I recently read this excellent article on crowdsourcing which explores ways in which the tool is expanding in different fields. Here are five of the best examples they came up with:

1. GrouperEye: This “survival of the fittest” project was started by and for college students looking for contract gigs. Businesses post a case on GrouperEye’s website and leave it open to students to solve. The company picks the best solution, and the student who came up with the idea is paid.
2. “This Is Your Brain on the Internet” Course: In the fall of 2009, Duke University professor Cathy Davidson started a new class called “This Is Your Brain on the Internet.” It introduces students to crowdsourcing by letting them accept some of the responsibility of running the class, including grading and teaching.
3. Crowdsourcing Help Desks: IT help desks are a necessary service on college campuses, as so many students depend on their computers and Internet access to complete their school work or even attend class online. At Indiana University at Bloomington, new IT help desks began implementing crowdsourcing to alleviate the cost and pressure of having to answer so many calls. Students and professors post their IT problems on an online forum, where other students and amateur IT experts answer them.
4. SOS Classroom: This program has helped sustain the Los Angeles Unified School District’s summer school system. USC students — along with teachers and parents — designed and collected online educational materials to teach K-8 language arts and math to summer school kids. Much of the program includes volunteers.
5. National IT database in the future: Notre Dame’s Chief Technology Officer Dewitt A. Latimer hopes to engineer a national IT database — powered by crowdsourcing — in the next few years. It would be based on the success of user-generated sites like Amazon.com and Wikipedia, and if the economy can get off the ground, the Hosted Integrated Knowledge Environment Project, or Hike, could become reality.

What ways can you think of to use crowdsourcing in human resources & corporate learning? Are you using crowdsourcing in your department? If yes, how? What implications can you see for it? Share your thoughts in the comments section!

If the answer is YES, I hope you read our recent blog at Harvard Business entitled Are You Ready For Five Generations Of Workers? We stirred up quite a dialogue about how companies will adapt to having five generations in the workplace in the year 2020.

Here is what we see in our crystal ball leading up to 2020 – five generations and they include:

Traditionalists, born prior to 1946
Baby Boomers, born between 1946 and 1964
Gen X, born between 1965 and 1976
Millennials, born between 1977 and 1997
Gen 2020, born after 1997

Note: While there several reasonable cut off dates used to define the generations, we choose these as they are widely accepted and currently used in a variety of sources such Grown Up Digital by Don Tapscott.

The chart below shows Baby Boomers will cede the majority of the workforce by 2015 to the Millennials. Due to their smaller size, Gen X will not have the majority spot in the workplace — and some employers may well focus development and promotion opportunities on Millennials.

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So now I pose the question: How will having multiple generations in the workplace affect you and your learning or HR department?

Some thoughts to consider:

Recruiting New Talent: Are you sourcing the next generation of talent where they live? Rather than career fairs and job boards, does your company have a social networking strategy with a presence on Facebook a YouTube channel and a presence on Twitter?

Social Networking With Alumni: Once mainly used by professional service firms and law firms, now JP Morgan and Lockheed Martin are developing elaborate alumni social networks as a way to attract the “boomerang” employees who already know the firm and can make an instant contribution.

Mentoring: Gen Xers, Millennials and Gen 2020s will increasingly want to develop their careers in the same social and personal ways they live their lives. Expect an increased demand for mentoring and coaching as we head into 2020.

Learning & Development: Look for learning & development to become “social, personal, immediate and highly relevant to an individual’s job.” This will translate into leveraging new technologies such as corporate social networks, alternate reality games and greater use of mobile devices.

So what’s your take on dealing with multiple generations in the workplace? How will your department, your role and your skills need to change?

[tags]Five Generations at Work, Millennials, Baby Boomers, Generation X, Millennials, Gen 2020, Learning & Development, Mentoring, Alumni Networks[/tags]

I came across an interesting research report I want to share with all of you. According to Pew Research, just over half of all working adults ages 50 to 64 say they may delay their retirement – but here is the surprise: another 16% say they never expect to stop working.

See box below:

Pew calls these folks the Threshold Generation, meaning those who are perpetually on the threshold of exiting the workforce. Even those Thresholders who do plan to retire some day say they will keep working, on average, until they are age 66 — four years older than the age at which current retirees report that they stopped working. This is certainly contributing to the shifts in workforce demographics as the participation rate of those ages 65 and older has increased from 12.9% in 2000 to 16.8% in 2008.

What’s driving this commitment to continue working? The Pew Research survey finds it may not be how much you earn but how much you lost in the investment market meltdown that determines whether you are re-thinking your retirement plans, with those that have lost 40% or more of their portfolio being firmly in the Threshold Generation.

If you are the head of HR or Corporate Learning and members of the Threshold Generation are employed at your firm, here are some questions for you:

• Is your organization prepared to have an increasingly aging workforce?
• Do these Threshold Generation members have the skills their employers need to win in the marketplace? If not, are they committed to building new skills in areas such as social media literacy?
• How are these organizations preparing for managing a multiple generation workplace?

Share your thoughts here, in the comments section, via email, or send me a note on Twitter.

[tags]Threshold Generation, Multiple Generations At Work, Pew Research[/tags]

The growth of mobile devices continues; it is now estimated there are more than 3 billion mobile subscribers and this number is estimated to rise to over 4 billion by 2010. In particular, the size and growth of the Smartphone market is expanding rapidly and will exceed the laptop market for the next five years, according to a report by market research company In-Stat.

What will be the impact of this on corporate learning? Are you ready to leave your laptop home?

The recent survey of 125 heads of Human Resource and Corporate Learning conducted by New Learning Playbook blog and Human Capital Institute revealed several relevant findings:

• While 33% of organizations have a mobile learning pilot currently underway, 70% of organizations surveyed are investigating the use of mobile learning in the next 12-18 months.
• Typical areas of usage include product training, sales training and compliance training, but the overwhelming use is for on-going performance support.
• There are some issues that need to be addressed, these include diversity of hardware and software, screen size, security and a host of instructional design issues.

However, the bottom line, as profiled in this survey respondent’s view of potential of mobile learning:

“The real power of mobile learning is around the interactivity and the ability to create learning campaigns rather than learning events. And of course it is fun as well.”
-Head of Learning, Finland

So what are your views on mobile learning? Share your thoughts with me and stay tuned for the date and time of a webcast on this topic.

Back in November I first wrote about the emerging potential of iTunes University as a vehicle for learning, when Yale University Dean Joel Podolny joined the Apple team to serve as Dean of their own learning system. This past February I wrote about iTunes U once more, as new research was released which confirmed the power learning via this method as university students who listened to podcast lectures received consistently better test scores than those who didn’t.

One University in Australia, however, is taking this a step further, and is now offering college credit to high school students who watch video footage of lectures on YouTube. Professor Richard Buckland of the University of NSW in Sydney, Australia, wanted a way to allow high school students who lived too far away but were capable of handling college level programs, to actually attend Buckland’s classes by watching videos of his lectures on YouTube. Though students go through a rigorous selection procedure, if accepted, they must not only watch videos on YouTube but also hand in other work assignments in order to receive the transferable college credit which is of no cost to them. And, of course, only those accepted to the program receive the credit, but once the lectures are up on YouTube, they are freely available to be streamed by anyone.

This is another example of Open Learning–how will this impact corporate universities? Right now many companies are creating a Youtube version behind the firewall to share “how to lessons,” will taking an entire course on YouTube be next? Share your thoughts here.

[tags]YouTube, eLearning, Higher Education, Corporate University, Chief Learning Officer, Corporate Learning[/tags]