Intelligent Learning Extended Organizations

Intelligent Learning Extended Organization (IntelLEO) is a new paradigm in learning communities. It represents a community that emerges as a temporal integration of two or more different business and educational communities and organizational cultures (industrial, research, and educational). The concept of IntelLEO is going to be investigated in a 3-year R&D project accepted for funding within the EU Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) and starting in early 2009. The project involves 8 partner institutions from Europe (both university/research and industry) and one from Canada. This paper presents the innovative concept of IntelLEO from the business case, technical, and pedagogical perspectives. Introduction The term Intelligent Learning Extended Organization (IntelLEO) denotes a learning community emerging as a temporal integration of two or more different business and educational communities and organizational cultures. The integration happens on the grounds of common interests of the organizations/institutions involved, in terms of knowledge transfer and harmonization of interests and objectives of the organizations/institutions and their members. For example, there may be one or two companies from industry, a university, and a training institution. They may want to collaborate and share business and educational efforts through performing various vertical and horizontal learning and knowledge-building (LKB) activities. Vertical LKB activities are performed within the organizations involved, whereas horizontal LKB activities can be performed within and between the organizations (Tuomi-Gröhn and Engeström, 2003). In a learning organization based on this idea – we call it an IntelLEO organization, or just IntelLEO – learning and harmonization of individual and organizational objectives happen at different temporal collaborative knowledge-building and learning groups. In other words, the IntelLEO emerges across various boundaries, by vertical and horizontal activities of various individuals and groups involved. The responsiveness of an IntelLEO is the observable performance in which individuals are motivated to proactively learn and construct knowledge. This responsiveness can be increased if: individuals are technologically supported to participate in collaborative LKB activities across vertical and horizontal boundaries of the IntelLEO; and their personal objectives of learning and creativity are dynamically harmonized with the organizational LKB objectives of different IntelLEO counterparts. In order to support individual, collaborative, and organizational LKB activities, IntelLEO assumes a service-oriented approach/architecture (SOA) based on two kinds of services (Figure 1): services for efficient management of collaborative LKB activities and access to and supply of shared content (called LKB services); and services for harmonization of individual and organizational objectives (called harmonization services). A distinguished assumption in the IntelLEO framework is that the effectiveness of the technological support for the learners and the responsiveness of an IntelLEO is achieved by the synergy of the two kinds of services. The increase of responsiveness is defined through the learners' increased motivation to proactively learn and construct knowledge in an IntelLEO. Support harmonisation between Individual and Organisational Learning Support Collaborative LKB Activities Students Employee Instructor Employee ... ... Lecturer University Company 1 Company 2 Employee Educational Organisation Trainer