Apps have taken over our world, haven’t they? We’re “App-ing” our way to most things we do today – hiring a cab, booking a movie ticket, buying grocery and so on. If learning isn’t on this list, something’s definitely missing.
You’ve got to be giving your learners Learning Apps and make the most of their instinct to reach out to their mobile devices for all their learning needs.
Through Learning Apps, you can give them the flexibility to learn when THEY want to – offline or online, from any location.
Learning Apps can be used to great effect to help learners pace their learning and do their convenience a world of good.
You can also use Learning Apps to provide learners with “just-in-time” help and on-the-job support to bring about application of learning.
What’s more, the concept of Learning Apps resonates well with the modern-day learner population (especially millennials)!
Need more insights on how you can “tap” into the potential of Learning Apps to add punch to your Corporate Training initiatives? Check out our Online Portfolio or schedule a call with our Solution Architecting Team. Check out these resources:
While the concept of content chunking to create short training has been there for decades, microlearning is the flavor of the season and for several good reasons. This article addresses 15 questions on microlearning covering its definition, benefits, usage, impact, and why you should adopt it.
Why Adopt Microlearning? What Is The Relevance Of Microlearning Today And Why Is It The Flavor Of The Season?
We live in a world full of distractions and dwindling attention spans. Both these raise questions on how your learning strategy should be updated to offset these challenges. Let’s take a look at this and some of the related facets more closely to determine what approach would offset these.
Challenge 1: Limited Attention Spans
The proponents of the 90/20/8 rule have made interesting observations about human attention spans. According to them:
People are completely alert and attentive in the first 8 minutes.
Once 20 minutes go by, the attention level starts showing a dip.
Once they hit the 60-120 minute range, the alertness level completely drops.
Challenge 2: Dwindling Attention Spans
If the findings of a study by Microsoft are to be believed, the human attention span (8 seconds) is lesser than that of a goldfish (9 seconds).
Challenge 3: The Forgetting Curve
Then there’s the “Forgetting curve” too that postulates that we forget nearly 80% of what we learn in 30 days if there is no reinforcement. These three challenges are very real and need to be addressed for learning to be sticky, easy to apply on the job, and show a demonstrable gain that businesses want to see. Let us see how microlearning can come to your rescue:
To begin with, you can use microlearning to supplement your formal training. This way, you can ensure that the reinforcement provided in the form of Microlearning helps learners retain the learning you offered them through the formal training.
A key feature of Microlearning is that it is short and learners would usually finish going through a Microlearning nugget within a 3 to 5 minute window. This way, it helps you negate the impact of the “Forgetting Curve” and offset the attention span challenge.
Short trainings then translate into faster completions, thereby fetching you better completion rates. There’s plenty more to Microlearning and the series of questions and answers that follows will help unravel each of these aspects one after the other.
In this article, through a series of questions and answers, I show how microlearning can come to your rescue. The 15 questions are logically grouped as:
Microlearning basics.
Microlearning benefits.
Application of microlearning.
Design and deployment of microlearning.
Impact of microlearning.
Part 1: Microlearning Basics
Q1. What is microlearning?
As the name suggests, microlearning is learning in micro bites. It is a short learning nugget that a learner would usually complete between 2 to 5 minutes to achieve a specific learning objective. While microlearning nuggets can be used for both formal and informal learning, they are used more often for just-in-time learning purposes (as Performance Support Tools). They offer multi-device compatibility and appeal to learners because of the rich media format usage.
Q2. What is not microlearning?
Microlearning is not just breaking down a 10-hour training into small pieces. It’s an action-oriented approach of offering bite-sized learning that gets learners to learn, act, and practice. The ideal way to go about creating microlearning nuggets is to identify the larger learning objective and then drill down at micro levels.
Q3. Microlearning sounds a lot like Just-In-Time learning of the past. What are the differences?
Just-In-Time learning is normally associated with the concept of Performance Support rendered through Performance Support Tools or PSTs.
They are typically designed to address a definite learner need or a specific problem.
They are normally not tracked by Learning Management Systems and are designed to support the formal training (tracked by LMSs).
They are almost always embedded in the learner’s work-flow. In other words, they are used for informal training. PSTs use microlearning-based formats.
Microlearning nuggets on the other hand are short training nuggets that address a specific learning outcome. They can be used to provide both formal training as well as Performance Support or informal training. They can also be used to support ILT/VILT sessions.
Q4. How micro can you go with microlearning?
The idea behind creating effective microlearning nuggets is to keep them as crisp as possible while ensuring that they are long enough to adequately cover a learning objective. While there’s no perfect length as such for microlearning, ideally they should be: 1. Easy to internalize. They should be short enough for learners to consume them easily in one go. 2. Available to learners precisely at the time of their need. The microlearning experience should be such that it helps learners on the job at the moment of their need. 3. Designed to enable learners to act and practice. The microlearning experience should be action-oriented and help learners practice what they’re learning.
