Introduction
This project is made as a problemoriented study by 3 Master students at the University in Aalborg, 3. Year and is our Master degree project with the purpose “Health Informatics from a scientific research perspective”. The subject of the project is E-learning in the municipalities of North Jutland with the employees´ perspective with special weight on their IT-competencies compared to Adopter type.
The project is based upon the project from 2.nd year, “E-læring i de nordjyske kommuner” made by Hageland, Dam, Starcke and Andersen. This project was about the leaders point of view concerning E-learning.
Method
The study is made as a triangulation by studying theory, results from a questionnaire distributed among the employees in 6 different municipalities´ elderly sections and students from the school for Social- and Sundheds-educations, 8 accommodated cognitive walkthroughs with testing an E-learning program about dementia from the National Knowledge Center for Dementia in Copenhagen and 8 interviews.
The theoretical base is “Diffusion of Innovation” by Everett Rogers regarding Adopter types, “The Design of Everyday Things” by Donald Norman regarding design and Gulfs of execution and evaluation, and Leavitt regarding organization.
We made a scoring model for Adopter types to classify the employees and students from their answers to the questionnaire.
The candidates for our accommodated cognitive walkthroughs were pointed out from the respondents of the questionnaire and are the same with whom we conducted the interviews.
The accommodated cognitive walkthroughs were recorded with Camtasia®, development on the screen and the voice from the respondent. These movies were watched through and screen cuts made for the analysis, whenever the respondent made changes not intended. The interviews were recorded with Audacity and transcribed and placed in Excel.
Results
We found, that the employees of elderly sections in the municipalities and the students from the school had marginal significant difference in the score of Adopter type. However we have more Early Adopters in both groups than expected from Everett Rogers distribution.
We found, that the higher score in Adopter type, the better the respondent could handle the design in the E-learning program.
In the municipalities the employees lack the normal group of Early Adopter, and that will make it difficult to make them adopt the innovation E-learning. It will only become a success if the leaders commit the employees to the process of working with E-learning.
We found, that the employees and student work fine with computer and internet, if they find a relative advantage of use in their daily living.
We conclude, that it should be possible to implement E-learning in the elderly sections in the municipalities, because the employees and coming employees are comfortable with information technology.
We found, that a good design is important for the success of implementation of E-learning. Features must be consistent and show a clear and obvious interface.
We conclude, that the physical environment must be thought of, i.e. a quite working space in an office.
Discussion
We consider that the Adopter type and the IT-competencies can be set almost equal as a measure before implementing a new technology as E-learning. To solve this, we try to uncover IT-competencies in several ways. Through questionnaire and cognitive walkthroughs, where we especially discover the ability to work with E-learning and register the Adopter type looking at the types of mistakes made in the process, we work us towards this connection.
We discuss the demands of the surrounding world towards the employees in the elderly section in municipalities, and try to find out, how they can get an easy way to get new knowledge, when the municipality is supposed to save money and staff. We discuss the importance of a quiet office and good computer equipment and setting aside time for these task. We find that this is a very important signal from the leaders to their employees.