یادگیری و توسعه کارکنان در HRD مجازی: تمرکز بر MOOC ها در محل کار Employee learning and development in virtual HRD: focusing on MOOCs in the workplace

Employee learning in virtual HRD Technology is deeply embedded in our daily lives. Rapid technological advancements have transformed our lives within just the last few decades, including our personal and professional lives as well as the workplace environment. Instead of traditional, face-to-face interactions, it is commonplace to see people engage in global communication, connections, and collaboration with each other because of technology-enabled, virtual environments (Yelon, 2006). In addition, internet use at work has expanded from simple e-mails to being an important tool for problem-solving to complete one’s job tasks (Horrigan and Rainie, 2002). These changes will accelerate even more as the millennial generation, characterized as tech-savvy, enters the workforce. Responding to these paradigm shifts driven by technology in the workplace, the field of HRD has put substantial effort into reshaping and expanding its boundaries and horizons, and has looked for ways to facilitate and maximize development and learning opportunities within a technology-mediated environment (McWhorter, 2010). Thus, a new construct, virtual HRD, has emerged to conceptualize this phenomenon and open an area of inquiry (Bennett and McWhorter, 2014). One of the most frequently used definitions of virtual HRD is a “media-rich and culturally relevant web environment that strategically improves expertise, performance, innovation, and community-building through formal and informal learning” (Bennett, 2009, p. 364). Her definition was derived from an empirical study (Bennett, 2006) that examined how organizational culture and change are embedded in a corporation’s intranet where considerable knowledge is created and distributed. McWhorter (2011) stated that virtual HRD refers to “the process of utilizing technologically integrative environments for increasing learning capacity and optimizing individual, group, community, work process, and organizational system performance” (p. 3). Taken together, virtual HRD spotlights the virtual environment in which HRD processes operate, with an aim to create strategic, systematic synergy for workplace learning, performance enhancement, and organizational development and change (Benson et al., 2002; Yoon and Lim, 2010). Furthermore, studies have emphasized that virtual HRD should be incorporated as a subset of larger virtual human resource (HR) systems that are strategically interconnected and integrated with virtual HRM to promote a healthy ecology (Bennett and Bierema, 2010).