Part 2: Microlearning Benefits
Q5. How does microlearning empower learners?
With microlearning, learners get a chance to apply their learning as they are doing their work. The transfer of information happens at a desired level and at the learners’ own pace. Besides, microlearning empowers learners in the following ways:
It provides them with the flexibility to learn on any device, whenever they want to.
It avoids them the hassles of logging in to a Learning Management System and then going about their learning.
It provides them access to the learning material within their workflow.
Q6. What are the benefits to the learners?
The key benefits of microlearning from the learners’ perspective are: 1. Learner-centric. Microlearning nuggets can be embedded in a learning path in a flexible way, letting learners choose what they want to learn and when on the device of their choice. They also help address the different learning styles and preferences that learners have and bring in an element of personalization in the learning. 2. Just-in-time. Microlearning nuggets make great Performance Support Tools (PSTs) to help learners apply the learning precisely at the moment of their need. 3. Accessible. With every passing day, learners are getting more access to mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones. Microlearning nuggets can be easily made available to learners on the device of their choice. 4. Rich media. Learners today are used to viewing pieces of information in various rich media formats. The flexibility microlearning offers in this regard helps meet learners’ expectations to have an engaging experience. 5. Less time consuming. Microlearning nuggets can be completed quickly. The learning as a result is more effective and beneficial for learners.
Q7. What are the benefits for business?
The key benefits of microlearning for the business are: 1. Affordable and agile. Organizations need not spend a bomb on microlearning nuggets. Studies reveal that organizations end up bringing down the development cost by 50% with microlearning at a development speed of +300%. 2. Shorter development cycle. As microlearning nuggets are short, it doesn’t take long to build them. This short development cycle results in lesser expenditure and a quicker turnaround time for organizations. 3. Easy to update. The short turnaround time factor comes into play in case of updates to be made to the nuggets as well. As they are short, it doesn’t take long to fix/update them, thereby providing organizations with an obvious advantage. 4. Wider application. You can use microlearning for both formal and informal training needs. They offer you the flexibility to use them as Performance Support Tools (PSTs), as standalone learning nuggets or as part of a series of courses. You can also offer them through an LMS or integrate them in the learning path of a learning portal. 5. High impact. As microlearning nuggets help achieve a specific learning objective, they help create a high impact as learners get to learn exactly what they needed.
Q8. Why is microlearning gaining momentum?
Some of the reasons why microlearning-based training is gaining momentum are:
You can develop and update microlearning nuggets quickly.
The flexibility to use them for both formal and informal training needs.
It results in higher completion rates and higher impact.
It is perfect for learners with low attention spans.
It finds takers in the millennial generation and other learner profiles.
Part 3: Application Of Microlearning
Q9. Is microlearning relevant only for the millennial workforce?
Microlearning nuggets are designed in a way that appeal to Millennials. However, their appeal extends beyond the millennial generation and they find takers in all learner profiles as they:
Save learners’ time and offer them the advantage of completing the learning quickly.
Offset the challenge of dwindling attention spans.
Can be taken on the device of learners’ choice.
Need not be taken through a Learning Management System.
Can be made available within the learners’ workflow.
Q10. How can you use microlearning in corporate training?
You can use microlearning for varied corporate training needs, including:
Formal training.
As a supplement to formal training.
To supplement/reinforce online and ILT trainings (pre and post).
As just-in-time learning aids.
Q11. When should you not use microlearning?
Microlearning may not work in a few situations where the training program at hand is too complex and where it makes more sense to present the training as a single larger learning unit. Otherwise, microlearning can be applied to almost all training programs in the form of standalone nuggets or as a series of nuggets threaded in a learning path. Their widest adoption continues to be as Performance Support Tools or PSTs (just-in-time leaning aids).
Part 4: Design And Deployment Of Microlearning
Q12. How should the microlearning be designed?
You can go about designing an effective microlearning experience by following the given steps: Step 1: Create the “Master Learning Blueprint” for your course and define the learning goals. Step 2: Craft the “learning path”. You need to then convert your master learning goal into a series of nuggets. As and when your learners complete each nugget, they would get one step closer to achieving the larger learning goals. Step 3: Scheduling the learning path/learning journey. Get your learners to complete these milestones everyday or based on their convenient time. This way, you can help learners reinforce the learning and practice what they have learned along the way.
Q13. What are the formats in which microlearning can be deployed?
Today, you can take a pick from several engaging and innovative formats. All of these are multi-device formats (supported on desktops/laptops as well as Ttblets and Ssmartphones). You can pick a particular format based on the nature of content and how it should be applied. At EI Design, we use most of the popular formats shown here to create engaging microlearning nuggets for formal learning, Performance Support as well as to supplement ILT sessions.
