Analyzing Work Teams Using Social Network Diagrams

Workplace teams are a common social structure that enables the successful completion of collaborative projects. They have been studied as “hot” teams, virtual ones, and other manifestations. For both management and team members, it is helpful to have a form of meta-cognition on teams to solve work team issues pre-, during-, and post-project. One way to systematize understandings of a work team is to apply social network analysis to depict the work team’s power structure, its functions, and ways to improve the team’s communications for productivity, creativity, and effective functioning. This chapter depicts three real-world team-based projects as social network diagrams along with some light analysis. This work finds that social network diagrams may effectively shed light on the social dynamics of projects in the pre-, during-, and post-project phases.

Four Strategies for Remote Workforce Training, Development, and Certification

Companies and organizations are increasingly turning to remote-based teleworkers to fill vital positions. This is due to a variety of circumstances, including increasing difficulty in locating and attracting potential employees who possess the requisite skills required for positions, locating potential employees who reside in close geographic proximity to the corporate facilities, high costs associated with relocating employees across the country or globe, and high costs associated with supporting a large, localized workforce. Therefore, developing and supporting a strong remote workforce becomes a critical business strategy and an important component of the corporate Value Chain. Providing ongoing training, development, and credentialing for these remote teleworkers can be challenging for many companies – despite technological advancements in recent years. In response, many companies are increasingly taking it upon themselves to provide workforce education and certification – bypassing traditional education formats in favor of emerging models for training, development, and competency certification. Four strategies/models are proposed in this chapter for training and credentialing remote teleworkers, including utilization of Open Systems, which are gaining popularity in corporations such as Google, the Khan Academy, and Autodesk; Badging and Open Badging, which are commonly used in corporations such as Samsung, NASA, and Disney; Gamification and 3D Simulation Strategies, which are used in a variety of corporate training; and Learning Support Managers, which are used by companies such as Apple, Inc.

Lessons Learned from Distance Workforce Training Applications

North Carolina Cooperative Extension (NCCE) depends on the skill set and subject matter competency of its field faculty to deliver quality, credible education to North Carolina citizens. In order to maintain and enhance field faculty competency, NCCE uses distance technology to provide training to field faculty located in offices across the state. Although not the only method of training, distance training allows NCCE to maximize resources by reducing the cost of travel and protecting valuable professional time. This chapter’s case studies identify areas in which NCCE utilizes distance education to train employees for on-going competency development, crisis response, program development and implementation, and program evaluation.

Online Policy-Compliance Training in Higher Education

In higher education, compliance trainings are necessary to ensure that the diverse workforce adheres to any number of regulations. With faculty and staff who are working on multiple branch campuses and traveling for research, conference presentations, and consultations, many such trainings are often created for online delivery. Policy-compliance trainings are a sub-set of professional development trainings, and they are unique in terms of their objectives—of both raising policy-awareness and providing the skills to enable behavior change to minimize liabilities and risks from non-compliance. Very little has been written about the design and delivery of policy-compliance trainings in any work context. This chapter proposes a simplified preliminary model for the design and delivery of online policy-compliance trainings in a higher-education context; it derives insights from the limited research literature and also from common practices and trainings in online policy-compliance trainings at a university.

Strategic Management of Workplace E-Learning

Continuing education has become a necessary component of the modern knowledge worker and, by extension, of the modern firm. Increasingly, cost effectiveness points firms to using e-learning solutions in the workplace over older, more traditional methods. This chapter explores the strategic positioning of e-learning in the workplace, the instructional design process, and different types of training that are necessary in the workplace.

