The Social LMS

<p><em>What does a successful social learning management solution look like, and can it be integrated within an existing LMS? </em></p><p>In the age of social media tools such as Facebook and Twitter, the traditional model of a learning management system must either quickly evolve or risk rapid obsolescence. Yesterday&rsquo;s LMS can no longer support the pace of lean, agile organizations and their digitally native learners.</p> <p >Social learning itself is nothing new. It has always represented a large percentage of the organization&rsquo;s total learning. It&rsquo;s just that in the past, employees would chat with cubemates or place a phone call to informally transfer knowledge.</p> <p >Today&rsquo;s learners view their organization as an extended social network in which there is someone who knows the answers to their questions &mdash; or knows where the answer resides. This self-directed, social-networked approach reshapes the learning model within the organization, and it exposes critical gaps in the traditional LMS solution. Further, because social learning is often unstructured and user-initiated, it can be very difficult to track. Traditional LMSs focus on such quantifiable events as course enrollment, SCORM-compliant e-learning and post-test results, but learning executives can&rsquo;t directly measure the number, outcomes and ROI of social learning.</p> <p >Yet social learning has matured to a point where its advocates desire a portion of the organization&rsquo;s learning and development budget. Therefore, the adoption of a social learning strategy requires the organization to re-examine its technology infrastructure as well as its approach to the learning process. It should achieve the following objectives: </p> <p>1. Encourage social learning throughout the organization.</p> <p >2. Measure outcomes that align with learning and business objectives.</p> <p>3. Support a culture of agile, continuous improvement.</p> <p >Chief learning officers also should ask themselves: What will a successful SLMS solution provide to the organization? Can it be integrated within an existing LMS? What features will be needed to facilitate social learning for a diverse audience of both digital natives and digital skeptics?</p> <p ><strong>The Age of User-Generated Learning</strong></p> <p>A few years ago, the Web 2.0 movement introduced the concept of user-generated content. With just a few clicks and keystrokes, Internet users were able to share their ideas with the world. Several popular Web 2.0 tools included:</p> <ul><li><strong>The ability to rate and review.</strong> For example, an Amazon customer could write a book review, and other book buyers could rate the value of these reviews. </li><li><strong>Creating your own "how to."</strong> Consumers, often frustrated with confusing user guides, could create their own and post them on YouTube. These videos often provided better and easier training than the manufacturers&rsquo; overly technical version. </li><li><strong>Instant Q&A.</strong> People could use Facebook or Twitter to ping their networks for answers.</li></ul> <p>Users have embraced these tools within their personal lives, and they now expect similar tools within the workplace. Anyone within the organization can create learning materials and distribute them to colleagues, vendors, clients and consumers. </p> <p>Social learning, according to its strongest proponents, will redefine the process of organizational training and development. Organizations will quickly leave the familiar world of expert-created, structured learning programs and migrate to a world where employees produce a wealth of user-generated content for their peers. Some claim that this transition is already under way, and organizations must embrace a new reality where communities within the company identify their own learning gaps and self-generate solutions.</p> <p>However, even the most well-intentioned user-generated learning can present a number of challenges to an organization, including:</p> <ul><li><strong>Dispersed locations. </strong>When unofficial solutions appear in different locations, learners must know about them to find them.</li><li><strong>Standards and structure.</strong> User-generated learning may vary in format from department to department.</li><li><strong>Resource quality.</strong> Creators may have limited expertise in adult learning and learning design.</li><li><strong>Organizational alignment. </strong>The time invested in creating these resources may not align with the organization&rsquo;s priorities.</li><li><strong>Validation.</strong>The content may not have been vetted by subject-matter experts.</li></ul> <p>User-generated learning solutions can sometimes become so popular that they are overwhelmed by their success. The creators&rsquo; bosses may wonder why this side project pulls employees from their assigned duties. Or a project may grow so large that it cannot scale efficiently. At that point, the project needs organizational support &mdash; and perhaps a champion. </p> <p>Based on her experience as a global director of learning for a leading telecommunications company, Corrine Cort shared the following wisdom: &ldquo;Social learning is unavoidable and enables agile knowledge transfer within organizations. But to be most effective, all levels of management must promote, enable and sustain the social learning systems.&rdquo;</p> <p><strong>Three Degrees of Influence</strong></p> <p>The traditional LMS solution revolves around content elements: courses, curricula and learning objects. The model assumes that learning flows in pre-established hierarchical pathways from the organization to learners. This traditional model, in many ways, is a flawed and partial view of organizational learning.</p> <p>Social learning requires organizations to rethink how learning spreads within the organization. Social learning cannot be tracked through a process flowchart. Instead, social learning flows dynamically from person to person within a community, and the key tools for understanding that process come from social network analysis. One common representation &mdash; the social graph &mdash; shows the following connections between individuals within the network:</p> <ul><li>Who is connected.