Interactive parallax based scrolling.
Mobile apps.
Short videos.
Interactive videos.
Whiteboard animations.
Kinetic text based animations.
Complex branching scenario based simulations.
Infographics.
eBooks and flipbooks.
iPDFs (interactive PDFs).
Part 5: Impact And What More Is Possible
Q14. Can microlearning impact the ROI?
Any learning strategy that can impact Recall, Retention, and Application will be able to demonstrate a positive impact on the ROI. As we have seen so far, microlearning approaches appeal to the learners, lead to high completion rates, and package information that can be applied precisely at the time of need. Designed to meet the mandates of knowledge acquisition, application, and behavioral change, microlearning-based training will establish a clear value for the business and ROI. Let’s take a look at the impact on ROI that microlearning creates in the light of Kirkpatrick’s model of evaluation.
Kirkpatrick’s model of evaluationMicrolearning impacts Levels 1 and 2 directly. As a derived gain, it would impact Levels 3 and 4, thereby resulting in a positive ROI on training.
Q15. What more is possible?
As I have shown earlier, you can opt for a variety of interesting formats (mapping to your content). Additionally, you can enrich the microlearning experience by using it in conjunction with other approaches such as:
Gamification.
Social Learning.
Personalization.
You can take a look at this video of our Webinar on How You Can Use Microlearning To Improve ROI for a comprehensive view of microlearning and how it can help enhance your ROI.
I hope this article answers your questions on microlearning and why it makes sense to adopt microlearning based training in your learning strategy. If you have any queries, do contact me at apandey@eidesign.net. Also Read:
Of late, there has been a surge in mLearning or mobile learning, triggering the need to migrate the existing, legacy Flash courses to HTML5. This article provides tips for effective Flash to HTML5 migration and insights on how you can use this opportunity to step up the learning experience.
7 Tips For Successful Flash To HTML5 Migration
The need and the challenge: The use of mLearning or mobile learning for corporate training has seen a significant increase in adoption in the last 5-6 years globally and if numbers are anything to go by, its usage is only going to increase.
Check this out:
Google has confirmed in a report that there are more mobile users now compared to desktop users.
Gartner has reported that on average, a mobile user will use more than three personal devices by the end of 2018.
Internet usage on mobile devices (per day) has increased from 0.4 hours to 2.8 hours between 2010 and 2015.
Tablet sales have seen a sevenfold increase in the last 4 years.
According to a report from Ambient Insight, the percentage of learners using mobile devices for learning is 74%.
70% of the people who were surveyed said mobile learning motivated them.
This surge in mobile learning has, however, rendered courses built using Flash useless as they are not compatible with mobile devices. Organizations are realizing the need to provide learners with the flexibility to learn anytime, anywhere and on the device of their choice and Legacy/Flash courses will not serve this purpose. The solution: With HTML5 coming into the picture, it has now become easier to provide learners with the same course seamlessly on multiple devices (including desktops, laptops, tablets, and smartphones). Not only this, today, most browsers support it.
What Are The Tips You Can Use To Create An Effective Strategy To Migrate Your Legacy/Flash/SWF Courses To HTML5?
At EI Design, Flash to HTML5 migration is a mature practice (we’ve been doing it for the last 5 years) with over 1000 hours of Flash content migrated to HTML5 already. With technology updates come associated challenges. We’ve faced a few of those ourselves over a period of time and have created a Toolkit to ensure we convert Flash to HTML5 right every single time. I now share a few tips and best practices that you can use to offset these challenges and go about your Flash to HTML5 migration with a greater impact.
Tip 1 On Pre-Requisites: What You Should Watch Out For
1. Multi-Device Support While mLearning or mobile learning is certainly gaining momentum, desktops and laptops are not done and dusted yet. You need to deliver courses to learners that are compatible with desktops and laptops as well as mobile devices, so that they can learn on the device of their choice. A key thing to keep in mind here though is the non-compatibility of older browser versions with HTML5. You need to factor for browser upgrade and associated costs as part of your strategy to make your migrated courses desktop/laptop-friendly. 2. Learning Management System Support You need to check if your LMS is mobile-friendly. While most LMS providers offer mobile learning support today, there are a few who don’t. If your LMS does not support mobile learning, you will have to either upgrade your LMS or start using an LMS that offers mobile-compatibility. In both these cases, there are costs involved and you will have to consider this aspect as you plan to convert Flash to HTML5. 3. Security Concerns Organizations today are encouraging the BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) concept. While it does offer more flexibility to learners to learn on the device of their choice, it also provides room for security issues. You need to have security measures and policies firmly in place to keep security threats at bay. There are associated costs and efforts that you need to factor for here as well.
