It's the Sign of the Times:

Building Competencies through E-learning

February 18, 2009

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Beverly Traynor, designer of on-line learning communities at Eudaimonia, pointed out that each company has many communities whether they are visible or not. In a webcast poll conducted by the Human Capital Institute, most respondents in a COP participated in one outside their organization and within their own country, and 25% of respondents participated in international COP’s.

Since learning in each COP is a social activity, their diversity of membership is both an advantage (providing a shared context for learning, and multiple perspectives) and a challenge to meet divergent learning needs. Every element of diversity is an opportunity for learning and insight. The complexity of dynamic membership gives all members access to one another and to the knowledge they need. It also encourages the members to periodically re-examine the community's desired scope, both in terms of collective knowledge and membership. Tenure, drop-out rates, and new membership influx may indicate members’ expectations of what they thought they would learn and if their expectation was met or expanded.

Moreover any self-directed group has leader(s) emerge. For organizations who want to address needs of diverse cross-generational, cross-cultural, and cross-disciplinary groups, Beverly suggested that COP leader-facilitators give positive feedback to people who share their skills and support, build activities and reflection into what the group discusses, include trust-building activities, introduce peer-mentoring and/or collegial coaching, and allow enough time for collaboration and trust-building (and not just the pursuit of content objectives).

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