Peer Review

The Flexible Workplace: A Manager's Guide to Flexibility

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Reviewed:: Feb 27, 2018 by Business

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Ratings

Overall Rating:

Content Quality:

Effectiveness:

Ease of Use:

Overview:: From Work & Family Connection: these Web-based electronic courses provide tutorials on navigating work and workplace options, based on a dual agenda that meets business goals but also allows employees to meet their personal responsibilities, through consulting service and training assistance. Work-Life Clearinghouse is the world’s largest online database of best practices in work-life, available and searchable by key words. Formal and comprehensive onsite and online training or consulting incurs cost.
Type of Material:: Tutorial
Recommended Uses:: individual self-paced training and organizational-level training program. This can also be used for elements of homework, lecture, and class discussion or activities.
Technical Requirements:: Internet Browser Firefox version 52.0.1 (64-bit) and Flash
Identify Major Learning Goals:: The purpose of this portal is to provide web-based online training and onsite training. It is based on meeting business goals and allowing employees to meet their personal responsibilities through consulting and training support. Learners or users of these services are provided with a flexible, mobile and online based training support designed to be user friendly, cost effective and convenient.
Target Student Population:: First and second-year college education, managers, supervisory staff and interested employees at local and global level.
Prerequisite Knowledge or Skills:: Computer skills for online training programs which includes working knowledge to navigate the Internet and web pages in general. A basic knowledge on managerial function and workplace setup, demands and dynamics.

Content Quality

Rating:
Strengths:: The material has information that is relevant to employees and professionals in the workplace. The web portal is clear, concise, provide a complete demonstration of core and related concepts; information provided is accurate and adequate, easily applicable in different contexts. The material can be used to supplement organizational on-boarding processes, such as answering questions about workplace options of which employees may not be aware. There are several tutorials to choose from the teach the objectives of the website.
Concerns:: Information provided is ambiguously supported by research and lacks contemporary relevance. Concepts are not well integrated or summarized and are not self-contained as far as assignment and context are required. Some of the pages locked up when navigating back and forth. Annoying advertising pop-ups appeared when visiting some of the web-pages.

Potential Effectiveness as a Teaching Tool

Rating:
Strengths:: Good source of brief supplemental material for human resource personnel to share with employees. The learning material is not full of technical jargon and is easy to read and follow. The resource center has links to articles that expound more on the topics. All WFC Resources e-courses can be stored either on personal/company server or on a special page on WFC server that is available by password to assigned employees only. The courses are SCORM/AICC compliant and can be added to existing learning management system (LMS).
Concerns:: Concepts are compartmentalized, and relationship between concepts lacks coherence. Integration into curriculum assignments will be a challenge indeed due to arbitrary concept development, in addition to learning inefficiency and the difficulty to measure learning outcomes. There are no assessments to determine if students gained knowledge about the tutorials. There should be a page specifically outlining the purpose of the tutorials. When visiting the web-site, there was nothing indicating costs of courses offered.

Ease of Use for Both Students and Faculty

Rating:
Strengths:: The website is user friendly and visually appealing. It is not too busy and there is nothing distracting.The web-page layout is simple yet not too basic that readers lose interest. The overall graphics and pictures on the landing page were of high quality. The web-based resources are easy to use and quite engaging.
Concerns:: Instructions given are not fully clear since it is non-interactive; design is of mediocre quality and visually unappealing; accessibility is limited (except for free resources; app format availability is ambiguous, apart from website only available in the form of Social Media, i.e. Facebook. There is a concern that ADA readers may not be able to read some of the fonts as some of the material has very small font sizes. There are no links within the resources to other resources within the tutorials. The reviewer tried accessing the web-site on an android tablet and had trouble uploading some of the web-pages.

Other Issues and Comments:: This is a simple and easy to use resource for learning about workplace options but resource material needs to be updated for more contemporary applications and relevance.
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