COLLABORATIVE ONLINE
LEARNING
ACROSS YOUR ORGANIZATION
{ perspectives } LEARNING DESIGN & DELIVERY
ABOUT CORPORATE LEARNING
Harvard Business Publishing Corporate Learning partners with clients to create world-class leadership development solutions for managers at all levels. Our team leverages the management insight, thought leadership, and expertise of Harvard Business School faculty and authors from Harvard Business Review to create tailored leadership development solutions. With more than twenty years of practical experience, our innovative, technology-enabled solutions drive meaningful and lasting business results. Corporate Learning is a market group within Harvard Business Publishing.
ABOUT HARVARD BUSINESS PUBLISHING Harvard Business Publishing was founded in 1994 as a not-for-profit, wholly owned subsidiary of Harvard University. Its mission is to improve the practice of management and its impact in a changing world.
The company achieves its mission through its relationships with customers in three market groups:
Higher Education, Corporate Learning, and Harvard
Business Review Group. Through these platforms,
Harvard Business Publishing is able to influence real-
world change by maximizing the reach and impact
of its essential offering—ideas.
H A R VA R D B U S I N E S S P U B L I S H I N G C O R P O R AT E L E A R N I N G
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COLLABORATIVE ONLINE LEARNING ACROSS
YOUR ORGANIZATION
The demographic shift to the millennial generation. The ongoing globalization of the economy. The increasing formal and informal use of social media in the workplace. These trends combine to make collaboration an important part of the future of online learning.
BY JENNIFER GASPAR AND TC HALDI
P
eer-
to-
Peer,
orcollaborative,
learningis increasingly playing a more prominent role in leadership development, and the use of social learning tools—Internet-based applications that enhance and contextualize the online learning experience—is supporting this growth.
More and more individuals are connecting with colleagues and peers through online media. A July 2012 McKinsey & Company report on “the social economy” indicated that of 4,200 enterprises worldwide surveyed, 70% are using social technologies for communication and collaboration.
Interacting with peers can be one of the most engaging and effective aspects of a successful learning experience. While peer interactions always have been central to good face-to-face classroom experiences, incorporat- ing collaborative learning into traditional elearning programs has been difficult. As the use of elearning continues to rise, however, learning professionals must find ways to drive and facilitate learning from and with others as part of their online learning delivery.
The demand for this approach is only going to grow. The workforce is changing, and as employees use Internet-based technologies outside the workplace, they expect these technologies to be part of their professional
“MAKING SPACE FOR GOOD CONVERSATION AS PART OF THE EDUCATIONAL PROCESS PROVIDES THE OPPORTUNITY FOR REFLECTION ON AND MEANING-MAKING ABOUT EXPERIENCES THAT IMPROVES THE EFFECTIVENESS OF EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING.”
DAVID KOLB AND RON FRY
experiences as well. The new generation of online learning programs must provide social learning tools that enable collaboration.
Collaboration Is the Future of Online Learning
Cultural forces—demographics, globalization, the Social Web—that are changing the world at large are helping transform online learning from a solitary activity to an increasingly collaborative experience.
DEMOGRAPHICS
In Plugged In: The Generation Y Guide to Thriving at Work, Tamara Erickson notes that those born between 1980 and 2000—“Generation Y,” or “the millen- nials”—will dominate the workforce from 2010 through 2050. As Karie Willyerd pointed out in her Learning 2009 presentation, “A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the New Learning Ecosystem,” millennials, “the ones you need to hire to replace the retiring boom- ers, are networked 24/7 and expect the company to accommodate pervasive connectivity.” In order to attract and retain promising new talent, organizations will have to provide collaborative technologies.
GLOBALIZATION
The emerging workforce will also be more geographi- cally dispersed. As organizations continue to expand globally, and as more workers perform their jobs remotely, organizations must provide their workers with the ability to communicate seamlessly—in ways that emulate real-time, person-to-person interac- tions—with their colleagues in other locations.
