Question

President Cyril Ramaphosa officially opened and addressed the first 4th Industrial Revolution SA - Digital Economy Summit. The Summit was hosted by the 4th Industrial Revolution South Africa partnership (4IRSA), an alliance between partners from the public and private sectors, academia and civil society. The 4IRSA partnership seeks to develop Human Resource practices that will enhance training and development in South Africa. Furthermore, the summit presented plans to develop training procedures that will be inclusive, coherent and responsive to the 4IR in the country. The president was quoted saying "Training programmes must allow learner's to be evaluated in the workplace after a period of approximately 6 months to determine whether their performance has improved and whether these improvements contributed to the achievement of objectives".

Use the statement above to identify the training level of needs the summit intended to highlight as well as the evaluation method the President suggested during the summit. Furthermore, briefly analyse the potential impact of the 4IR on the following classrooms.

 Interactive television classroom

 Distance learning

 Computer based training (20)

Answer 1

The training need analysis in the given case is being done on an organizational level. The 4IRSA has been developed with the objective of enhancing the training and development domain, all over South Africa. 4IRSA has also committed to come up with training and procedures which will facilitate the assimilation of the 4th Industrial Revolution in the region. The need analysis as well as the training interventions are being planned at mass level and the objective is to bring a change in the disposition of entire South African society.

The President understands the criticality of training evaluation and hence is suggesting that it must be done at the individual level. This will help in assessing the training level of the learner more comprehensively. Moreover the evaluation must be conducted every 6 months. This will help in training the learning and training effectiveness more concretely. The analysis of the training evaluation will help in identifying the training loopholes and the organization can come up with improved interventions so as to facilitate the overall learning and training process.

The potential impact of the 4th Industrial Revolution (4IR) on the following:

· Interactive television classroom: 4IR can increase the overall interaction level in these classrooms. Use of bots and robots will help in enhancing the overall interaction level and effectiveness of these classroom programs. The robots can be programmed to illustrate the application of concepts in real life. This will be more impactful for the participants and increase their overall learnability.

· Distance learning: Distance learning programs can become monotonous. To break the same, 4IR can integrate Artificial Intelligence in the distance learning programs. AI will assess the participants energy and enthusiasm level and accordingly suggest the content which must be taken for the day. Level of interaction can also be increased.

· Computer based training: Use of AI and gamification can make the computer based learning quite impactful. Gamification of content helps in maintaining the interest level of millennials in the training program. AI will help in making the overall program quite interactive and impactful.