How To Boost Social Learning Through A Learning Management System
Social learning is a cognitive process that lets people discuss learning objectives and enables them to share their perspectives. It’s an easy way to help peers understand better by breaking down complicated points into a language that they comprehend. This not only improves the learning efficiency of the people, but also acts as a catalyst for organizational transformations.
Social learning helps employees connect better with each other, which, in a way, repairs broken links of complete communication of vision and values within the organization. It makes learning a continuous process, even when the employees are not undergoing any formal training, and keeps them engaged and motivated to improve their knowledge and skill sets.
A Learning Management System (LMS) plays a vital role in engaging your employees and boosts social learning with improved interaction. Here is how you boost social learning through a Learning Management System in 11 easy ways:
1. Public News Feed
Amy Jo Martin once said "Social media is the ultimate equalizer. It gives a voice and a platform to anyone willing to engage". Today, the need to engage learners has led the news feed to become an extremely important feature of any social platform. This allows learners to express their views by sharing, liking or commenting on their industry-specific articles. Through an LMS, the admins can create surveys, polls, etc. to engage learners based on topics of their interest in the industry.
2. Discussion Groups
Creating topic-specific discussion groups within the Learning Management System provides a platform to your employees, who are brimming with innovative ideas but don’t have a platform to share. Such discussion groups can provide a productive space for like-minded employees, such as tech nerds or process-oriented people who wish to simplify steps in the administration department. These groups can later help in building training courses that are focused on relevant topics.
3. The Live Chat Functionality
The live chat feature enables learners or employees to connect with each other internally and gives them the space to discuss issues and clarify doubts that they may not want to present in front of a crowd. This works best for bringing your employees or learners together and resolves issues related to the communication gap. Adding other users and having group conversations can make it easier for them to interact with each other and exchange knowledge and views.
4. The Chance To Ask The Experts
'Ask the Experts' is a social learning functionality that can be used in an LMS to help learners find answers to topic-specific issues or queries. The Subject Matter Experts become the go-to-section that welcomes learners to clear their doubts and resolve their problems on a real-time basis. As these doubts, problems, and issues are addressed and resolved, these can be stored for future use and reference for employees encountering similar problems.
5. Content Analysis, Feedback, And Comments
Providing a comment section or a feedback-form at the end of any training or course material can help learning managers or course developers to focus on areas that need improvement for providing efficient and effective training to the learners. Simple comments like 'thank you', 'this was helpful' or, 'XYZ was not properly explained in the course' are of great importance to improve training programs for your learners. Learners can also flag content that is irrelevant or outdated.
6. User-Generated Content
An LMS can act as a platform for learners to share their work-related videos, research documents, or industry updates through their mobile devices. This user-generated content can help other learners with videos of their sales demos, market research, and planning sessions, etc., thereby, creating a huge bank of training material for all learners.
7. Social Media Integrations
Integrating social media icons for learners to share their progress or achievements on social platforms can boost their performance. With this, they can share their professional success with their personal network. Basically, it’ll give them a moment of pride for growing in their professional career.
8. Gamification
Showing progress of learners through badges and leaderboards is an effective way to engage learners. Gamification and social learning go hand in hand to ensure that learners are engaged and motivated at regular intervals. Moreover, earning badges and achievements creates a healthy competition among peers to improve performance and boost engagement.
9. Learners’ User Profiles
A majority of social platforms ask users to add their job title, email, etc. This allows learners to add their skills, work related interests, and their professional achievements on their Learning Management System profiles, which can allow them to be a part of projects that best suit their skill sets.
10. Badges For Learners’ Performances
Badges in an LMS allow managers to communicate and share constructive feedback with their team members. Giving away badges to top performers is an effective way to acknowledge the efforts of a team member and demonstrate the reason why they earned it. These praise badges drive learners to bring out their best at work.
11. Being Social Is Being Responsive
In a world where our day starts with looking at mobile devices, it is a necessity for an LMS to be mobile responsive in order to boost social learning. A large part of learning takes place on such devices and, irrespective of where they are located, the information should be accessible to all learners at all times, so that they can participate in important discussions and seamlessly share their perspectives.
Hence, utilizing the social functionality of an LMS to the fullest can reap great results in terms of learner engagement.