Tip 2 On The Essentials: How You Should Begin The Migration Plan
1. Identify The Need (Technology Update Vs. Complete Redesign) First, you need to have clarity on the scope of your migration requirement. You need to decide whether you want a mere technology update or a complete redesign. You can make a decision on this by considering these two aspects: Recent courses: Most of your recent courses would already have been created with enhanced Instructional and Visual Design inputs and in such a case, mere technology uplift (conversion to HTML5) will suffice. Legacy courses: Here, you may require a complete overhaul of your course in terms of Instructional and Visual Design enhancements. The advantage you have here is you would have the content layered already and the enhancements can build upon it quickly. 2. Identify What More You Want To Achieve As You Craft Your mLearning Or Mobile Learning Strategy Offering learners with the option to learn on the device of their choice notwithstanding, you need to consider other factors such as user and learning experience, higher recall and retention, performance gain, and so on. 3. Understand The Pros And Cons (The Trade-Off Between The Punch Of Learning Design Capability That Flash Offered And What HTML5 Can Offer To be able to make your Flash to HTML5 migration effective, you need to be aware of the pros and cons of both Flash and HTML5, their benefits and limitations, whether you can recreate the learning impact of your Flash course with HTML5, factor for the difference in the learner experience in specific frames, and so on when you convert Flash to HTML5.
Tip 3 On Planning: Draw Up An Effective Action Plan For Successful Migration
You can chalk out an effective migration plan using these simple steps: Step 1: Zero-In On The Approach For Migration Choose between Adaptive and Responsive designs: You can opt for Adaptive designs if you’re looking to create multi-device custom mobile learning material for Desktops, Laptops, and Tablets. With Responsive designs, you get the added advantage of Smartphone support as well. Select the right authoring tool: Today, there are a number of authoring tools that you can choose from and you need to select one that suits your requirement the most. While they can be looked at broadly from an Adaptive vs. Responsive perspective, you can narrow down your selection further in terms of authoring tools for rapid development (such as Articulate Studio, iSpring, Adapt, and so on) and authoring tools for mobile learning development (such as Adobe CS6 with CreateJS, Adobe Captivate, Trivantis Lectora, Articulate Storyline, and so on). Step 2: Draw Up A Checklist Of Pre-Requisites There are a few aspects that you need to be sure of before you get going with your Flash to HTML5 migration. To make sure you are on the right track, you need to take care of these aspects: 1. Ensure readiness of supporting aspects. You need to make sure if your LMS and browsers are compatible with HTML5. You also need to ensure that you have updated your security policy so that you are prepared to mitigate risks associated with approaches like BYOD. 2. Prioritize the courses to be converted from Flash to HTML5. You can create a master plan and start migration of a small number of courses to begin with. 3. Validate that all assets and pre-requisites are in place. Keep your assets ready to avoid delays after the pilot phase. Not paying attention to this can have an impact on the migration timeline. Step 3: Pilot And Plan For Sampling To Test User Experience It’s always better if you do a sampling to get a sense of whether the migration approach that you have taken will indeed fetch you the desired benefits. A good way to do this would be to obtain feedback from learners as to whether they experienced any change or was there a different impact because of the migration exercise/change. Their inputs will give you cues as to whether your strategy is working or otherwise and you can take the next steps accordingly. Step 4: You Are Ready For Migration Process – Go For It!
How Can You Use This Migration Opportunity To Step Up The Learning Experience?
More than just a technology upgrade, the opportunity of Flash to HTML5 migration opens doors to embrace the current and trending trends and step up your learning strategy.
Here is my list of 7 tips that you can use to step up the learning experience:
1. Evaluate and enhance the Learnability or learning effectiveness. We, at EI Design offer a unique service that allows you to evaluate and measure the learnability or learning effectiveness of your existing course and recommend a strategy that will help you create a predictive and much higher learning experience. 2. Use more immersive learning strategies. Use learning strategies such as Gamification, Storytorials, scenario-based learning and so on that create more immersive learning experiences. 3. Pick learning approaches that adapt well to mLearning or mobile learning. These include microlearning and social learning and see the impact on learners soar. 4. Use high impact, rich media formats. These include formats like Interactive videos and mobile apps for learning that map better to mLearning or mobile learning. 5. Evaluate emerging techniques like personalization of learning. This may be a good idea for some of your significant programs. 6. Take this opportunity to look at specific designs that would appeal to your millennial work-force. 7. Enhance the support of primary training by:
Taking the learners through a “learning path” or “learning journey” based approach.
