3 Social eLearning Strategies To Try In 2017

3-social-elearning-strategies-to-try-in-2017
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Summary: Social learning isn't anything new, but it’s certainly more relevant now than ever before. Let's look at 3 social eLearning strategies you can use in your content this year.

Social eLearning Strategies To Try This Year 

As one of Elucidat's top 10 eLearning trends for 2017, social eLearning holds significance. It's one of the new big trends to shake up the industry. But what is social learning?

Social eLearning is not just content that is meaningful to the audience and their needs, but that fits into natural windows of consumption –right time, right format, right device– and adapts to the personal needs and preferences of individuals.

Social eLearning helps mesh the formalities of eLearning with the informalities of social learning – the key to engaging individuals with learning. Moreover, it can be utilized to mobilize workplace learning and create a culture of learning anytime, anywhere.

Here are 3 ways you can implement social eLearning strategies in your learning content this year.

1. Encourage And Enable Grassroots Learning

Knowledge is power. Tapping into the vast knowledge bank of your employees and opening it up so it can be easily shared and digested by others makes a lot of sense. There are swarms of experienced Baby Boomers getting ready to leave your doors, with all their knowledge.

Involving employees in the content creation process will help to keep them engaged, and help empower them to share their ideas and knowledge with other colleagues.

Modern content authoring tools allow employees to create, collaborate, and share content together with ease. Give your managers the tools they need to share, collaborate, and coach their teams.

Related: Why you should embrace grassroots learning (7 reasons)

2. Use Polls To Crowd-Source Answers And Share Ideas With The Group

Keep an open mind to ways of using new learning tools and technologies. Some tools now let you survey learners and then feed their answers to the entire learning group. Sharing results with other learners can have a huge impact on learning.

Social polls and surveys can help you dig into performance needs, before or during the learning design process. Use the data and insight to improve your learning content:

3. Think Beyond The eLearning Module

Your eLearning doesn't end on a final page. In fact, don’t consider an end at all – instead, view it as a process or journey you’re trying to help get underway. You can do this by using the eLearning to launch into other well used workplace social platforms; newsletter sign-ups, related online articles, up to date subject briefings (like those via AndersPink). Continuously listen to learners and deliver more content that meets their needs.

Related: Content Curation for Learning: 93-page book by AndersPink

Final Thoughts

The connection between eLearning and social learning platforms will get easier as learning technologies continue to assimilate. The next step lies with you, the Learning and Development leader. How you can begin to let people into the creation of content through tools that empower and enable collaboration? And how can you create and facilitate live social learning experiences within the eLearning content itself?

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