Engineering Peer-to-Peer Learning Processes for Generating High Quality Learning Materials

Abstract

Organizations are facing the challenge of transferring knowledge from experienced to novice employees and are seeking for solutions that avoid the loss of knowledge with retiring experts. A possible way for overcoming this challenge is having employees develop learning materials for their novice colleagues. Based on insights from both, education and collaboration research, designing structured collaborative peer-creation-processes seems a promising approach due to several reasons. Within a peer-creation-process participants are guided to knowledge acquisition, transfer as well as documentation for others. By developing learning materials through collaboration with people at different level of knowledge, e.g., the tacit knowledge of the expert gets codified and is ready for being used by novices. Furthermore, the collaborative creation will create learning effects even among participants and should further increase their knowledge, and the quality of the learning materials. Unfortunately, little research has addressed reusable didactically driven processes of systematically documenting knowledge that can be used by others as learning material. In order to bridge this gap we identify requirements from educational and collaboration literature and conceptualize educationally driven changes in the layer model of collaboration, e.g., to consider learning objectives in the goals layer or to integrate peer review as mechanisms for quality control in the procedures layer. This paper opens up a promising field for collaboration research and provides future research directions for reusable structured peer-creation-processes with focus on learning. This research-in-progress paper closes with a conceptual framework with requirements of a collaborative peer creation process.