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How employers take their workers beyond a transient university skill set

An interview with IGI Global Editor Dr. Shalin Hai-Jew

By IGI Global on Feb 26, 2014
Contributed by Kristen Stauffer, Library Relations Coordinator

Lifelong learning can occur both in and out of the classroom, but the most valuable instruction takes place on the job. On the job experience often happens as you go, picking up new skills with each new project, but just as often, many work-places offer training to their employees through Web-based delivery. In that spirit, remote workforce training is utilized to prepare people for today’s work with challenging and dynamic skill sets.

Remote Workforce Training: Effective Technologies and Strategies The new February 2014 title, Remote Workforce Training: Effective Technologies and Strategies, edited by Dr. Shalin Hai-Jew, (Instructional Designer at Kansas State University), covers this very topic.

Dr. Hai-Jew recently took a moment to talk with Kristen Stauffer, IGI Global's Library Relations Coordinator, discussing the inspiration behind her most recent publication and giving a preview of her upcoming presentation at Sloan-C’s 7th Annual International Symposium on Emerging Technologies for Online Learning in April:

What inspired you to explore the course-design strategy involved with “on the job” training?

What inspired the prospectus for this text was just the fact that a lot of what I do on a daily basis is work on training materials and online courses for professionals in the workplace. I work as an instructional designer at Kansas State University. As a short backstory, I was a tenured professor at Shoreline Community College in Washington State when I left it all to pursue instructional design work in Manhattan, Kansas. I left what one administrator called a “million dollar” job with guaranteed work and much higher pay than I’m making here because of an inexplicable fascination with various technologies used in the field. I still remember the moment my then-supervisor handed me a laptop with every technology I ever wanted. That was in 2006! This is all to say that my inspirations are all part of my interests that have evolved over time. My work with online learning goes back to the 1990s…when I worked to develop online learning in colleges and also served as a faculty fellow at an aerospace company to develop online trainings. Remote Workforce Training: Effective Technologies and Strategies brings together a lot of long-time interests.

Did you finish this project with a different set of results than you might have expected going into it?

That is a very astute question. In a way, a conceptualized edited book is a bit like a hypothesis and a hope. It’s an invitation for professionals in the field to conduct and share their research in a formalized way. While this invitation goes out to literally thousands, of those, only a handful will express interest, and of those, only a smaller percentage will follow through with the work. Those works have to go through rigorous double-blind peer review. Ideally, the works that have come this far will “make.” Not all do. In other words, there is a pretty tough standard to get a work to publication. There are not only factors with a diminishing pipeline of potential works from the editorial end. On the side of the researchers and authors, they also have a lot of issues. They have to have the right work context to do this work. They have to have access to the tools of research and the training to set up the research and to analyze it. They have to have the inspiration to conduct the work and the good will to participate in an open and competitive context. This process is rife with all sorts of what-ifs and dependencies. Every edited text is a product of its own context. Many might be surprised to realize that such a book takes about a year to bring together…and that’s not counting all the production work that follows.

Remote Workforce… does offer a wide range of works from various workplace contexts. It captures some of the latest potentials of massive open online courses (MOOCs) and fresh methods for certifying professional learning from various contexts. There are works analyzing occupational trainee satisfaction with various training projects. One chapter deals with training endeavors involving isolated regions of Australia. Another addresses a training project used with the Turkish police. One work highlights remote training efforts used with cooperative extension endeavors in the U.S. Another deals with a MOOC taught by its core instructor using a wiki and other technologies. There is a broad and contemporaneous sampling of what is occurring in the world. There are design models for building compliance trainings. There is a chapter on strategically deploying workplace e-learning.

Have to say, I love the topic of this book, because workforce training is such an important part of company success. What are some of the lessons or insights you hope readers will take away from this new title?

Some of the lessons that readers might take away from this book would be that there are many innovative ways to design, deliver, assess, and evolve remote workforce trainings. We have more technologies available now than ever. More is known now about human perception and cognition and how to engage the full person in training. There are so many practical endeavors that can benefit this work.

Looking forward to spring, what is the focus of your presentation at Sloan-C this coming April? What are some examples of how to use the software you are exploring now?

Thanks for asking! I’ll be presenting at The Sloan-C’s 7th Annual International Symposium on Emerging Technologies for Online Learning, which is slated for April 9 – 11, 2014, in Dallas, Texas. My presentation is on “Setting Up a Qualitative or Mixed Methods Research Project in NVivo to Code and Analyze Data.”

How do I use NVivo? I’ve used the software itself on a number of qualitative and mixed methods research projects. The most involved project related to a modified e-Delphi study on massive open online courses. There have been literature reviews that I’ve conducted using NVivo. As I user, I tend to have one foot in more manual coding methods and one foot in using this technology to help manage and support the data analysis. I’m pretty efficient and fast with the range of tech tools that I use on a daily basis. Also, I use the related NCapture for all sorts of social media data extractions.

By nature, I tend to try to over-learn any tool…even if it takes years to fully acquire. In this case, I started learning NVivo about a year and a half ago…and I still have yet to try autocoding and to use matrix analysis in any depth. This is a tool that will likely require lots and lots of years to fully learn, and then, there are so many qualitative and mixed methods approaches that may be used. My sense is that I have maybe only used this tool to about 1 percent of capabilities. This is a tool which requires that the user “bring it.” I know the fundamentals, but in terms of being an actual virtuoso, I’m many years away from that…but I hope to truly master this one day.

I’ll have an ulterior motive going for the next research projects to see how I can try out these other features. In my work, whatever I can learn about almost any technology tool eventually comes in handy on a project. When I learn any tool, it’s ultimately for practical reasons. I’m presenting essentially because my supervisors thought it was time to push me out into the world to a conference to learn, and I sent in a proposal on a lark, and it got accepted. The microsite that I’m using for my presentation is available at http://www.k-state.edu/ID/QualMixedNVivo10/ if anyone is interested. This is a work in progress.


Shalin Hai-Jew works as an instructional designer at Kansas State University (K-State); she teaches from a distance for WashingtonOnline (WAOL). She has taught at the university and college levels for many years (including four years in the People’s Republic of China) and was tenured at Shoreline Community College but left tenure to pursue instructional design work. She has Bachelor’s degrees in English and psychology, a Master’s degree in Creative Writing from the University of Washington (Hugh Paradise Scholar), and an Ed.D in Educational Leadership with a focus on public administration from Seattle University (where she was a Morford Scholar). She reviews for several publications — Educause Review Online and MERLOT’s Journal of Online Learning and Teaching, and is editor of several IGI Global titles, including Remote Workforce Training: Effective Technologies and Strategies, released in February 2014. She is currently editing a text on innovations in multimedia presentations (https://www.igi-global.com/publish/call-for-papers/call-details/1120) and the hidden Web (https://www.igi-global.com/publish/call-for-papers/call-details/1158). Dr. Hai-Jew was born in Huntsville, Alabama, in the U.S.
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