More on the group assignment …

On Monday (17/09) night we had an online group meeting via msn and we discussed what we have found so far, sharing links to sources we found worthwhile. We also recapped our approach to the assignment and with each of us feeling quite unsure we decided to email Mark to put our worries at ease. I think that this assignment is overwhelming us because there is so many things to consider such as if the group is on the same page, finding good quality resources, blogging about the process, making sure that we don’t repeat each other and so on. The email we sent out contained the following information:

We refined out topic to “How generational gaps in the workforce are affecting e-learning program design”

Our approach to this question as we have discussed was this…

There are five members in the group and so we thought of splitting the workload into four areas:
1. The first is the blurb in which we will be describing the generational gaps – characteristics and so forth and touching on concepts of digital
natives/immigrants, we are also thinking of including a few statistics in this area as well
2. One person will look at the literature around generational gaps and how they affect organisations, in particular why this would affect e-learning program design
3. Two people will work on one local case study of an organisation to exemplify what the second section was about – which we would then split into discussions of why they chose to have a separate training program for younger workers and one for older workers. HOWEVER if we find that they use the same program for both we were thinking of looking at reasons for/against that decision.
4. Two people will do the same as the previous section but will focus on an international case study

Mark was helpful in his response to our email directing us towards two readings about the generational gaps so that we could better define the categories of workers we were talking about and search for case studies. Further he confirmed that we needed to do a case study each and so we have decided to incorporate the second component into the blurb. We are now working independently selecting and writing up our own case studies however we continue to seek each other’s help and advice.

The two readings directed to us by Mark can be accessed via the links below:

http://www.fdu.edu/newspubs/magazine/05ws/generations.htm
http://www.elearningguild.com/assets/files/14/eid05_-_403_-_pellegrini__lynch.pdf