Breaking Us in Two

Always liked Joe Jackson (the singer, not the baseball player, although I am pretty convinced the baseball player got a bad rap, but I digress). 

Joe the singer had a really cool song back in the day, 'Breaking Us in Two'.  I heard it the other day and Flickr - I'm Heavy Dutycoincidentally I have been thinking about a breakup of sorts, that is a breakup of my HR Technology class into two separate classes.

Currently, the class covers a wide range of topics and technologies, starting with the basics of HR Technology - 'Define ERP', progressing through the various components of Talent Management and their associated technologies, and eventually covering new trends and directions in HR Tech.  Things like the growing impact of social media in recruiting, discussions on the use of external social networking by employees, the concept of the corporate social network, and demonstration and testing of some of the technologies in that space.

Each time I give the course, the latter section about new technology and trends seems to get bigger, and since it is much more current and interesting, some of the 'older' material and concepts are starting to get squeezed out, and that really is a shame.  This quarter, I spent really not enough time on ERP and the issues and challenges inherent with ERP, did not talk about workforce scheduling and management technologies at all, and gave not nearly enough attention to Learning and Development technologies.

Even my sections on 'new tech' felt somewhat rushed, as we were fortunate to have the use of great Talent Management software from Halogen, that we spent quite a bit of class time using. Now I am at the end of class, wishing I had about three more weeks to really cover collaboration and internal social networking properly, with real software to use like Mentor Scout or SocialCast.

The remedy might be to split the current class and curriculum into two separate courses, an HR Tech Part I and Part II.  Part I would start with the basics, definitions, ERP, etc. and continue though the various components of Talent Management (recruiting, onboarding, performance, succession and comp).  Part II would then pickup with the impact of Web 2.0 on all these technologies, modern approaches to recruiting with social media, the use of external and internal social networking.  We could find a internal community platform vendor like SelectMinds to partner with the class to let the students roll out a full deployment of a mock internal social network for our class company. We'd spend time on internal use of blogs, microblogging and other new methods for company communication.

Does it make sense?  Is there really enough content and technologies to split one HR Tech Class into two?  Is this all just a shameless ploy to double my (meager) salary as an instructor?

What do you think?  Is HR Tech so big now, that 'Breaking Us in Two' makes sense?

Comments

[Nicole Dugan]

Being a student in your course this Winter, it's hard to describe in words the impact it had on me, with having absolutely no prior experience or knowledge with HR technology. I did also feel that there wasn't enough time to cover every aspect of HR technology without dragging out a 4-hour class to the point where we'd drop dead at our computers before you finished your lecture/demonstration. We already have to suffer unbearably dry lectures in other courses where we absorb maybe 25% of the content.

I would say that the 2nd half of the course was much more interactive, engaging, and fresh. It may be just a personal preference, but social networking is much more interesting than learning about the ins and outs of hefty ERP systems that can be ugly at times.

I'm just wondering about the students' interests and the program requirements. Breaking it up into 2 adds more weight to the core requirements. Maybe the first course could be an overview, and the 2nd course can be be more in depth and offered as an elective?

[Steve]

Nicole - thanks so much for you comments and observations. As you can tell from the post, know that there really is too much material at this point to cover it all adequately. I certainly want to make the course as lively and interactive and different as possible. If I did manage to get the course 'split' somehow, only one component would remain a required course I imagine, and the 'new' course would be an elective.
Anyway, thanks again for reading and for your contributions to class.