Posted by With the increasing penetration of smart technologies, how do you make the transfer of knowledge seamless, smooth, and simple? How to provide just-in-time learning modules customized to the needs of an organization? How to make learning fun, engaging, and collaborative for a distributed workforce? What actions must a fast-growing enterprise take to keep its workforce trained and up to date to meet the global service excellence standards? What are the skilling techniques that it needs for reinforcement? Do businesses have a robust build-your-own-device policy at workplace? These and many more are the diverse challenges that organizations grapple with globally.
Which brings us to the question as to the start of how to craft, design, and lay the foundation of using the social media platform as an effective engagement tool in the sphere of learning? One thing is sure though. Be it to launch initiatives or trying to make things work, this is a technology platform that has thrown open the doors wide to experiment, explore, and measure the outcomes. It is a dip stick to know the trends and behavior of the usability and efficacy of technology. As the White House Chief Digital Officer Jason Goldman avers: “The advantage of these platforms over traditional media is that they’re very measurable. You get feedback on what people like, and what works.”
That’s what is fundamental to rolling-out social media learning at workplace or embedding it into an existing LMS environment. It’s about the belief in the power of conversation. What if the social learning platform can track, measure, and even predict a learner’s behavior? What if the use of Big Data and advanced computing technologies brings learning analytics to the fore? What if there is a way to power collective intelligence? So, are organizations willing to take the “baby” steps? Can they attempt to “move the needle”?
Let’s consider the environment of a luxury retailer, whose one-third staff only had a company computer or tablet and a company email address. For this retailer, most store computers were dedicated to sales and related management reporting with associates having neither a company computer or a tablet, nor a phone. The retailer was worried about onboarding employees in newer locations and how they would embrace the organization culture. How to capture local knowledge from experienced employees in a capsule format? Challenges faced included the following:
- To encourage a peer-to-peer problem-solving approach between employees
- The desire to have a single portal for learning, sharing, and collaboration that could be accessed through any device (PC, smartphone, or tablets)
- The need to rapidly scale up operations and train hundreds to thousands of new employees as new airport contracts are won
- Create a community to share best practices to ensure that the customer experience continuously improves
- The desire to capture local knowledge from experienced employees and encourage informal sharing, communication, and collaboration
- Provide a platform to deliver key messages from senior leaders
- Create a portal for sharing of success stories and lessons learned
- Encourage a system that enabled peer-to-peer problem solving between employees
- Enable social communication to create a stronger network and common understanding across the many global locations through a single platform
- The existing LMS had to be juxtaposed in a way that would facilitate training without derailing the processes already in place
Isn’t social learning an exciting and experiential way to make learning permeate? But then, let’s not forget the misconception that social media is simple, because technically anyone can get on Twitter and get on Facebook, as 360i’s Barna-Stern points out, “There’s a tremendous amount of strategy, thought, and investment that really goes into it.” A thorough understanding of how to utilize the platforms and social media best practices will enable the possibility of achieving business goals.
There is tremendous scope to “break new ground.” Why do we say so? Because, Origin has demonstrated it! By successfully implementing Konnect, its next-gen social learning and analytics platform, breaking the barriers of legacy learning. Supporting a wide variety of course formats including SCORM, AICC and xAPI(TinCan), Konnect takes learning beyond the traditional LMS architecture. The cloud-hosted solution comes with a secure and customized environment that is simple and easy to use. If you are interested in a demo, don’t wait! Just reach out to our colleagues at Learning Solutions 2016, Orlando, Booth # 218. Make your learning intent lively!