Synapsys Blog - Getting social and collaborative learning right

Getting social and collaborative learning right

The goal of any learning initiative should be to make a difference. This difference could be increasing learners' knowledge in a subject or improving people's ability, efficiency, or satisfaction in their job. From the organisation's perspective, the value of these initiatives is seen in the extent to which this change occurs. Increasingly, organisations are seeing the value of creating opportunities for social and collaborative learning to drive this change.

Social learning techniques give learners the opportunity to apply their learning in a practical context, and gain feedback from peers and managers about how they have approached the task. It can be used to create ways for groups of learners to work collaboratively to achieve an outcome, learning from each other as they go. It can also provide a way for personal and shared reflection on their learning.

This kind of learning is less structured and formal than traditional classroom approaches, and as such it can be difficult to monitor. As a result it can be also be difficult to motivate learners unless there is transparency about the expectations and outcomes.

The challenge for an organisation is to make good choices about how they direct learners to do this, and to choose good tools for their learners. The good news is that there are a number of learning technologies that can help.

However, choosing between the many options available can seem like an impossible task. Many more organisations are making use of social networking tools such as Twitter and Yammer, and at the same time other business applications are become more social - from collaborative tools like Jive SBS and PBWorks, to CRM solutions like Salesforce.com introducing social collaboration into their services. Making the right choice, when many applications seem to offer similar capabilities, can be a difficult challenge.

From our perspective, you can succeed in this area by applying some basic principles, including:

• Get your activity design right - Focus on practical activities, using case studies and scenarios, to allow learners to apply their learning. Arrange for review by peers and supervisors, and coach them to provide constructive feedback and bring the benefit of their experience to solving a problem.


• Look at your current technologies first - If you are already using Sharepoint for collaboration, or a company intranet for peer discussion, see if you can use extend these to support social learning. Giving learners more than one place to go to discuss and share their knowledge and thinking could cause confusion and reduce the likelihood of effective engagement.


• Remove technological barriers to participation - if you need to introduce another application to handle social learning, consider how easily it integrates with your other systems. Nothing will kill collaboration faster than giving users yet another username, password and web address to remember.


• Don't forget the people - Technology doesn't create effective learning, people do. Make sure you invest in people to champion this approach, to foster and encourage learner collaboration, to facilitate involvement by managers and to ensure good quality evaluative data is gathered and reported on.


• Pilot and evaluate - Identify a small group or topic that you can use to trial these techniques. Ensure you have ways for learners to easily provide feedback. Measure the outcomes and compare it to the outcomes of other modes of delviery. All of this will be necessary evidence if you are trying to justify significant investment in people and technology to support this model.

We will be writing more on this topic in the future, including commentary on possible technology choices and examples of approaches to the design of social learning activities. In the meantime, get in touch if you'd like to talk about these concepts in more depth.