Publish at March 01 2023 Updated March 01 2023
"The purpose of an organization is to enable ordinary people to do extraordinary things."
Peter Drucker
"The purpose of a learning organization is to enable ordinary learners to learn extraordinary things."
Peter Drucker, somewhat modified
The corporate universities are organizational spaces invented in large companies after the war to develop learning. As they grew, especially internationally, and changed scale, large companies indeed understood that they generated organizational behaviors and that these had an influence on their performance.
Initially they structured training departments with course catalog logics, then to go further, they created schemes linking to business life, career management, project management, monitoring or innovation to develop individual and collective know-how in action, to learn faster than the competition. They identified that the individual and collective tacit knowledge concealed great value for their development. Progressively, they realized that they were building cultures that were favorable to learning. They knew how to organize reflexivity loops on their organizational behaviors. They were learning to evolve their mental models, to react to the hazards or varied situations encountered, and to anticipate the changes in the systems in which they were embedded.
Thinking about the role of organizations was not confined to the sole register of business and also challenged the educational world. "The learning university" is a surprising phrase suggesting that universities could be ignorant or unlearning. Here again, the expression must be understood as a challenge to set in motion and to make people aware that learning goes beyond the simple transfer of data from brain to brain in a room dedicated to this purpose. Even if the practice of learning in an agreed space has been codified since the 16th century, the various pedagogical discoveries attest that we learn everywhere and all the time. How can we take into account favorable effects of organizational structures on learning?
As early as 1997, Hélène Trocmé-Fabre describes the need of contemporary universities: "It is a matter, for the University of today, of filling an absence: that of a time-space between three types of expertise:
Yet, to read the criteria for evaluation and recognition of teachers or the standards of university management, the University overvalues expertise and knowledge and, too often, neglects pedagogy and the desire to learn. A teacher-researcher is indeed more likely to advance in his or her career and remuneration if he or she publishes a research article in a ranked journal, rather than if his or her pedagogy is appreciated by his or her learners.
Becoming a learning university would mean transforming management modes to develop virtuous behaviors in collective learning. It means working to forge links between the disjointed expertise of the field, the pedagogy, and the learner. These connections are made through organizational choices or, put another way, it is about creating a culture of learning that goes beyond the mere expression of content in the classroom and incorporates a pedagogical approach and a true place for the learner.
What is true of universities is also true of most educational actors. Circumstances now force a shift in habits. Thus, training organizations are faced with a random motivation of their audiences in the face of an offer too often standardized in internship mode that struggles to attract and capture attention. However, a research carried out by Sol France shows the capacity of certain structures to initiate transformation processes sometimes by taking side roads like the CNFPT which has modified the relationship to knowledge
By changing the way its permanents interact, it is a whole environment that enriches the traditional internship offer. And it is particularly during the Covid crisis that the role of this environment is particularly visible (see the Sol France action research on the acceleration of learning during the Covid crisis). Making educational and formative professionals (trainer, designer, administrator) change their relationship to knowledge, contributes to distilling the possibility of new practices for learners who are the final beneficiaries of educational and formative institutions.
Younger students are also concerned. The idea of "learning high schools" mark a shift to "collaborative training models" develop within so-called learning institutions where collective thinking is enriched by the contributions of each. The core of the approach here aims to get the teacher out of his or her solitude in the face of a class that is increasingly difficult to make progress in and to more systematically install collective strategies to respond to the problems of transforming students in their relationship to knowledge.
The learning high school would thus be, according to its promoters, an effort to put the collective back into the teaching teams beyond the mere physical meeting during a break in the "teachers' room" sometimes turning into an emotional outlet. Making a collective learning project is the goal of the learning high school. If the learning high school strives to change the way a physical space and activities in the same vein the "learning holidays", we look differently at a space of time hitherto without an explicit learning intention to "ensure the consolidation of learning and contribute to the personal development of young people through cultural, sports and leisure activities, supervised by professionals".
If there is always informal learning whatever we undertake during the vacations, this time it is a matter of being more explicit and taking an informed look at what is experienced to extract a life lesson. It is an effort to formalize what has been informal until now, with the exception of the school assignment at the end of the year, which was expressed in the form of a text to be written such as "what did you do or learn during your vacation"
All actors endowed with the mission of teaching and learning now apply strategies to themselves to increase the reflexive gaze on their practices, or strive to develop this gaze in their recipients. This reflective gaze helps change their view of their learners and allows for the introduction of innovative practices.
Several axes can be identified to develop as an educational organization promoting the desire to learn.
All of these actions together will develop a culture of learning. The whole process will benefit from being driven by a performance and skills monitoring system to evaluate the effectiveness of training and learning programs and adjust strategies accordingly. For it is always in the feedback of organizational behaviors that they are likely to evolve and be adapted according to the reactions and initiatives of the various actors.
Sources
Thot Cursus. Learning Organization, the Digital Transformation of Training
https://cursus.edu/fr/11030/organisation-apprenante-la-transformation-numerique-de-la-formation
Centre-inffo. How to become a learning organization?
https://www.centre-inffo.fr/site-centre-inffo/comment-devenir-une-entreprise-apprenante
Ciret Learning Today, in a Learning University
https://ciret-transdisciplinarity.org/locarno/loca5c8.php
Sol France Research action https://www.solfrance.org/action-research
Education.gov learning vacations https://www.education.gouv.fr/ete-2022-les-vacances-apprenantes-303834
Thot Cursus Corporate Universities and other collaborations
https://cursus.edu/fr/11388/les-universites-dentreprises-et-autres-collaborations
Centre-inffo. A research on current events in learning organizations
https://www.centre-inffo.fr/innovation-formation/articles/une-recherche-sur-lactualite-des-organisations-apprenantes
Wikiliberal. Tacit Knowledge - https://www.wikiberal.org/wiki/Connaissance_tacite
Access exclusive services for free
Subscribe and receive newsletters on:
In addition, index your favorite resources in your own folders and find your history of consultation.
Subscribe to the newsletterYou might also like:
Complex thinking, but who can juggle data flows today? Complex thinking has never been cultivated as such and the demand for people capable of this type of thinking is exponential. This leads us to apprenticeships to integrate this thinking in the university. First steps.
Making Evaluation a Game: Different Models
The game, especially the electronic version, can keep players engaged for hours. Education would like to be as engaging. As a result, some believe in the gamification of education, especially for student assessment. Are students really more motivated with points and achievements? It seems that, for the most part, they are.
They who were once called the public are becoming collaborators (@LanceWeiler, on the MCN 2014 conference Twitter feed): how does this collaboration work around museum collections? Some digital museum experts answer and give examples.
Slow management, smooth training
By going too fast, we are treading water, so by slowing down we move forward: consequences of a calm learning process
Storytelling as a tool for projection into our world
From cave drawings, through the unchanging Middle Ages to the ultrashort pitches, the history of storytelling through time that décline according to the periods according to a rhythm increasingly short and effective passing from the integrated work to the centralized work, connected by links..
