How do we define social learning?

Is it a collaborative approach? Enhanced feature sets to engage learners? Strategy tied to learning initiatives from a business standpoint?

Or is it a way to ensure that our employees and our customers see the value of  learning and its benefits?

Benefits of Social Learning

  • Gives power and provides engagement to your learners, they seek this out
  • Eliminates passive training, now you can find out what your employees are thinking, responding and inquiring about
  • Opens up an experience that can show the real impact of learning
  • Does away with instructor led training that is often non-engaging, lacks interactivity and hopes that everyone asks questions and is involved (rarely the case)
  • Enables people regardless of location, division, department to be part of something rather than nothing
  • Offers opportunities to link to job roles, skills, leadership development using tools not available before

Two types of Social Learning & Benefits

Social Q/A

  • End users ask questions, Subject matter experts respond, end users add comments
  • Unique Value Proposition- establish mentoring program, one learner to one SME (via department, division, region, etc.)

Gain?

  • Eliminates on the job training – which has been shown ineffective in the long term
  • Identifies topics that could be used for future training

Scribd & Slideshare

  • Employees or Trainers can upload presentations and share them with other learners
  • Training department or employees can create, upload, read, print or share documents, audio/video files, presentations, spreadsheets, etc.

Unique Value Proposition

  • Training Departments can provide quick reference materials, cards, video clips or presentations, audio, etc. to employees/customers and identify how many times they have been viewed, printed & shared – reduces cost to department for unnecessary future training or courses, reduces cost to department (eliminates printing/shipping), opens up global experience – which can be tied to native language (for example you have employees outside your home country)

Gain

  • Localized learning
  • Higher engagement
  • Eliminates waste
  • Identifies topics to train & topics to re-train (via blended learning or e-learning)

Bottom Line

Social Learning offers your learners, new opportunities, provides you as a training executive with future topics without the need of constant gap analysis, reduces costs in the short term and long term and identifies what your trainees need and want.

To gain a new perspective on social learning, please make sure to attend the exclusive event of the year, the Global Leadership Congress, May 9-11, 2011 in Philadelphia.  A roundtable on this topic and its strategy from a training and department angle will be presented. To learn more about the roundtable including the agenda, click Social Learning at GLC.

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