I hope this article provides you with practical insights that you can use to create an effective Flash to HTML5 migration strategy. More specifically, it gives you pointers on how you can use this opportunity to re-evaluate your learning strategy and enrich it through the new, more engaging, and highly immersive approaches. If you have any queries, do contact me at apandey@eidesign.net.
Organizations the world over acknowledge the importance of fostering collaboration among employees. This article outlines how can you integrate the social learning strategy to maximize the impact of your corporate training.
How To Implement The Social Learning Strategy In Your Corporate Training
Social learning is intrinsic to all of us and all of us learn through collaboration, observation, and interactions with others. It can be defined as learning with and from others. From the discussions that we have with each other in the cafeteria to the more sophisticated interactions on social media and blogs, we all engage in some form of social learning or other in our daily life. The idea of collaboration and social interactions has always led to positive outcomes and higher impact. No wonder social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and the like have a ubiquitous presence today. When applied in corporate trainings, social learning can work wonders for you as a learning strategy. There’s more to social learning than just bringing in social media elements such as comments, posts, instant messaging, group discussion boards, wikis, video chats, and so on in your corporate trainings. To be meaningful, it needs creating a semi-structured approach to foster collaboration among learners. This can be done through virtual communities that can serve as a platform for them to share knowledge and ideas besides encouraging them to contribute with more inputs to your existing knowledge repository.
How Effective Is Social Learning In Helping Learners Learn?
There are no two ways about the fact that the concept of social learning works. While the success of various social media platforms today is proof enough, I would like to substantiate this further with the help of two theories. NOTE: To integrate social learning effectively into your learning strategy, we should use cues from these two theories. In the case study (featured at the end of the article), you will see how we have integrated many of these aspects to create an effective social learning platform. Social learning theory: According to Wikipedia, the social learning theory “is a theory of learning and social behavior which proposes that new behaviors can be acquired by observing and imitating others. It states that learning is a cognitive process that takes place in a social context and can occur purely through observation or direct instruction, even in the absence of motor reproduction or direct reinforcement”. Bandura and Walters, the key proponents of this theory observed that:
Learning may not always be behavioral. It is a cognitive process that takes place in a social context.
People learn by observing a behavior or its consequences (vicarious reinforcement).
Learning is a product of observations, extraction of information from those observations, and interpretation of the behavioral performance (observational learning or modeling). It is not necessary for an observable behavioral change for learning to take place.
Mere reinforcement does not suffice when it comes to learning although it does play a key role in the learning.
Learning does not happen in passivity. It is a result of a coordinated impact of cognition, environment, and behavior (reciprocal determinism).
Active Learning: Simply put, the active learning theory is all about getting learners to involve more directly in the learning process. It started surfacing as a topic of serious discussion after it appeared in a report by Bonwell and Eison published by the Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE) in 1991. One of many aspects that the report throws light on includes the significance of students playing a more active role in learning (by way of reading, writing, taking part in discussions, solving problems, and so on) as opposed to mere listening. According to the duo, through active learning, learners get to:
Do things.
Think about the things that they are doing.
What Are The Benefits Of Social Learning?
Integrating social learning in your learning strategy has benefits for both learners as well as the business. Social learning can enhance the learning experience and result in a positive outcome both in terms of the success of your learning initiative and a positive ROI. Let’s see the value it offers to the learners and to the business.
The Learner Perspective
How learning happens: As per the 70/20/10 model for Learning and Development, learners obtain:
70% of their learning from on-the job experiences.
20% of their knowledge from interactions with others.
10% of the learning from structured or formal training.
It is here that social learning comes in as a key enabling factor for learning as it triggers learning through collaboration with peers on the job and interactions with others. Specifically: Social learning empowers learners: Sometimes all it takes is one little tip or a piece of advice from a fellow colleague to help you re-focus on your work or get the job done faster in the workplace. Collaboration and interaction help learners learn better. This way, social learning not just helps learners retain the learning but also helps apply that learning on the job. Appeals to Millennials: Millennials are poised to take over as the majority of the global workforce in a few years and they are the future of organizations. This generation loves social media and social learning. They use social media more (59%) than others (29%) and are likely to relate to social learning more than people from other generations.
The Business Perspective
There are advantages for businesses as well, as social learning:
Facilitates learner engagement.
Brings about self-organization among learners.
Triggers collaboration.
Can be used to supplement all kinds of training needs and enhance the impact of new initiatives such as Change Management.
Why Does It Make Business Sense To Adopt It?
Apart from the 70/20/10 model for Learning and Development, social learning theory, and active learning theory, there are other factors as well that make a great case for integration of social learning in your learning strategy. Consider this:
The ratio between social learning approaches and web-based training is 75:1, proving social learning to have a huge advantage. (Association for Talent Development)
There was an increase in the course completion rates (85%) on HBX, a Harvard Business School new online education initiative after social learning was introduced. (Harvard Business Review).
