME. This e-learning effort is done working on the basis of a SME knowledge oriented platform called PROMIS, platform that could integrate and use in the most efficient way such instruments for e-learning, assuring sharing processes for knowledge (and specially compliance oriented knowledge) among SME. An efficient educational process is based upon knowledge and not information. It is possible to separate distinctly data, information and knowledge into an e-learning process, as follows:

• Data- a property of things (discrimination between physical states);

• Information- the subset of the data that resides in things and activates an agent- being filtered from the data by the agent’s perceptual or conceptual apparatus;

• Knowledge- a property of agents predisposing them to act in particular circumstances;

So, knowledge is connected directly with action. Knowledge evolves dynamically, being changed in the action process. Continuous learning is based upon the dynamically progress of knowledge. The e-challenge here is to create chunks of knowledge that could be efficiently used, without being boring for the learner and also without being too complicated for a SME that has just general IT knowledge.

Other objectives of the paper are:

• to explain that in a rapid and continuous changing world, SME managers have a lot of difficult choices to do daily in order to be compliant with the national and European rules and regulations and not just only on the paper but by using this compliance as an engine towards future durable development;
• to show that compliance could be obtained most efficiently through a mixed process of learning and using knowledge based tools as PROMIS;
• to explain that using the eduknowledge concept, chunks of e-learning structures could be used most efficiently in order to imprint the main compliance notions in SME management and also other personnel and to make them understand how they can use compliance into their own interest.

Methodology 

The main used methodology is educational design, adapted for the e-learning area. Some knowledge intensive discover methodologies are also used in order to improve the solution and make it more user friendly.

The methodology is based on three pillars:

-Educational ontologies (for quality, health and safety and environment) – used to obtain an integrated static learning framework and to integrate existing and available knowledge into contextual instances of this framework;

-Eduknowledge objects – in order to improve and develop knowledge management on new horizons related to compliance aspects (for example compliance with new and emergent risks requirements)

-Development of semantic enriched relationships between learning objects – in order to improve the community (of SME) sharing and reusing eduknowledge learning objects

A very important aspect of the methodological approach is represented by knowledge elicitation It involves obtaining knowledge from a human expert (or human experts) into compliance assurance in order to use this knowledge in practical compliance implementation and maintenance at the SME level..

The knowledge elicitation  (and analysis) task involves:

-Finding at least one expert in the specific compliance domain which :

= is willing to provide his/her knowledge;

-has the time to provide his/her knowledge;

- is able to provide his/her knowledge.;

-Repeated interviews with the expert(s), plus task analysis, concept sorting,etc,

-Knowledge structuring: converting the raw data (t compliance practical aspects) into intermediate representations  prior to building a working e-learning system. This will improve the knowledge engineer’s understanding of the subject;



-Building a model of the knowledge derived from the expert, for other experts to comment and improve. From then on, the development proceeds by stepwise refinement.

The methodological development based on the voice of customer is represented in the next figure.

Figure 1 The methodological development

Eduknowledge is presented and analysed systematically around a business case involving compliance with ISO 31.000 as the best example for safety developments. The main eduknowledge structures, like those presented below are described in detail:

• The eduknowledge start-up booster- which gives details regarding the specific eduknowledge chunk and also acts as a user-friendly interface ;

• The preliminary examples- which are introducing learners  in the specific domain of compliance;

• The basic chunk of knowledge that gives the ways to perform the specific task for which the eduknowledge was built (for example, a specific eduknowledge is oriented towards the design and development of a compliance based culture inside a SME- this basic chunk of knowledge is a step-by-step procedure for development this culture from scratch);

• How to do (HTD) knowledge- which shows how to perform specific tasks  related to the main task (for example, an efficient culture  uses  all available data from databases or other sources - as the eduknowledge is centred around efficiently building the compliance culture ,one of HTD  is centred around the development of data framework that could sustain this culture)

• Maintenance (M) knowledge- which has the role to help in solving specific problems that could appear during the task performance (for example, maintenance knowledge gives the solutions for tracking and debugging the inference process required by the continuous culture improvement)

• Examples and case studies- are used in order to give the learning person the possibility to see in practice the applications of the knowledge

• Dissemination mechanism- the tutorial mechanism used to train the learning person;

• Feedback mechanism- the mechanism used to take the feedback from the SME together with the individuals involved in e-learning  and uses it to adapt accordingly the tutorial process

Brief Conclusions

The business case is used in conjunction with a specific  structure called pyramid in order to give SME the best instrument in order to understand, learn and imprint inside their people compliance as a future  continuous growth instrument. Having   a multilingual tool could only help  various national SME in order to collaborate and share together experience and moreover experience focused into lessons learned. A SME gains time and money using such knowledge and not re-inventing them from scratch. Knowledge issued from the new European Union states could be helpful into regional cooperation and development but could also be the start-up of development of a knowledge based network of lessons learned in the domains of quality, health and safety and environment protection  on the basis of PROMIS platform across all the European Union.