KNOWLEDGE ACQUISITION AND UNDERSTANDING THROUGH STUDENTS' SELF-ORGANISED LEARNING ACTIVITIES IS INDIFFERENT TO ORGANISATIONAL LEARNING

摘要

Organisational learning has attracted the attention of management researchers in practice-orientation to address the perspectives of productivity of knowledge generation and motivation in engaging people within an organization to create, implement and transfer organisational knowledge. Many management researchers have endeavoured to examine the critical factors for organisational learning. These factors include: conflict management, inquiry skills, system thinking for actionable models, single loop versus double loop learning processes, and learning in action. In recent years, some studies have also explored the roles of knowledge agents who take action for learning and contributing knowledge. The main feature of a knowledge agent is that he or she is willing to make efforts to acquire knowledge for helping an organisation achieve a business goal or solution. The autopoietic characteristics of a knowledge agent, however, may be a burden to the individual in contributing to organisational learning. The organisation, therefore, needs to provide a supportive structure and mechanism to arouse the knowledge agent's self-referential capacity for self-producing knowledge components to extend his knowledge boundary through group learning, and at the same time, make a collective decision for action. Universities, as a human capital supply institution, should prepare students with group learning abilities and collective decision-making capacity. Many educational institutions, however, look at learning as a personal intuitive process to gain knowledge and skills, and may not focus their teaching activities on preparing students for acquiring knowledge in a collective manner. Indeed, the assessment of student learning in school always reflects individual learning results only. In results, the autopoietic characteristics are magnified, but the group-learning manner is understated. Although many educational institutions increasingly promote the importance of lifelong learning and teamwork and collaborative activities to students, not many provide a real, complex and interdependent environment for students to develop their capacity for group learning, or make decisions for an organisation. In this paper, we establish the Experiential Learning Model (ELM) that integrates classroom taught knowledge with a real world situation to allow and enable students to develop skills for lifelong learning, build up the capability to make collective decisions, deepen and make concrete their knowledge and extend their ability to group learning. With the dimensions of learning process, contents, and theory versus practices, the ELM in this paper is constructed of four stages: 1. awareness of a real life issue that needs a solution; 2. use of learned knowledge to evaluate the gap between the knowledge inventory and expected knowledge for the issue; 3. implementation of knowledge; and 4. generalisation of the experience into new knowledge. The expected learning outcomes via the model are to establish for students an ability to predict problems, make better decisions for the group and make sense of signals from the environment. We introduce a case study, adopting the model of an outside classroom learning project to confirm the authenticated results of building up students' group learning abilities and collective decision-making capacity to solve legitimate, real life problems and contribute to organisational learning in their careers.