Social media is being widely used to support learning. It has evolved into a powerful tool for training and learning professionals. Social media offers new opportunities to share knowledge and experiences in fun and exciting ways. Today, let’s look at how social media can be used during the various phases of a typical training cycle.

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In our earlier posts we have seen the benefits of social media and the ways of transforming learning in the workplace through social media. Now here I’m going to spread spark on how to use social media as part of our learning strategy.

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Someone once said “there’s nothing new under the sun”. Except maybe format changes. With social learning being one of the buzzwords today, here are a few thoughts on the topic.

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This month’s big question in Learning Circuits “What are your Predictions and Plans for 2010?”

My crystal-gazing revealed certain expected trends in learning. I do not know if they would come about in 2010 but things will surely move in these directions.

Learning Management Systems (LMS/LCMS): Organizations will move more toward adapting open source LMS/LCMS like Moodle, ATutor or Ganesha rather than going in for proprietary systems like SABA, SumTotal and so on.

Also, they would be more interested in the basic features rather than all the frills (and expenses) that go with the current systems. So, it will be more ‘back to basics’. It augurs well for organizations that offer customization and maintenance of open source LMS’ or offer their LMS free like TLN and change for maintenance.

Duration for Training: In 2009, CommLab has developed more than a 100 eLearning courses for 25-30 organizations in 7 countries. The trend is clear. The customers/learners want “capsules” or “pills” of learning – the more concise, the better. Gone are the days of 3-5 learning hours for a program. Now, the average seat time is less than 1 hour. I think this will further come down to 30 minutes or even less. It poses a challenge to Instructional and Learning Designers to come up with ‘precision’ learning. Again, to cut the bells and whistles. The learners are becoming very mature. They want more training and less entertaining. They want both effective and efficient learning – better learning in less time.

Harnessing Social Media: I am sure all of you have learnt something useful through social media in the past year. I have personally learnt substantially by just reading various discussions in LinkedIn, leave alone posting and participating in them. I think Social Media is the next big wave in learning. The challenge here is to channelize and manage this revolution. I really don’t know how. Any ideas?

Just-In-Time (JIT) Learning: Reading about learning delivered through mobile phones (m-learning) and other PDAs makes me wonder that a time is near when learners want to acquire learning just before they need to use it. For example a sales person may want to brush up his product knowledge just before a crucial sales call or an operator wants to run his eyes down a checklist just before starting a new machine or a custom service executive goes through the latest analysis of a particular customer’s behavior before taking the call.

Boom in Cross-Cultural Learning: When we started CommLab in 2000, without any physical representation outside India, trying to do business virtually, we knew pretty little about the cultural aspects of our markets. Today, after 9 years, we feel that we know so much about these cultural nuances. The world is really a global village now and we will continue to learn so much about each other, wherever we may be physically living. I foresee a boom in learning about each other’s cultures. The day is not far that a common, basic culture evolves. Maybe it is too grand a vision, but it is exciting to think about it!

Great time to be alive!!!

RK Prasad

CEO

This month’s Big Question in The Learning Circuits “PRESENTING THE VALUE OF SOCIAL MEDIA FOR LEARNING” is an interesting one for us, the professionals and votaries of learning, training and change.

How do we ‘market’ the use of social media as a new tool or avatar of learning?

First, are we sold on it? Many of us have mixed experiences and opinions about using social media in an organizational setting to learn and improve workplace performance. I think I find blogging and LinkedIn more useful than Facebook or Twitter. I am sure many of you have opposing views.

Social media represents universal wisdom, present on such platforms that are moderately accessible, despite most IT departments’ reluctance to open them up for lesser mortals like us . Of course, it has its own negative features just like any other tool.

If you are convinced in principle that social media, with all its shortcomings, is still a very powerful medium that can really empower people with JIT (Just-In-Time) learning on anything under the sun, it is our responsibility to present it to our ‘customers’, so that they benefit from it and thereby benefit our organizations.

Let’s see how you can do it. Research shows that when any new innovation is presented, potential users go through five distinct stages of adoption:

1. Awareness
2. Interest
3. Evaluation
4. Trial
5. Adoption

It is advisable to keep in mind that educating people on new innovation takes time and effort.

We should also keep in mind that, people vary in the time to adopt new things. This process of “Diffusion of Innovation” was first popularized by Everett Rogers (1962) in his text book, Diffusion of Innovations (Rogers 1964). He defines diffusion as “the process by which an innovation is communicated through certain channels over time among the members of a social system.”

It helps us immensely to take a quick look at adopter categorization on relative time taken.

The normal curve distribution above shows people differ greatly in their readiness to try new products or services. The graph shows that after a slow start, thanks to the innovators and the early adopters, an increasing number of people will adopt the innovation. The number reaches a peak and then drops off, as the innovators and early adopters rush off to try some new alternatives.

Research shows that:

• Innovators are adventurous and take risks.
• Early Adopters are guided by respect. They are opinion leaders who adopt early but carefully.
• Early Majority are deliberate in their choice, though not leaders.
• Late Majority are skeptical and wait till the majority have tried.
• Laggards are traditionally the last set of people to adopt change.

How do we use this knowledge in popularizing Social Media as an innovation in learning methodologies especially in Corporate Training?

My suggestions are:

1. First target the Innovators and the Early Adopters through free workshops and contests. They are risk takers and get attracted by anything new.
2. Present success stories and case studies collected from the Innovators and the Early Adopters to the Early Majority.
3. Once these groups are behind you, the others (Later Majority and Laggards) will automatically follow.

I think we should give adequate time to see results.