Applying a formalized context to inspire people to develop transferable descriptions of knowledge

Knowledge about competent behaviour is harder to transfer than the type of knowledge that is examined at universities. We describe an efficient approach for promoting the knowledge transfer and examination of a certain type of knowledge, i.e. the type of competence needed to do some non-trivial work. The approach is based on the use of non-experts. We replace the need for experts by allowing non-experts to use designed dramatized stories that contain instructions for how to classify the learner’s behaviour when they perform role plays in reaction to the stories. Promoting knowledge transfer and measuring learning effectiveness and competence improvement of a learner is even more important in SMEs as work places, because of the typical scarcity of resources. In project management situations, the learning process rarely is structured by design and the success of this process is rarely measured at all except by success or failure of the project itself. By comparison, this is a little like judging the success of a fitness program by survival or death of the participants—not a prudent use of resources or the passion typically at play in work-related learning situations. The role playing used for training professionals is based on user stories. The stories contain a description of a specific problem situation and instructions for interpreting trainee reactions to this situation. To design the instructions for how to evaluate competence is difficult, since the context in which the competence is evaluated must be very distinct to allow for the non-expert to be able to interpret trainee behaviour. The story telling context and role playing approach have been tested both at university courses and in workplace training in small en medium sized enterprises (SME’s). During five years of designing the approach for training at university courses we have iteratively tested strategies for measuring the competence of learners by confronting them with problems that should to be solved instantly. From the results of the performance of the students we gradually learned what type of stories could be reused in the courses. The role playing training were usually done in a setting in which the student was confronting another role playing students while being judged by a third student. To enable the judging student to make a relevant and useful judgment, he or she was given a very strict classification scheme from which to analyse and grade the behaviour of the measured student. The instant feedback from the judging student was used throughout the training process and also for the final examination done by the teachers. For the past year, we have also studied IT-related training in SMEs with special attention to a possible improvement of the framework of tools available to trainers. Though these trainers, who were usually working as consultants on the IT systems they were training, were experts, the improvement of the training programme at large and the evaluation of the training success is in the hands of non-experts.