Interventions
Once we’ve identified an initiative or organization as primarily formal, collaborative, or emergent in its learning needs, we can begin thinking about interventions.
For emergent learning needs
Let’s start with a highly emergent learning need. Imagine a scenario in Pharma or high-tech where a team is working on creating a new product or service. Learning in this scenario is about facilitating the exchange of ideas, relevant industry or market data, and building on each other’s work toward a common objective. Some of the tools or approaches that might be used in this sort of approach include:
- Course authoring technologies: This may not seem like a tool for emergent practices, but by placing rapid authoring tools in the hands of any learner, we can enable them to capture and document their own expertise and the work they are doing.
- Virtual classroom technologies: Again, if we let anyone record and share their desktop or files, it’s another quick mechanism to document and share their expertise.
- File sharing: File sharing may be standard files like documents, PDF files, and the like, but it might also include video and audio sources. Ideally, video and audio sources would be converted to text transcripts so that they are searchable.
- Blogging: Blogs provide an excellent vehicle for knowledge sharing and documenting lessons learned, new insights, and the like that are essential for emergent learning activities.
- Discussions: Discussions are typically used to share information and insights in a collaborative exchange, but discussions can also be used as a mechanism to communicate new best practices via frequently asked questions or idea exchanges.
- Idea Sharing: Idea-sharing tools are the cornerstone of emergent learning technologies.
- Wikis: Wikis provide a central location to document expertise and learning in semi-structured formats.
- Tagging: While not content per se, tags provide insight into the way learners perceive the connections between knowledge and information. Tags are a kind of emergent taxonomy, suggesting future structures and descriptors.
- Chat and IM sessions: If you cannot save these content types, then it diminishes their usefulness as an emergent learning media. If you can save and search them, then these exchanges can provide a rich history of the emergence of new ideas.
- FAQ/Ask an Expert sorts of tools: As with Discussions above, FAQ tools provide a mechanism for experts to document their unique knowledge and insights.
- Comments: In some cases, comments can contain as many new ideas and raw insight as the original post.
- Q&A during classroom or virtual classroom activities: As with chat and IM, these exchanges only provide value if one can capture and search them after the sessions.
- Social profiles: While most learning professionals do not yet consider a social profile a kind of content, a profile can be among the richest repository of emergent knowledge. A profile also serves as a guidepost toward additional expertise, either in someone’s extended network, or in the individual themselves.
For collaborative learning needs
Collaborative learning, while using many of the same tools, is more about connecting learners together to discuss ideas, create new socially-validated best practices, share information, and strengthen connections between individuals, resulting in greater group cohesion. Two classic examples of industries where collaborative learning makes sense are healthcare and franchise environments. In each case, there is a high need for collaboration and sharing of best practices across common job roles. Some of the tools or approaches that might be used in this sort of approach include:
- Discussions: With a collaborative focus, discussions aren’t about asking for answers from known experts, they are about the exchange and sharing of ideas and opinions to reach a joint understanding or consensus.
- Wikis: Typically wikis are about documenting known information and known expertise; however, there have been several well-publicized uses of wiki technology as a shared collaboration platform. The most notable of these is Cisco’s iZone, an internal wiki used as a collaborative tool for idea capture and vetting.
- Idea Sharing: As with wikis, idea tools are typically about capturing new ideas, but when the ideas are editable and rate-able, and when the tools enable comments, idea-sharing technology can become very collaborative.
- Comments: Commenting on blogs and other forms of social media as a means of sharing ideas with others and requesting feedback is a classic collaborative learning exercise. Nested discussions can make this experience even more collaborative.
- Ratings: While this is a not a kind of content per se, ratings provide a necessary filter by which content surfaces to colleagues. They also provide group feedback to the content creator.
- Reviews: Reviews provide a mechanism through content such that consumers can share opinions with each other or with the content creator.
- Enabling search and connection around Social Profiles: While a social profile itself is an example of emergent learning technology, the ability to find and connect profiles is very collaborative, particularly when other learners can see and act on a learner’s activity streams.
- Social bookmarking: Social bookmarking tools enable learners to share relevant sites and information with each other in a collaborative way by tagging items in the “cloud” for all other learners to see.
- IM, Chat, and Microblogging: When used as a mechanism to share ideas and discuss relevant topics, these tools are a classic form of collaborative learning technology. IM is typically one-to-one; chat is typically constrained to a defined set of individuals; microblogging is typically used as a public chat where you are broadcasting your exchanges for a much larger audience. In the last year or so, these technologies have been converging.
