Providing Varying Degrees of Guidance for Work-Integrated Learning

We present a work-integrated learning (WIL) concept which aims at empowering employees to learn while performing their work tasks. Within three usage scenarios we introduce the APOSDLE environment which embodies the WIL concept and helps knowledge workers move fluidly along the whole spectrum of WIL activities. By doing so, they are experiencing varying degrees of learning guidance: from building awareness, over exposing knowledge structures and contextualizing cooperation, to triggering reflection and systematic competence development. Four key APOSDLE components are responsible for providing this variety of learning guidance. The challenge in their design lies in offering learning guidance without being domain-specific and without relying on manually created learning content. Our three month summative workplace evaluation within three application organizations suggests that learners prefer awarenss building functionalities and descriptive learning guidance and reveals that they benefited from it.