According to a survey, 73% of the companies expressed their desire to increase their focus on social learning and more than 60% wanted to see their employees interact with learning resources on a daily basis. (Brandon Hall Group)
Cisco’s move to use social learning was a huge success (there was a 98% employee adoption rate in the first year) and 80% of the learning content was socially generated. (Chief Learning Officer)
AMD, a semiconductor manufacturing company, saw their social learning strategy yield positive results as it saved them more than USD 250,000 annually in web-based training production costs. (Kenexa)
With a majority mandate, social learning is clearly a winner. 82% of organizations who have tested waters with Social technology want to use them in the future. (Accenture)
Are There Any Approaches That Can Be Used To Craft Your Social Learning Strategy?
Factor for the following steps as you begin the process of integration of social learning into your learning strategy: Step 1 Assess the readiness to adopt social learning: This is the crucial strategy point and this assessment needs to nail the readiness of the organization, learners, and how the current training programs are being offered. It makes sense to pick programs that need social interaction and collaboration as pilot programs and build from their success to create a wider net. Step 2 Quantify the gain you want to achieve and leverage on early adopters: Very often, social learning will support your primary, formal training. It is vital to identify what gains the approach of social learning would bring to the organization. Continue to focus on the value this would create and you will see the required gains over time. Some initiatives like Change Management can benefit substantially through it. You can use early adopters of the initiative to share their positive feedback and recommendations to their colleagues, and see the acceptance of the new concept increase. Step 3 Use social learning platforms rather than a LMS: Instead of a LMS, opt for specialized platforms that provide better interactions between users and feature capabilities like:
Richer usage of the existing knowledge base.
Content curation (including learning paths).
Discussion forums.
Access to experts to coach and mentor.
Facilitate sharing of experiences and learning.
Create communities of interest.
Encourage learners to contribute and enhance the knowledge base.
Step 4 Improve the access to information: Unlike formal training, you can now ensure a speedy update or dissemination of new information. Step 5 Provide and take feedback: Use the platform to schedule formal feedback sessions from the learners (what is working, what is not, and what can be done to improve the interactions and collaboration). Also use Analytics to check the progress (or a lack of it) and re-strategize to meet the intended goal.
Where Can You Apply Social Learning?
Some areas that find a better alignment to social learning are:
Group collaboration projects.
Group discussions (moderated).
Coaching or mentoring.
Knowledge share sessions.
Design thinking workshops (for specific problem-solving).
Social polls and surveys.
Are there any success factors that can help entrench social learning effectively into an organization’s learning culture?
Adopting these simple measures will help you see the culture of social learning take roots and grow:
Identify champions who can advocate this (create awareness, create a buzz, and so on).
Identify people (leaders or managers) who are looked up to and who can implement the
Social learning based approach to create early success stories.
Identify people who can conduct peer-to-peer trainings.
Leverage social media to inform, update, and connect.
To showcase how you can integrate social learning into your existing corporate training, I now share a case study.
Case Study: Our Internal Social Learning Portal
At EI Design, we have a social learning platform that we rolled out with an intention to create a collaborative work environment, help team members interact with each other, create communities of learning and practice, and provide a platform for our employees to receive on-the-job support. Some of the highlights of this solution are:
Personalization.
There is an element of personalization in our solution as employees can upload their photo, provide a description about themselves, and provide their personal details (birthday, address, Facebook URL, Twitter URL, and so on).
The concept of “Spaces”.
Employees can trigger and take part in focused discussions in dedicated forums or “Spaces”, where they can ask questions, get their doubts clarified, or simply go through/share content relevant to that particular “Space”.
Social media features.
The platform comes with features found on most social media, such as Comment, Like, Follow (user to user, user to space, user to content), Tag other users, embed and share YouTube videos and other media (text, images, web links, and so on) in the platform, and so on.
Option to make friends/invite others.
The platform enables employees to make friends with other users and follow them. They can look up the Directory to search for people and send them friendship invitations. The Directory can also be used by employees to look for Spaces and enroll in the Space of their choice.
Emails and notifications.
The platform comes with an in-built email feature that can be used by employees to send individual emails to other users on the platform. When they receive a mail, a friendship invitation, or invitation to join a group or Space, they will get notifications as well. The impact: The platform helps our employees to:
Reach out to their peers for help anytime they want.
Receive on-the-job support.
Interact with other team members.
Know more about our processes/organization-related initiatives in a simple, informal way.
Be part of a collaborative work culture.
Relate to the solution because of the personalization aspect.
Get better on their job by enhancing their knowledge and skills.
You can also take a look at this video to see how this solution works.