</li><li>What information flows through the network.</li><li>Who accesses this information.</li><li>Who contributes new information to the network.</li></ul> <p>Researchers Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, authors of Connected: The Surprising Power of Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives, have studied the spread of behaviors through a network &mdash; behaviors such as smoking cessation, obesity and happiness. Research has shown that individuals are not only influenced by their friends, but also by the friends of their friends&rsquo; friends &mdash; in other words, by third-degree connections.</p> <p>The traditional LMS approach treats learners as discrete individuals who solely interact with course material. Social networking theory allows us to look at networks of interconnected people who create statistically significant impacts on one another&rsquo;s behaviors. We enter a world where social learning creates continuous ripples that touch upon issues traditionally addressed by talent management and organizational development.</p> <p><strong>12 People, Including You, Like This</strong></p> <p>Currently, social learning environments provide only rudimentary tools to visualize the social learning networks within an organization. Therefore, social learning environments must be managed by people capable of serving as online community managers who monitor the health of the community and promote its best solutions. </p> <p>The social graph can be mapped by analyzing many different data sources, including patterns in the following activities:</p> <ul><li>New thread and resource creation.</li><li>Response rates and discussions within the community.</li><li>Ratings patterns and endorsements &mdash; the &ldquo;stars&rdquo; or &ldquo;thumbs up.&rdquo;</li><li>Frequency of document downloads.</li><li>Blogtrackbacks, referral URLs and retweets.</li></ul> <p>These data points do not represent the entirety of the informal social learning that occurs within the organization. However, social network analysis provides the clearest view yet into the health of an organization&rsquo;s informal social learning behaviors. Until now, these behaviors had been practically immeasurable and therefore unmanageable. </p> <p>Yet managing an online social learning environment will take more than printing and filing a monthly activity report. Here, lessons can be learned from many marketing departments, which have cracked the code for online community managers who maintain the relationship between a brand and its most loyal fans. The community manager serves many roles: </p> <ul><li>Encourages contributions from fans.</li><li>Creates campaigns to attract new members into the community.</li><li>Serves as a bidirectional conduit between the fans and the organization.</li><li>Reports on the health of the community to the organization.</li></ul> <p>While an organization&rsquo;s employees clearly differ from its fans, enthusiastic internal learning communities will likely also score highly in traditional metrics, such as employee satisfaction. By regularly monitoring the health of a community, gaps can be identified early. With this information in hand, the organization can dynamically reallocate its priorities or resources.</p> <p>Jane Hart, founder of the Center for Learning and Performance Technologies, believes that learning and development &ldquo;now needs to concern itself as much with helping employees become dynamic, agile, self-directed, smart learners as with creating learning solutions for them. Smart learners develop trusted resources and networks; use the most appropriate tools; and have the right mix of skills to make effective use of these tools and resources.&rdquo;</p> <p><strong>@CLO: Please Retweet</strong></p> <p>When creating a social learning strategy, keep the following five points in mind.</p> <p>1. <strong>The rate of change will accelerate. </strong>Social media tools are still in their infancy. Virtually all of today&rsquo;s most popular public social media tools were launched in the past decade: Wikipedia (2001), Facebook (2003), YouTube (2005) and Twitter (2006). These platforms will continue to evolve and grow. Additionally, new social media technologies will emerge in future years. </p> <p>2. <strong>Choose an environment that focuses on learners.</strong> Some organizations will embed social learning functionality within an LMS provided by a vendor. However, other organizations prefer open-source social learning solutions that accompany their open-source LMS. Regardless of your organization&rsquo;s choice, ensure that the solution focuses on the people within the social network rather than the mountains of content within the servers.</p> <p>3. <strong>Balance the open-world sandbox vs. intense metrics.</strong> An unmeasured sandbox social learning environment will encourage learner exploration, but it may also lose organizational focus. However, a highly measured and overmanaged environment may squelch collaboration and creativity. Community stakeholders must find and maintain balance.</p> <p>4. <strong>Listen to your users. </strong>Your learners will tell you what they need. You can also anticipate social learning trends by keeping up with social media. When people adopt a new social media technology in their personal lives, they will likely want to use it at work as well.</p> <p>5. <strong>Start with a pilot.</strong> Before launching a social learning environment within the entire organization, build a pilot community and nurture it. Weave it into existing programs. Then, let the program grow organically. People will soon ask to be added.</p> <p>Social learning environments create collaborative opportunities within communities of learners that cannot be achieved through traditional LMS solutions. However, these applications must still be accountable for providing clear value and ROI to the organization.</p>