THE SOCIAL WEB
We now have access to a wealth of tools and technolo- gies that enable around-the-clock interaction via the Web. Most likely your organization is starting to use these tools for recruiting, working groups, and even learning. But if you haven’t begun to implement these tools within your learning programs, it’s time to reconsider. Your learners—and not just the millen- nials—are going there. A survey conducted several years ago by Harvard Business Publishing found that by early 2010 more than 40% of the learning profes- sionals surveyed were already seeing the impact of social networking tools within their leadership devel- opment programs.
Why is this so important? Research has long sup- ported the notion that the majority of training at organizations takes place informally, where workers interact with each other and try things out on the job.
(The Institute for Research on Learning, 2000) Elliott Masie, founder of the Learning Consortium and The MASIE Center, noted in Learning TRENDS 2009 that social learning was “an emerging practice in which organizations provide structures to enhance the informal social learning taking place there.”
Bersin by Deloitte sees social learning as a “catalyst for the transformation in L&D.” In The Corporate Learning Factbook
®2013, they wrote, “We believe that the evolution to informal learning will be of a similar magnitude as the switch to elearning that began over a decade ago.”
The challenge in creating more collaborative online learning programs is to understand the tools and tech- nologies available and how to select the social learning tools that you can implement to best promote collab- orative learning at your organization.
Choosing the Right Tools
Of the many social learning tools available, not all will necessarily be appropriate for online learning in your organization. Why is this the case? For one thing, many organizations are not equipped technologi- cally or culturally to implement the full spectrum of options. Others can’t implement social learning tools because of security and privacy limitations. And some need more evidence of the value and effectiveness of the tools. Thus, organizations need to make carefully considered, strategic decisions regarding the social learning tools that will best support their specific online learning efforts.
These are the types of selective decisions that we made when designing the collaborative features in Harvard ManageMentor
®, an online resource for management essentials. How does Harvard ManageMentor take online learning to a new level?
What social learning tools does it include? And how
will these collaborative capabilities impact your learn-
ers and your organization?
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Bringing Collaborative Learning to Online Learning
Harvard Business Publishing’s learning heritage is drawn from Harvard Business School, which estab- lished the case method, a participant-centered learn- ing approach that is the foundation of its curriculum.
As a result, participant-centered learning informs the way we approach the design of all our products and programs.
In a self-paced, online learning experience, the inclusion of social learning tools allows for more peer-to-peer-based participation and collaboration around learning than does a static elearning experi- ence alone. With its collaboration features, Harvard ManageMentor builds on a highly successful approach to online learning and performance support. It incor- porates social learning tools for collaboration around proven, high-quality content, underscoring Harvard Business Publishing’s interactive, contextual approach to learning.
In doing so, Harvard ManageMentor focuses on providing all learners—from traditionalists to millennials—with intuitive methods for making informal learning opportunities more effective and available and for institutionalizing organizational knowledge in a way that appeals to a broad spectrum of learners.
Harvard ManageMentor’s social learning tools include:
RECOMMENDATIONS
Learners can rate specific content elements at a granular—not just modular—level and view and link to the most recommended pages.
DISCUSSION FORUMS
Dynamic feeds of the most recent postings give learn- ers the ability to discuss core concepts in real time.
COMMENTS
Sections on each page allow learners to share their thoughts with their colleagues.
The ability to email within content pages provides learners with a familiar way to quickly and easily share and exchange information about content.
POLLING
Learners can provide valuable feedback about the online learning content in and of itself and within the context of your organization. Harvard ManageMentor offers two types of polling:
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Organization-specificpoll:a poll that an adminis- trator can populate with his or her own questions to initiate responses and promote sharing among employees.
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Learningpoll: placed at various points throughout the content, learning polls allow learners to sub- mit answers and see how their colleagues respond within the context of the learning content.
Hybrid Approach Drives Engagement
As Masie has observed, there are two different approaches to social learning:
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Designed social learning requires high levels of facilitation and guidance to get people accustomed to using social media tools.
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