I hope this article provides the required insights on social learning and why you should implement the social learning strategy in your corporate trainings. The tips, best practices, and the case study shows you how can you go about it. If you have any specific queries, do contact me at apandey@eidesign.net. Also Read:
Content curation could mean different things to different people. Our definition is based on its relevance to learners and the impact it can create for business. We define content curation as an exercise to continually find, filter (group, organize), and share the most relevant content on specific topics and offer it to learners as an online tool or through a portal or platform.
What Are The Benefits That Content Curation Offers And How Can It Enhance Your Existing Learning Strategy?
Content curation can add value to your learning strategy and enhance the impact manifold as it helps you: 1. Aggregate meaningful content. With content curation, you can gather and organize all relevant online and offline resources in your network and help your learners access them all in one place. 2. Empower your Learning and Development team and learners alike. Content curation allows both Learning and Development experts and learners to generate and curate content and make contextual learning material available for everyone’s benefit. 3. Motivate your learners. With content curation, you can enable employees to get recognized and rewarded for their contribution, effective usage, and learning achievements. 4. Encourage learning as a continuum. Content curation will help your learners experience constant learning through forums, discussions, and chats for peer level collaboration. It also provides the choice for learners to build paths and share content. Furthermore, it facilitates creation of strong relationships between experts and learners. 5. Provide personalized feedback through analytics. Through some smart data analytics, the solution can provide personalized recommendations/feedback to learners as to what content they should go through.
Why Should You Adopt It?
While formal and structured learning approaches will continue to be revered in Learning circles, there is a growing sense of consensus with regard to they being less appealing to modern-day learners. The reasons are many – longer development time, longer seat times, limited learner participation, higher development costs, time consuming update processes, and so on to mention a few. Content curation appeals to today’s generation of learners who are accustomed to looking up information on the Internet. It resonates with today’s learners due to the following factors: 1. Focused. Although the information that learners get through content curation is dynamic, it is filtered and just what they want, mapping precisely to their needs. 2. Continuous value enhancement. Filtering of information by experts notwithstanding, learners get to play an equally important role in curating content and making the content repository richer. 3. Social learning and performance gain. When today’s learners find a useful piece of information, they tend to share that information with others. Content curation allows them to share content with others, thereby creating a larger learning audience. 4. Changing the learning culture. Content curation can serve the purpose of creating a culture of learning as a continuum really well.
What Are The Steps Involved In Content Curation?
For your content curation exercise to be beneficial, you need to follow these steps: 1. Find the most suitable content from different sources (both from external sources and your existing repository). Filter it so that learners only get to see content that’s relevant to them. 2. Share the content found at the right time through the right platform. 3. Add value to that content with additional inputs, context, or commentary. 4. Tag and archive information, which is vital in ensuring its usage in future. (Consistency in tagging is very important. Often, there could be multiple people involved in an aggregation exercise but they should adhere to identical guidelines to tag the resources). 5. Take feedback from learners to assess the relevance, usage, and the impact. Are There Any Best Practices To Maximize The Content Curation Impact? You can enhance the impact of your curated content by following a few simple practices: 1. Seek validation from learners. While the process of curation would have gone through the rigor to secure the content that is relevant for the learners, it is important to validate this with them. Create channels to seek your learners’ opinion and feedback, validate them against your assumptions, and make the required changes. 2. Integrate the curated content into online courses. The engagement of learners tends to end with completion of an online course. You can extend this by providing a supporting Webliography or Resources (outside of the eLearning course). You can further extend this to ensure that this continues to be enriched by learners through their ongoing contribution to it. 3. Endeavor to create a self-sustainable learning ecosystem. Often, great ideas tend to start on a high note and lose sheen in the long run. By creating “communities of interest/practice” and ensuring that your content is being updated by learners, you can create a sustainable learning ecosystem. 4. Continuous improvement to refine your strategies. Take feedback and continuously checkpoint the usage. These cues will provide the required insight to improve and retain learners’ interest.
Case Study
Now, I share a case study that will help you understand how you can use content curation in your organization. Our content curation approach is based on a dedicated learning portal featuring multiple learning paths. We have integrated aspects of social learning, gamification, and personalization to support the organization’s 70/20/10 learning model. Key Highlights
The platform allows learners to create their own profile and select topics of their choice.
It then recommends personalized learning paths based on the areas of interest chosen by them.
Learners can view recommended assets based on their browsing patterns and trending topics.
The solution offers social recommendations to learners with the option for them to share the content.
Gamification elements come in the form of points gained, achievements, badges for accomplishments, and so on.
The platform also offers insightful analytics for admins to assess the browsing patterns of learners and make the learning more personalized for them.
