The source of competitive power of a corporation is employees' knowledge level and especially R&D engineers' knowledge level is the most important. Executives in companies gradually strengthen the role of HRD, which focuses on developing human infrast...
The source of competitive power of a corporation is employees' knowledge level and especially R&D engineers' knowledge level is the most important. Executives in companies gradually strengthen the role of HRD, which focuses on developing human infrastructure on R&D by technical education, in order to increase corporation's competitive power.
Most Korean corporations usually operates off-line education course for core technology session unlike blended learning trend of general management and leadership training, which are taking advantages of e-learning and off-line education. Blended learning for technology program is not yet actively implemented in most gemeral education program.
This study chose blended learning for technonogy programs at A Training Institute - charging for technology education for R&D engineers in S company - and will deeply research on the operation of the technology eduction as a case study to figure out the objectives, structure, process, problems of blended learning for technical education, and special features on operation. Finally, I will propose major improvement points and find out best practice methodlogy of blended learning for technology program.
The objectives that ATI adopted blended learning for technology programs are as bellow.
First, minimizing required time for a classroom type training at off-line. Current classroom type training required more than 2 weeks off-line session. This length of time caused discontinuance on daily work as well as a heavy burden due to interuppted daily work to R&D engineers, who are the technical education trainees.
Second, increasing the effectiveness of education by minimizing the level in equivalance on trainees' precedent knowledge. Each employee's technical background is different and it became a bottle neck as useless time consumption to advanced engineer as well as to basic level engineer. Blended learning allows basic knowledge acquisition prior to session and it is the benefit for an employee who are lack of basic technical knowledge.
Third, expanding technical training coverage to non-R&D employees. Basic technical session for 1 week for non-R&D employees will be the basic asset and finally corporation's competitive power since it strenghtens employees' goal and vision for one corporation.
We investigated problems from education planning, development, implementation, system, and characteristics of technical training, especially about trainees, education contents and resources to use, therefore, we propose solutions for improved blended learning program operation for a technology.
First of all, corporation has to design their own blended learning model based on instructional design because technology education is very different from other education like leadership, general management.
Second, corporation also needs to design a specialized blended learning for integrated technical training. Currently, e-learning and off-line education is designed separately and combined later, however, from the beginning stage on design, education objectives, trainee, contents, instruction method, interaction and learning methodlogy should be considered together for online and offline architect.
Third, corporation should have a solution in order to overcome the discrepancy between employees' current knowledge base since trainees cannot understand technical sesssion without basic backgrounds on that technology.
Fourth, one person should be assigned from architect designing, development and to operation for a consolidated operation pf e-learning and off-line education.
Fifth, corporation should capture basic technical knowledge in workplace and provide it as a e-learning. Currently, over 70% trainee are studing by themself as pre-activies before classrome type training in order to acquire main technology knowledge.
Finally, corporation should prepare many different levels of education contents for trainee. For example, skillset for Executives, skillset for team leaders and skillset for engineers of working level as actual implementation level.
Along with these six solutions, teacher's instruction capability, e-learning contents upgrade, development of simulation and preparationof projects are also recommended.
If there are all implemented successfully, blended learning fo rtechnology programs would be actively accepted as a good training methodology like blended learning for general education part.