Social learning is already happening in your organisation. If you’re responsible for good learning design in your business, you need to be aware of its potential, and provide an environment in which social learning can flourish, through tools, behaviours, and effective blended learning design. Ahead of our guide on the subject, here are some pointers for using social in your learning designs.
Social Learning – the water cooler – has always been there. But technology has helped it to scale. Social learning tools and technology have matured as a response to the modern workplace. Learners are under increasing pressure to problem solve rapidly, work more collaboratively at scale across distances, and do it all without the opportunity cost of lots of formal learning. It’s up to the learning professional to respond to these needs, and create the potential social learning as part of blended experiences. There’s no one right answer or way.
Here’s model for Scaffolded Social Learning: it’s a framework for blended learning design that lets us utilise both formal and social elements, to ensure deeper integration.
There are two components: social, co-creative community spaces and formal gateways that sit between them.
The formal spaces (represented by the block) may be a piece of eLearning that you signpost to, an external link or article, a book or paper, a podcast or video. This is the ‘10%.’The messaging and story of the formal elements is owned by the organisation. It’s formally commissioned. The role of the individual is to complete the learning.
The co-creative and community spaces (represented by the spheres) may be a shared case study, personal narrative, co-created conversation, collaborative exercise or simulation. This is the 70 and 20%.The messaging and story is owned by the community. It’s here that learners react to the formal learning, discuss and dissect it, apply and react to it. It’s the role of the organisation to facilitate the conversations and support them with the right permissions, spaces and resources.
As learning professionals, as you build up a learning experience using this approach, you are providing the scaffolding for learning to take place, using the best parts of the formal narrative and the best parts of the social, co-creative narrative. You can use the formal spaces, the blocks, for assessments and ‘push’ learning, then use the social parts, the spheres, for the collaborative and creative parts. Here’s how.
Within online communities, we see co-creative processes at work. Co-creation is the process of interaction that takes place in shared spaces, but it’s more than just arguing about things: we can see distinct activities taking place and, by understanding what these activities are, we can structure Social Learning to take advantage of this within our blended learning designs.
These are the seven traits of co-creation:
People offer CHALLENGE to others, providing feedback on what we feel and why we feel it.
The community can provide TEMPO, maintaining momentum in conversations and learning.
We build SHARED VISION of a subject, a shared understanding, built through the conversations and reinforcement.
Communities can provide space for REFLECTION, both internally and into the community through the stories we share.
Alongside the shared vision of a subject, we build SHARED VALUES, particularly around subjects like management, leadership or responsibility. Communities allow us to rehearse views.
We can REFINE our understanding, iteratively. Much of the Social Age is about iteration.
Finally, we can EDIT our language as we rehearse and refine our understanding.
The end result is that we build our own vocabulary and understanding around learning. We can support this by providing spaces and activities that achieve each of these things.
As part of the new socially-powered blended learning models, we expect to see widespread collaboration: the behaviours that we see are those of CO-CREATION and SHARING. We can view collaboration through two frames: organised and emergent.
In an organised framework, we assemble the groups (externally moderated collaboration) and set them tasks, so we are providing both the structure and narrative for them to work around.
In an emergent framework (internally moderated collaboration), the community is emergent, often around a specific shared interest or problems, location or time, and they choose both their space and purpose, as well as the narrative of their learning. We in the learning community don’t manage or organise it.
In other words, organised collaboration has a set community, purpose and duration whilst emergent collaboration sets its own. As learning designers, the way we facilitate both of these needs to be different, so it’s a more nuanced view than simply trying to generate engagement.
Example: Organised collaboration as part of formal blend
A professional services firm designed a formal elearning programme on diversity and inclusion
The elearning included video ‘episodes’ portraying challenging situations
A community space to discuss the situations was set up and learners were invited to answer specific questions: ‘who was in the right in this situation?’ ‘what would you have done?’
Links to supporting resources were embedded in the community space
An expert moderator supported the discussions
Summaries of the discussions were curated and posted as blogs
Learning Designers: Time to Get Social
Social learning plays a vital role in supporting formal blended learning programmes: it enables the 70/20 of the learning mix. Learning professionals need to create the conditions and environment that enables social learning. Tools like Totara Social can empower this through a range of collaboration and co-creation features. They can drive activity, building on formal learning, and help teams to create outputs and transfer learning into the workplace.
Find out more about how Totara Social can enable this: contact us.