Take a look at this video to see how this solution works and the kind of impact it can create on the learning:
If you are reading this article, you are probably evaluating outsourcing of eLearning content development or are looking at alternatives for your existing outsourcing approach. There are several compelling business reasons to outsource and there are certainly plenty of possible partners you can engage with. However, the evaluation and selection of the right partner is a tough job. Tougher still is to make the partnership work effectively and consistently once you sign up. So, how do you determine if outsourcing eLearning content development is right for you?
How To Decide Whether Outsourcing eLearning Content Development Is Right For You
In this article, I begin with the start point, that is, identification of the need to outsource (the triggers) with which you begin the hunt for an onshore or offshore partner. Next, I will outline the advantages of outsourcing your eLearning content development. This reaffirms why outsourcing eLearning content development makes business sense. I will then touch upon the challenges that are inherent to outsourcing eLearning content development. In my next article, I will walk you through how you can offset these challenges and share insights on how to choose the right partner to outsource your eLearning development.
Why Do You Want To Outsource Your eLearning Content Development?
Having clarity on why you want to outsource is obviously the start-point. At the outset, define if the outsourcing is strategic for you or opportunistic (possibly on account of a large project execution). Think about the gains you’re looking at from your outsourcing initiative. You can consider outsourcing if you’re looking to:
Scale (to handle higher volumes).
Reduce the time to deliver or time to market.
Reduce costs.
Access talent that you do not have.
Add more innovative solutions to your portfolio.
Why Does Outsourcing Your eLearning Content Development Make Business Sense?
There are several advantages of outsourcing your eLearning content development. Here’s my list of the top 7 advantages: 1. Reduction in costs. This is certainly the first and the probably the biggest benefit of outsourcing. Through outsourcing, you can get access to large talent pools that map exactly to your requirement and yet pay a fraction of the cost that you would incur if you were to hire them in-house. 2. Flexibility to scale the team up and down. eLearning content development outsourcing offers you greater flexibility by allowing you to rapidly scale up and down the required team exactly as per your business dynamics. 3. Access to new skill sets and more varied talent in a given domain. With rapidly changing learner expectations, tools, and technologies it is not possible to have all combinations of skills that you or your customers may require. Outsourcing offsets this challenge and offers you the flexibility to have more than one partner to be able to address varied solutions. 4. Reduction in development time leading to a faster turnaround time. Typically, an outsourcing partner will have a dedicated team addressing your requirement including focus on shorter development cycles. This gives you a significant edge in managing a quicker turnaround time for your projects particularly when your internal teams may not be available. 5. Access to best practices leading to optimization of your development practices. Remember your partner will be servicing the needs of several organizations and therefore, is more likely to have development practices that are optimized for globally distributed development. You can use these cues to enhance your own development practices further. 6. Addition of more innovative solutions to your portfolio. You can leverage on your partner’s skills to enhance your portfolio with additional innovative solutions to service more varied or more complex needs. 7. Enhanced focus on your customers. Leveraging on the partner’s development strengths enables you to bring higher focus on customer interfacing activities rather than day to day execution. Besides creating better customer satisfaction, this may enable you to address new opportunities. What Are The Challenges In Outsourcing Your eLearning Content Development? The success of your outsourcing strategy for eLearning development can go belly up on account of: 1. Hidden costs. In your budgeting, you would have factored for the pay-out on account of outsourcing as well as time and budget for your Project Managers who would work with the outsourced team. The outsourced team’s inability to follow the brief accurately can often lead to higher review times adding to your costs. They may also add delays in your project schedules. 2. Aspects that you can identify only after you begin outsourcing. During the evaluation phase as well in the pilot phase, you get to interact with your partner’s top notch talent. Once you start scaling (after looking at the initial success), you find the talent pool has changed. Often this leads to additional costs for you to cover the re-briefing, additional reviews, and quality issues. 3. Inconsistency in performance and quality standards. Closely linked to the challenge outlined above, you often see a variation in the quality or lack of consistency. This too leads to additional review time and adding days to your project schedule to mitigate these challenges. 4. Inability of your partner to adapt and align effectively to changing dynamics. Often, the business dynamics change, the kind of solutions your customers require now can change, and this can lead to a gap in what you gain from an existing partnership. (For instance, significant transitions like Flash to mLearning or the current need of fully responsive mobile learning solutions that need a different expertise set) can play havoc with your further planning. If the partner is not in sync with changing market expectations or what more is required, you may have a show-stopper.
Can Most Of These Challenges Be Mitigated To Create A Successful Outsourcing Partnership?
The good news is that the challenges mentioned here can be mitigated to a large degree leading to a successful outsourcing of your eLearning content development. In my next article, I will outline measures that you can use to offset these challenges (you can use these pointers during your evaluation process). Additionally, I will share my pointers on how you can choose the right partner to outsource. Meanwhile, do refer to my earlier articles that cover various facets of outsourcing eLearning content development.
