How To Find Hidden Knowledge On A Social Learning Platform
Are you making the most of your internal communications? If your company uses an intranet, an enterprise social network, or a social Learning Management System, your most powerful learning assets might be passing unnoticed right under your nose! Worse still, your most ineffective learning assets might be allowed to continue their reign of boredom unchecked.
The traditional approach to training focused mainly on producing learning assets from scratch and pushing them to the learners. Although this gives the training team lots of control over the content, it’s not very efficient. Since most people learn from their peers rather than formal content, it makes sense to capitalize on the knowledge they share with each other on a daily basis.
Here are a few tips to help you find those pearls of wisdom and use them to improve the learning experience.
1. Make Your Social Learning Platform The Go-To Resource
It’s great if your learners are sharing knowledge with each other on their preferred social network, but if you don’t have visibility over it, you can’t use it. Your need to make sure your social learning platform is the first place your learners think to go when they have something to share. If your platform is ugly, clunky, and uninspiring, your learners will just go elsewhere.
2. Appoint Experts And Ambassadors
Finding learning assets on a bustling social learning platform is a difficult job for just one person. You need to have dedicated users keeping an eye on each area. The easiest thing to do is to recruit Subject Matter Experts and leave each one in charge of their own area of expertise. This doesn’t just ease the workload, it means that the person with the most expertise is best placed to judge whether the learning asset is accurate.
3. Build Knowledge Sharing Into The Culture
If you want to achieve anything in life, promises and good intentions won’t take you very far – you need a change in behavior. Whenever your learners find something that might help their teammates, their first instinct should be to share it on your platform. This kind of behavior won’t embed itself overnight, so you need to make sure you’re driving it on a regular basis and leading by example.
4. Challenge Your Learners To Create A Learning Asset
Sometimes, when you want someone to do something, all you have to do is ask. How you ask can make a big difference. Instead of just making them aware that they can share their knowledge, build it into the training program. Send short, specific challenges regularly asking your learners to share their own experiences. The assets your learners share will be especially valuable because they’re relevant in a way that formal material can’t compete with.
5. Offer Rewards To Top Contributors
You can give your learners an extra push by offering rewards. This doesn’t have to be a cash bonus on top of their salary – it doesn’t even have to be a physical object! By adding game mechanics to your platform, they can earn points and badges every time they share knowledge. Once you add a leaderboard to the platform, the whole training program becomes a company-wide competition to see who can share the most knowledge.
6. Enable Rating And Review Features
Curating knowledge is about sorting the good from the bad. If you’ve successfully motivated your learners to create their own content and share it on your training platform, you can bet that some of it won’t qualify as a viable learning resource. Once again, it’s time to turn to the wisdom of the crowd. Let platform users vote for the content they like and give them a space to comment on the parts that don’t fit the bill. With everyone on your platform searching for great learning assets, you needn’t worry about missing any!
7. Make Sure Your Platform Is Mobile-Friendly
Your learners could stumble across a relevant and timely learning asset at any point during their working day. The chances of that happening while they’re sitting in front of a computer could be very slim. Make sure your learners can easily access your platform on their mobile and share a vital piece of knowledge whenever and wherever they come across it. Don’t just rely on text either – make sure they can take a photo or record a video and upload it without any problems. The next time you need visual, real-world examples to back up a learning objective, your learners will be able to chime in and contribute to an entire gallery!
Final Word
When your learners have the opportunity to contribute to the training program, something special happens. You create a sense of ownership for the training that extends beyond the Learning and Development department. Once this is in place, your knowledge bank will grow organically to become a useful resource that has real meaning and relevance. The result is a training program that’s perfectly tailored to those using it and a workforce that’s enthusiastically engaged with it. What could be better than that!?
