Projects

Informal Learning

We also conduct a series of development projects focusing on improving informal learning at the workplace. These projects are conducted within and outside the School of Business and Economics. Among them are:
 

• Projects on improving Social Inclusion through increasing Literacy Skills
• Projects on facilitating Cross-Boundary Learning
• Projects on developing Learning Platforms within Organizations & Industry

One of our most recent projects is dedicated to the design and implementation of a "Meet, Create, and Share Platform" for employees of Maastricht University. Next, we are developing large-scale interventions to improve literacy skills to improve social inclusion of vulnerable adults. It is an important step towards offering minority groups new perspectives on life. Finally, we work in close cooperation with manufacturing industry (Electro & Metal) to design (in)formal learning platforms to improve the capacity for innovation. We are also conducting a wide range of development projects which focus on improving cross-boundary learning in Health Care, Chemical Industry, Emergency Care, and Technology and Engineering. Some of these projects are conducted in close cooperation with leading consultancy firms.

Projects on developing Learning Platforms within Organisations & Industry

Old is out? Not at all! You’re “out” if you do not participate in learning anymore and that is hardly connected to your age. Instead it is linked to your ability to develop professionally. In this sense many companies are aware of the limited power of formal training programs for supporting professional development and are looking at how workplace learning (or informal learning; learning as part of your daily work) can be encouraged and supported. Informal learning means that employees in organisations learn from each other, by exchanging information, by giving feedback, and trial and error.

The goal of the “Old = out?” project is to provide organisations a basis for structurally supporting the exchange of knowledge and feedback in the workplace (two powerful components of informal learning) thereby increasing your employees’ employability. During the past months, researchers from ERD have been cross-validating a questionnaire that measures informal learning in the workplace in different sectors (medical, IT, metalektro, academic). The questionnaire was used to better understand which informal learning activities (feedback exchange, information exchange, help giving and seeking) are powerful predictors of employees’ employability. The results are the input for the development of an application that measures your employees’ informal learning, but and provides suggestions on how to optimise their informal learning in the workplace. The app is available under www.fl2i.com
 

 For more information, please contact S. Beausaert
 

How to support informal learning in the workplace?
Medical professionals have to continuously learn in their daily work to deliver high-quality health care. Ambulance staff is required to act quickly thereby ensuring and improving the quality of their work. Health care organisations are responsible for ensuring that medical staff is trained and participate in a process of continuing professional development. Formal learning activities in the form of trainings, courses and workshops are an essential parts of the work to meet these changes. However, the ambulance staff has to deal with a high variety of (emergency) situations on a daily basis. As a consequence, it becomes nearly impossible to follow the pace of changes and staying up-to-date with formal learning activities only. For example, how do you communicate with patients under time pressure? How do you prevent errors? In the above examples, sharing knowledge, insights, and experiences in daily communication are a powerful way to learn informally.

The goal of this project is to develop a tool that structurally implements informal learning in the workplace to support employee’s employability. For this project we work together with the ambulance services in the Netherlands.

 For more information, please contact S. Beausaert

Moving Audit Teams Forward: Designing Firm Environments for Sustainable Learning From Errors

Start date: September 1, 2016
End date: January 1, 2020

Recent reports by inspection bodies (AFM, IFIAR) consistently emphasize that audit firms need to do more to understand and address shortfalls in audit quality. They indicate the error climate as one of the root-causes for insufficient audit quality: “The Dutch Authority for the Financial Markets expects effectiveness of any other measure depends on the degree to which audit firms are able to develop a quality-oriented culture” (AFM, 2015).

This study will specifically address the factor learning as a missing link in current audit research between the well-researched relationship between human capital (abilities, and experience) as inputs and judgment quality as output. This study will use essential insights from learning science research on health care, aviation, and engineering to improve auditor’s learning from errors embedded in audit engagements.

Research in comparable professional environments (such as health care) has consistently shown that errors are seldom caused by the individual professional, but are often the result of complex social interactions within the professional team. The present research proposal will therefore focus on the social interactions within and between audit teams, to disentangle the spurious relationships between human capital as the essential input factor and audit judgments as the output factor. In particular, it is crucial to understand the conditions which enable auditors to learn from error, instead of just addressing the report without learning from for audit engagements. Current research on the link between human capital and judgment quality has provided inconsistent results between experience and audit judgments. It shows that experience is a necessary yet insufficient condition for high-quality audit judgments. However, our own recent work on the relationship between judgment quality within different hierarchical levels shows that audit firms are able to significantly improve performance when auditors are able to actively learn from errors in audit experience. In one of our pilot studies we found that level of judgment accuracy differed significantly (more than 40%) when taking into account whether individual auditors had learned from prior experience or not. Given that most of the audit work is conducted in hierarchical audit teams or groups, it is essential to extend this research to the level of audit teams, and their learning behavior.

The present study will investigate the necessary conditions to provide the optimal organizational setting in the audit environment so that auditors can learn from their experience and improve audit quality.

Keywords: error management, learning from errors, learning from error climate, audit teams, audit quality

For more information, please contact W.H. Gijselaers