Learning Trends - Down the Rabbit Hole of Social Learning

🤯 ☝️Learning teams telling learners not be social in their learning programs☝️ 🤯

Traditional learning teams have kept social learning out of their programs to focus purely on synchronous or asynchronous learning. They are like the photo above, telling learners to "go be social elsewhere", not in my program ❌🤔

This is a massive mistake, as you are creating misalignment between your program and how learners today prefer to actually learn. Take Gen Z-ers for example, who are entering the workforce en mass. These learners are born social and have knowledge-sharing in their blood. If you do not consider social in your programs, you are missing out.

Social/collaborative learning is one of the hottest topics for learning teams in 2022. It can be a game changer for your programs, for employees, partners, or customers alike.

But what is social learning, and how might this be a secret sauce for your programs? 🥫👇

Donald H Taylor produces the Global Sentiment Survey every year, one of the the most reputable guides for what's relevant in L&D.

He asks the question, "what's hot in L&D in 2022?" to which collaborative/social learning came in second place with 9.6%, only behind reskilling/upskilling with 12.5%

This article will dive into what social learning is, why it's crucial for your programs, and how you can adopt it in your organisation.

The what - is social learning just a buzzword ❓🤔

Social learning stems from a theory from psychologist Albert Bandura called the 70:20:10 learning framework stating that 70% of someone’s learning happens via on-the-job experiences, 20% through interactions with their peers, and just 10% in traditional, instructor-led classroom environments.

Bandura’s 4 principles of social learning

🚨 Attention: We can’t learn if we aren’t focused on the task at hand. If we believe something as being novel or different, it’s more likely that that concept becomes the focus of our attention. Social contexts reinforce these perceptions.

🚨 Retention: Humans learn by internalizing information. We recall learned information when we need to respond to a situation similar to the situation in which we first learned that information.

🚨 Reproduction: We reproduce previously learned information (behavior, skills, knowledge) when required. Practice through mental and physical rehearsal generally improves responses.

🚨Motivation: We need motivation to do anything. More often than not, humans are motivated by someone else being rewarded or punished for something they have said or done. This generally motivates us to do, or avoid doing, the same thing.

How do adopt social learning and why does it matter?

✅ Most learning teams have nailed compliance training (tick)

❌ Take it, or your job could depend on it. So, you're forced to do it.

🤔 Beyond this, teams I speak to struggle with learning engagement

💡 This comes down to many things, including the marketing of learning (internally or externally, but equally important, depends on the actual learner experience itself.

Social learning programs does not succeed in isolation. It is the potion, but to make it, you need a lot of ingredients.

Communities for learners with zero searchability or discoverability of content will not gain traction, nor get engagement from your learners. Users would rather be on TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram or Twitter (or here on LinkedIn)

Learners' attention span is shorter than ever, with distractions being a constant recurrence.

Making social learning work, and how your learning tech should help

In my view, you need 3 things from your learning tech to make social learning work👇

1️⃣ The learning system needs to provide functionality to

• Support social learning, including channels/community creation, FAQs and forums
• Gamification and rewards
• An organisation and hierarchies to structure the visibility and access to content, so it's easy to find content from internal, external and peer-based sources. This usually comes from a robust admin side with automation and user management tools for this purpose.

2️⃣ The learning system needs to provide tools to provide meaningful and personalised curation of content to go into social learning channels/forums/communities. Usually done via functionality for searchability and discoverability of content, AI, or social learning vehicles built into set system.

The content here needs to be varied and engaging, to add variation and richness to the social learning experience, comprised of an i) internal content library (list of eLearning courses with different modalities and topics), 2) "wider web", crawling in content from relevant sources and iii) social-learning content created and shared by peers (ability for peers to author content in community-based learning/social learning)

3️⃣ System need analytics tools to see what content is working and what is not. This includes user feedback, moderation of communities, and learning analytics drilling into engagement of content from all sources (internal/external/social). If your program is popping but you can't prove it, what good does it really do?

⛔️ What's at stake? The perception of learning in your organisation (culture), the engagement of your program and your buy-in for your programs.

⚠️ Without a clear plan for the above, learning will easily become a tick box compliance tool that is reactive and top-down.

What do you stand to gain if you adopt social learning successfully?

💡 Social learning approaches have a 75:1 ROI ratio compared to formal web-based training

💡82% of businesses that use social learning tools want to increase their use them in the future

💡 Course completion increased to 85% on HBX, a Harvard Business School online education initiative when it introduced social learning

💡Semiconductor manufacturer, AMD, says their shift to social learning saves more than US$250,000 per year in web-based training production costs.

Who is nailing social learning? A real world example - 🏆🥇 L'Oréal Access 🥇🏆

Access is by far the coolest corporate learning program I have ever encountered.

L'Oréal needs no intro, as one of the most iconic personal care companies in the world.

But why build out Access, an external learning program focused on social learning?

I am very fascinated by the intersection of learning & community, and believe that programs that not only teach but actively apply will be more successful for knowledge retention (think of Bandura's theories).

Access is fresh, accessible (mobile-first), and THE PLACE to learn for salon professionals. This is where they can share how they use the products, while learning from leading influencers.

By inviting world leading experts, in a community-powered learning platform, Access is setting a new bar of corporate learning, and one that can rival the attention war for today's learners (people would rather learn from experts there than anyone on the web).

Access is setting a new standard, and before long, community-powered learning will be the new norm. Great eLearning courses ain't cutting it, you need to leverage the power of peers, social networks and community, to reach the learners of tomorrow.

Next week, I am continuing down the rabbit hole focusing on a new learning trend: Learning in the flow of work. Join me then, and subscribe to this newsletter. Let's explore the wonderful world of learning together ✌️

-Harald