HUMAN LEARNING: From Learning Curves to Learning Organizations

Book excerpt: Learning plays a fundamental role in the production planning and growth of all organizations. With the need for more rapid changes in the global economy, the management of organizational change is a key factor in sustaining competitiveness in today's economy. This book has been developed with these `learning needs' in mind. Human Learning:From Learning Curves to Learning Organizations covers a broad range of learning models and related topics beginning with learning curves to recent research on learning organizations. The book's focus is to enable researchers and practitioners to forecast any organization's `learning needs' using the prediction aspects of an array of learning models. The book includes research and application discussions on topics such as accounting for previous experience; the `learning-forgetting-relearning' phenomenon; parameter estimation with no previous experience; DeJong's incompressibility model; predictive learning models requiring only two learning parameters; long learning cycle times; the speed-error relationship; evaluating the cost of learning from the point of view of safety; and an examination of Learning Organizations. Each chapter is developed from published research and worked examples are used throughout.