Iff and Other Conditionals

For the past several years, a new form of online learning has emerged, which has captured the popular imagination, and with it, plenty of support from private universities, angel investors, and foundations. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are a scaled-up version of online learning, albeit on open socio-technical platforms, which enable digital content organization, learner interactivity, computer-based assessments, and peer assessments, as well as back-end “big data” data mining of learner behaviors. MOOCs are being discussed as for-credit university courses, supplementary professional development trainings, and informal and nonformal learning opportunities. They are considered not only for adult learners but also for high schoolers and even potentially for younger age groups. For all the hopefulness that many masses around the world will have access to high-level and well designed college courses, the emergence of MOOCs has sparked a range of forecasts. Some predict that MOOCs will socialize learners around the world to a common academic culture and unleash human potential. Some predict that MOOCs are a threat to the existing higher education status quo. Others suggest that MOOCs have been overly hyped and are an unworkable passing fad. To gain a sense of the attitudes towards MOOCs and their feasibility, a modified electronic Delphi (e-Delphi) study was conducted using the Qualtrics™ survey platform (aka K-State Survey). This chapter describes the processes of setting up the modified e-Delphi study. It describes the extensive literature review undertaken for the development of the survey instrument. The writing describes the major findings from this qualitative and mixed-methods research based on both manual and NVivo-based data analysis. There is a focus on issues that may need to be addressed individually and collectively in order to rollout successful MOOCs.

Learning4Content

The world over, some common factors have contributed to the emergence and growth of open educational resources. These can be to increase access to educational materials, to reduce the costs, to enhance the quality of educational content through working collaboratively, and to be used for capacity building and research. The WikiEducator project has been the foremost initiative to turn digital divide into digital dividends through free content and open networks. WikiEducator was established on 1 May 2006, and since then, it has grown a very big network of more than 66,700 registered WikiEducators. Learning4Content is one of the flagship initiative of WikiEducator providing free training for teachers. In this chapter, the author discusses building a vibrant and sustainable global community contributing to design, development, and delivery of free content for learning and providing training to develop wiki skills for mass collaboration to create high quality learning resources.

In Plaintext

People have long gone online to groom their online identities, to communicate some aspects of themselves in the real. The information shared is purposive and strategic. Inevitably, the information is selective and incomplete. The cyber may evoke something about the physical only to a degree, in the cyber-physical confluence. In an asymmetrical information environment, those who have the most accurate and requisite information often have the advantage. It is said that much of intelligence is conducted using Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT), which suggests a need for reading between the lines of publicly released information; indeed, much of life is conducted in online public spaces. A number of tools enable the extraction and analysis of information from public sites. When used in combination, these tools may create a fairly clear sense of the online presences of various individuals or organizations or networks online for increased transparency. This chapter describes some of the tools (Maltego Radium™ and Network Overview, Discovery, and Exploration for Excel/NodeXL™) that may be used to increase the knowability of others in the creation of various profiles. This includes some light applications of “inference attacks” based on publicly available information. Further information may be captured from the Hidden Web through tools designed to crawl that understructure, and this potential is addressed a little as well.

The Power of E-Learning

Contemporary police organizations benefit from technological advances not only for preventing and fighting crime and criminals but also for training their officers for better service. Likewise, the Turkish police organization has established an e-learning portal to enable managers to attain required managerial competencies and to learn modern policing concepts in a cost-effective training environment. This research examines the perceptions of participants who attend management-training courses conducted via e-learning. Five factors of trainees’ e-learning perceptions are examined through a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods, consisting of a questionnaire, one-to-one and focus group interviews, and observation. SPSS program and quantitative methods are used to analyze and interpret the findings. Research has indicated some positive perceptions, such as place and time flexibility, enjoyment of learning, becoming acquainted with modern learning methods and technologies, being able to participate in training without leaving work and personal life. Conducting a management-training course via e-learning is positively perceived by the majority of course participants, and they recommend e-learning for upcoming management training courses, specialized training, and professional development courses. However, research has also revealed that some technical and administrative problems affect negatively the trainees’ perceptions of e-learning. Based on the findings in this chapter, recommendations are offered for similar projects.

Teacher Professional Development

The teacher as researcher analyzed and documented his own professional development during the implementation of a program aimed at improving students’ listening abilities via exposing them to podcasts and familiarizing them with metacognitive strategies. Seventeen senior high school English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners participated in this study, with a second teacher acting as a facilitator. Action research procedures were employed to investigate the researcher’s professional development, with the results indicating increases in both his Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPCK) and his teacher efficacy. The findings in this chapter have implications for English teachers tasked with teaching listening and for researchers studying the pedagogical applications of podcasts and metacognitive strategies.