social media and learning v3

7/28/2019 Social Media and Learning v3

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Social Media and Learning A perfect match?If you were to do a survey of business professionals with one clear question What has been your most

memorable learning experience? Its very unlikely that anyone would answer that question with:

corporate training/learning event but more on a personal or social matter

The reason for that is that typical learning/training approaches within corporates are not really learner-

centric. They are typically event-based (a day or two) and driven by a facilitator. People come with

different and varying skill levels and when they finish the training they go back to their workplace/team

and struggle to implement what they have learnt, as they are in the stage of conscious competence.

This stage is characterized by experimentation and repeated failures before the person can move to the

unconscious competence stage, where learning becomes a part of doing without thinking about it.

Most training delivered fails at this crucial stage transition.

Additionally, according to a paper presented at ASTD in 2007, after two weeks of training the retention

comes down to about 10% of the training delivered.

How could social technologies help?

1. Social technologies can help in creating a community of fellow learners before they "attendtraining". This would help them to learn from each others experiences.

2. Focusing away from "competencies needed" to people sharing their expertise and strengths.3. The facilitator sharing content and theory before the training - so that face to face time could be

used for practice and feedback

4. The community of learners could be a support and ideation group when they go back to theworkplaces and implement the learning. This would help in reinforcing concepts and also

practical application which would help in retention as well as understanding the implementation

in the context of the workplace.

5. The managers could also be a part of the community to understand how better to support theirpeoples learning to be translated into the workplace.

This method not only supports the training but could reforces the key objectives helping with retention

and support pre and post the event. This would make the learning more memorable and be ultametly

much more cost effective for the organization

Examples of content that could be put together are using social media are:

Basics of the subject expertise Files, Websites, Videos, List of Books that act as aprimer for gaining knowledge

Additional Reading Material Documents that people can download List of Resources Agencies, Thought Leaders, Partners collated at oneplace. List of People (yellow pages) employees who have worked on Initiatives and how to

contact them(email, Skype, IM)


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FAQs A series of basic questions focused on what a new employee needs to know BestPractices e-books, videos, ppts.

All the above should be editable by key people, like the course facilitator and instructional

designer. In fact, the role of the facilitator changes from content creator to content curator.

Other employees can add comments and their ratings below the content.

Once people have gone through this they can be tested for their knowledge using a quiz/survey

toolacting as a feedback measure to what they have learnt. Coaches, subject matter experts

and mentors could also be asked to be available either on specified times or to answer queries

via social collaboration tools like wikis, threaded bulletin boards.

Updating new information

Whats new and up to date in the domain and what is the buzz around the firms

products/services/operations and what is the Market/Competitive Intelligence.

Keeping content dynamic by updating what is new. This can be done by the following:

RSS feeds of Google Alerts with key words around the brand name, competitor name, market

name.

RSS feeds of thought leaders blogs and websites to ensure new ideas come directly to the

employeesdesktop

Twitter updates of the whos who of subject matter so that employees can track and even

interact with them.

Using lists curation services like http://listorious.com/Competitive Intelligence A dynamic page

which is updated with news/tweets about the major competitors based on publicly available

data. Collated and shown on a specific site. The comments section would enable the employees

to add their personal experiences on what the competitor is doing in their specific insights.

New videos and Slideshows Using a keyword tracking processes, new videos and slides

updated on the specific subjects (like Financial Modelling or "Consumer Behavior" or "HR

Trends") could be embedded in the dashboard of the employees.

CollaborationEnabling employees to learn from each other using learning logs, ideation and connecting with

each other. Some ways that can be done are:

Ideation Platform: A blog/wiki in which senior management asks for ideas around acertain campaign, product on initiatives


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Status updates would let other people know what the employee is working on so thatif anyone has any ideas/lessons to share can do that via the tool.

Lessons Learnt: Similar to the ideation platform focusing on the past initiatives and whatworked and best practices learnt from them

Sharing project plans for learning projects (when part of a blended learning initiative)and getting other participants feedback on them.

Q&As with partners, senior management, consultants which are archived and after some

time can be moved into the FAQs section in the static part. Discussion around events like

conferences, trainings that some employees go to can share learnings, videos, slides with the

rest of the peer group resulting in richer and more learning.

Implication for Learning Professionals

If Learning professionals have to adapt to leverage social technologies to be more effective they have toget comfortable in new skills to become online facilitators and move from a we will build content

mindframe to we will find the best content and people and curate it along with facilitation mindset.

Understanding why people share content online and how to design interactions that help them connect

and learn together as a community is the key skill facilitators need to build. These skills are known as

community management skills in the digital realm, and L&D professionals need to transfer this offline

skill to an online skill. Its an exciting period for the L&D function, as it moves from an event-based

focus to a continuous learning focus, finally impacting the 70 and 20 percent part of the 70-20-10

model. Hopefully, when in the future professionals are surveyed about their key learning moments they

would look back and say the learning in the community facilitated by our L&D team