For formal learning needs
Formal strategies are what we have been pursuing for most of our adult careers, so they probably don’t need much explanation. It is worth noting, though, that some social approaches can still be pretty formal. A blog that’s used as a corporate communication channel may not be very social, particularly if the comments are disabled or ignored. An FAQ engine may be somewhat formal if experts create both the questions and the answers. Conversely, traditional formal technologies like course authoring tools may play a big role in a social strategy if the average learner is empowered to use them. The value and impact of the technologies is heavily dependent on the philosophies and objectives that define their use.
Blending interventions
Not surprisingly, there are very few instances where a purely formal or purely collaborative approach will work well. In most corporate initiatives, a blend of formal, emergent, and collaborative learning strategies will prove most effective. The tricky part is finding the right mix, both initially and over time. As in the aforementioned example of a software rollout, it may be that the initial need is formal. Prior to the rollout, learners will have questions that can best be answered through formal communication plans and formal FAQ’s. As the rollout gets closer, the organization will want to begin formal training – instructor-led, Web-based training, virtual classroom, etc.
Once these formal learning programs conclude, however, things may change. After learners begin using the new software, they will see new possibilities and new ways to use the tools. They may develop new best practices. They may be curious as to how others in their roles run reports and queries. All of these needs require more collaborative and emergent learning strategies: FAQ forums, wikis, communities of practice, and similar approaches may make sense at this point. From these emerging best practices, the organization might even decide to create new courses and new formal material.
Our roles change, too
Across these various interventions and strategies, our roles may shift and change several times. At the first stage of this initiative, our role is to be the traditional instructional designer: gathering information and known FAQ’s from the subject matter experts and management team. In the second phase of the project, we’re still the traditional learning professional creating formal training or performance support for the initiative.
In the third phase, however, our role needs to change. The learners are the ones sharing insights and knowledge. The learners are the ones with the information, rather than the subject matter experts. In some ways, we have the same job as before – we need to convey expertise from the subject matter experts (our former students) to our learners (our former SME’s). It’s just all reversed. The problem is that we can’t scale adequately to do this effectively across all learners. Instead, the answer is to lay out the plumbing by providing the discussion boards, blogging tools, etc., that enable these exchanges to happen “without” us. In reality, we’re still involved, and in a much more strategic capacity, but our involvement is less “hands on” and more about organizational enablement.
In other examples, the exchanges may be more peer-to-peer where learners are helping each other. Again, we have the problem of scale. How can we possibly scale to a level where we can be a conduit between any groups of learners, or even between individual learners? The answer is that we can’t. The only solution in this case, too, is disintermediation. We need to remove ourselves as conduits, and put technology in place instead.
Becoming strategic
This does not diminish our role. In fact, we have an opportunity to be more strategic in driving learning as a strategic initiative that is woven throughout almost all organizational activity. Consider again the questions that I posed at the beginning of this article:
- Who is a subject matter expert?
- Who is allowed to create content?
- When does content expire?
- And so on.
These are weighty questions. The answers depend on a new kind of organizational needs analysis. Who better to do this than learning professionals? Who better to lead an organizational transition where the sharing of personal expertise and unique insights is the central objective? One of the key strengths we possess as instructional designers is the knowledge of how to convey complex information in ways that can be easily consumed by others.
The mantra for our profession is to “teach a man to fish,” but maybe we should be teaching people to teach instead. In the first model, we are a linear asset, upwardly bound by our team size. In the second scenario, we provide exponential value and our impact is bounded only by the size of the extended organization. We need to rethink our roles and embrace this transition to more social forms of learning, not as a replacement for formal learning but as another set of tools in our belt.
Conclusion: Be quick or be left
We do need to be quick in jumping on this train. One only has to look at the news industry to see what happens when disintermediation is something that happens to you as opposed to happening through you. If we don’t begin driving the social learning agenda, then IT groups, Corporate Communication, Marketing, and HR will drive it. “Training” will be limited to corporate initiatives, compliance requirements, and annual certifications. Other groups will facilitate “Learning” on software they chose, and through models they developed.
Training groups have not driven most stories of social learning to date – it’s time for us to take our rightful place as the owners and initiators of the social learning agenda. If not, we may find ourselves working from the same backroom where the company stores their old printing press, both of us relics from a time when expertise was centralized and the masses were nothing but consumers.
