A survey conducted by the Intelligence Group Study revealed that 88% of employees prefer a collaborative work-culture than a competitive one. Primarily this is why most firms are rooting for Social Learning methods in their training programs.

Now for those who are less familiar with the concept of Social Learning;

• it revolves around an interactive approach to educational programs by introducing social elements.
• it enhances collaborative learning with social learning communities, newsfeed, discussion opportunities and more, making learning more engaging for the trainees.

But this all boils down to relevance. Since the world is going social and mobile, it is important for any institute or organisation to be a step ahead in their training practices.

While the enterprises are looking beyond the traditional Learning Management Systems (LMS) by incorporating social features, here are the best practices to implement Social Learning for trainings at your organisation:

• What do you want?

The need for training emerges to make employees understand their departmental and organisational goals. On most occasions, social learning helps in meeting both needs, interactively. Cross department exercises and team-driven assignments let employees break the monotony of the day and improve their productivity. But before introducing Social Learning to the employees, an organisation needs to pen down the objectives they want to achieve. The only ploy here is to make the program as engaging as possible so that no one gets bored.

• Will your team cope up with it?

Adapting to social learning involves one to be open to the new techniques of studying and the organisations want their experienced employees to evolve with changing learning methods too. Hence it is very important to ensure that your LMS caters to all and helps them easily comprehend the system rather than making it a struggle to cope up with technology. Having said that, the organisation could also see this as an opportunity where freshers and the experienced professionals could collaboratively work to help each other complete their tasks. So opt for an LMS that’s convenient for all age groups.

• Which Learning Management Systems to go for?

Traditional Learning Management Systems offers features which are more trainer-centric than being trainee centric. That’s why LMS with Social Learning methods allows a trainer and a trainee to interact with each other using formats like: newsfeed posts & comments and quick polls. The freedom to create posts on newsfeed to share ideas or ask questions from their peers encourages collaborative learning.

From an organisation’s point of view, ensuring the LMS to be a mobile platform wherein employees, no matter where they are, can contribute to the projects and complete it on time makes it useful.

• Have the right content and the engagement strategy

The most important part of Social learning and sharing is the content. Interesting content always requires less effort to be promoted. Creating bite-sized content in different formats always helps the trainee stay hooked on to it. Videos, Presentations, Documents, Links and more helps implement a better engagement strategy.

• Incorporating assessments and challenges

Gamification is a great tool to help one get motivated. Incorporating assessment methods and tasks make modules very interesting to learn. This could be leveraged by including Quizzes, having a leaderboard and rewarding the performer with Badges and Certifications.
Remember, achieving goals creates a different mindset for employees and motivates them to gear up for bigger tasks in the organisation.

• Post Training Processes

On completion of the training, organisations can evaluate the results of the learners and identify who needs more support and guidance to improve. Enterprises can take one step ahead to bridge the gap with face-to-face mentoring or providing valuable feedback via web conferencing, to overcome the odds. Also, the process of learning can continue with updating training materials and encourage colleagues to share relevant content. This is to track who is consuming and engaging with the content as a part of their ongoing self-learning and evolving process.

All this when combined, one can safely say Social Learning is at the heart of the modern training program and it will help the trainers make learning more fun and interesting. So when are you incorporating it in your professional learning and development process?

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