Integrating Communities of Practice with e-learning platforms to improve on-the-job-learning

In knowledge intense business processes, a complex and dynamic body of knowledge is being built bottom-up by experience learning during exception handling and problem solving. Traditional qualification programs do not very effectively provide the special skills required. Communities of Practice are better supporting this dynamic on-the-job learning across hierarchies. Still, CoP approaches and platforms in many organisations can be improved by enriching them with e-learning components to create a connection between the unstructured personalisation strategy of CoPs and the structured training materials. Similarly, e-learning benefits from being linked to communities. In the article, the connections of both areas are analysed to derive a framework for integration. It proposes an agenda of activities for the two domains people-oriented and content-oriented integration of community management and e- learning. These two aspects affect the handling, configuration and design of software features. In a first stage, the challenge is mainly a management and organisational task. Consecutively, the integration processes can be further assessed in order to identify potentials for IT-automatisation.