Official Edubilla Blog

Collaborative learning has always had a positive impact on learners. The advent of social media has provided experts in the Learning industry with more food for thought with regard to creating better and effective learning solutions that leverage on collaborative learning. Let us see how you can practically use social learning to spice up your existing learning strategy.

What is Social Learning?

Social learning is learning with and from others. Social learning is not restricted to any one type of learning. If you’re learning using online social media tools like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and so on, or gaining knowledge during informal offline activities such as group discussions, conference interactions, or even over a coffee conversation, it’s social learning all the same.

Why Should You Adopt Social Learning?

Social learning not just benefits learners, but your business as well. The kind of positive learning experience that social learning provides to learners has a direct impact on the effectiveness of your learning initiative, which in turn translates into significant business gains and a positive ROI.

Social learning empowers learners: Have you observed your productivity go up and your tasks witnessing earlier completions when collaborating with your peers on the job? There might have been times when your mind just stopped working and you took to your Messenger to seek help from your colleague. A couple of minutes on the chat window and once you get the inputs or a little push that you needed, you’re back on track again. That’s the sort of impact social learning has on your learning and performance. Social learning helps bring about greater application of the learning on the job besides giving learners greater control over their learning.

How Can You Establish Quantifiable Gains For The Learners And Business?

To maximize the impact, you need to relook at your existing learning strategy and adopt the following aspects:

1. Change from discrete formal training to a “learning journey” based approach. 

Rather than having a finite number of formal training sessions that can happen for a finite number of days in a year, give the learners stackable bites of learning throughout the year.

2. Provide a clear learning path or journey for each learner. 

3. Provide accesses to all formal and informal learning assets on the device of the learner’s choice. 

You can extend your learning material from traditional eLearning to mLearning or mobile learning that is available on tablets and smartphones as well.

4. Use microlearning assets extensively. 

These small nuggets (running for a few minutes) can be used for both formal and informal learning. You can design a learning path that features multiple resources (microlearning nuggets). These are available to the learners within their work-flow promoting their usage at the time of need.

5. Use innovative formats in learning delivery to increase retention (and completion rates). 

You can use videos and other rich media formats extensively. You can also use mobile apps for both learning and for assessments.

6. Use gamification. 

The gamification solution gels well with the social learning concept as it induces the competitive spirit, makes learning fun, and is aligned to a specific learning outcome.

I hope this Blog gives you compelling reasons to adopt social learning and more importantly how exactly can you use it to enhance your existing learning strategy.