An educational design for organizational Learning

The aim of my study is to explore how employees may learn collaboratively from common work experience in the context of work. The study includes the development of an educational design for learning from work experience. The development of the educational design was initially not a research project, but a task for me to solve in my role as manager of Organisational Learning, Oracle EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) from 2005 to 2012. The development of the educational design was not planned as a scientific research. However, its success was founded on the feedback from participants, decision-makers and end-users of the results. Research methodologies were utilized for receiving the crucial feedback from users spread over more than 40 countries in EMEA. I look for a research methodology to investigate the development and implementation of an educational design in which I have been heavily involved in different ways:1.The development of a process for experience-based knowledge sharing and creation 2.Running the process in various lines of business and on various organisational levels3.Developing the process to fit to the new requirements and to incorporate new knowledge about organisational learning4.Data-gathering as the basis of changes, analysing the changes and discussing the consequences5.Communicate the changes and the results of the educational design to relevant colleaguesAs the researcher, I influenced practice due to the research itself. I am aware of this ‘un-neutral’ role (Pedersen et al. 2012).This study investigates organisational learning from a learning perspective. Consequently, the methodology should mirror this approach. The method of the research must bridge theoretical research and the real-life learning process. In addition the method has to imply a) me as the researcher and b) me as an active participant in the research object. The research area is Educational Research with the theory-driven design of learning environments. (Design-Based Research Collective 2003: 8). Design-based research (DBR) was developed for researching classical classroom training. In this study, DBR will be utilised for researching collaborative learning and innovation in the context of work. Research and development is an iterative process where the research is driven by the test and vice versa. DBR takes place in the authentic learning environment without a strong distinction between the researcher and the participants of the learning processes. DBR allows active involvement of the participants and includes a number of iterations for improving the educational design. The development took advantage of the participants’ expertise (Barab & Squire 2009) and high involvement (Collins et al. 2004), and the researcher collaborated with the researched people, investigating known and unknown aspects of practice.