Question from a client:

We have a new Learning Management System (LMS). How can it help us to induct new people into the organisation?

Okay. We need to think about what both the organisation and the new employee wants to achieve. A colleague of mine once said to me, in the first three weeks a new employee wants to:

1. satisfy themselves that their decision to join the organisation was the right one
2. prove to the organisation that their decision to engage the new employee was the right one

The organisation typically wants the new employee to become productive as soon as possible. And they want to mitigated risk by ensuring the new employee is conversant with important policies and guidelines.

E-Learning to mitigate risk

It’s important to think about learner ‘state’ (see points 1 & 2 above) when designing the key messages in compliance courseware. It’s important to couch the content and assessment appropriately, to reflect the people aspects of the culture. The LMS plays a role in tracking course completion from a reporting perspective.

E-Learning to enable productivity

Before we begin on this topic, it’s useful to think about ways of chunking induction-related training:

1. Induction from a) organisation, b) department, and c) role perspectives. A new employee should be inducted into policies, procedures, tasks and people from each of these three business perspectives (a, b, c). It’s useful to take a co-ordinated approach to designing Induction, so that all 3 perspectives are presented and trained in synergy.
2. Collison & Parcel’s two famous knowledge management questions to the stimulus question of “I have a need”
• a) What do others know about it? How do I find them? (think social networks) and
• b) What information is available? How do I find it? (think information management and performance support)

Effective social networks (live or online) help staff to satisfy their productivity needs. An effective social network is one that is responsive, well used, and has norms in place in relation to sharing and collaboration, so that people know what’s expected of them. The role of L&D is to show new employees how to engage in social networks to get what they need and to contribute.

Performance support tools are aids that have been specifically designed and mediated through technology for the purpose of supporting performance at the point-of-need. The role of L&D is to be an informal guide to help new employees learn to diagnose their needs and then use the performance support tools properly to satisfy the need.

At this time, most LMS play a weak role in enabling productivity. We need to look at more agile and heuristuc systems; systems that provide information and people at the point of need. Think mobile apps for in-the-field needs, group decision support systems, social intranets and other and social platforms such as Jive.

The bottom line

• Induction should be a holistic and co-ordinated effort of both centralised and decentralised parts of the business – organisation, department, role.
• We need to be mindful of how we portray the organisation in compliance e-learning courses – the focus should be on ensuring employees know how to behave to keep them safe and happy and what to do if they don’t feel safe/happy. The focus should not appear to be an exercise to satisfy the organisation’s legal requirements.
• To enable employees to be productive as soon as possible, we need to evaluate the social aspects of the business as well as the support tools available to staff. Active organisational ‘knowledge’ can only be found in the minds of the individual and the collective, so let’s use technology to better enable our employees to solve problems.
• The role of L&D stretches beyond instructional design to that of a learning architect – who can see and understand how systems, processes and people inter-relate and how these work together to drive efficient productivity, and even innovation.

Episode 18 e-learning tutorial examines some of the skills required of employees to effectively engaged in social media for learning and workplace performance.

Why not download this free e-learning training from iTunes

Or read the Transcript

Or watch the entire free e-learning tutorial series on our YouTube channel (Episode 18 is embedded below).

Yesterday I wrote that introducing asynchronous social media for formal organisation learning is difficult – see 4 Considerations for Implementing Social Media for Formal Learning. I suggested we need to become creative in design, and look at social media to help embed learning into the workplace. Below is a description of one such creative solution.

In 2006 I was working for a Pharma company and was completing my MA (E-Learning) at UTS. I knew about work from Thiagi, in particular learning games using email. For one of my Uni subjects, I designed a learning interface that essentially simplified and aggregated a email learning activity. The company’s web designer developed the solution using an old technology that is rarely used these days – but it worked! We called the platform LearnShare.

The platform had an administration ‘back end’ that enabled our Learning and Development (L&D) team to create scenarios. We could enter text and upload supporting pictures/video. For example, a sales scenario:

“You are about to see Dr X. You have heard she prefers using Y product to your product but you need to confirm this. What are two open questions you can use to uncover Dr X’s preferred treatment option?”

Below the question is a free text box. Learners were pre-warned that what they enter in the text box will be viewed by the learning community, so take you post seriously.

On the following page the question is repeated, and the responses are listed, beginning with a response from the subject expert. This process of question > text response > community view is repeated to represent the progression of conversation in the sales call.

We could build this scenario in about 30 minutes in response to a field issue, new clinical paper or competitor activity. We would send it to the sales team on a Monday and close it on Friday. The administration functionality provided reporting. It also enabled me to download the question and free-text responses as a PDF and send it to the team, thereby enabling learners who participated early to see the input of the late respondents.

What this enabled was an automated way of gathering meta-perspectives of the team to a problem, issue or opportunity. The PDF could be printed and taken into the field.

The benefits of LearnShare:

• Low administration (compared with aggregating emails)
• Simple to build, enabling L&D to be highly responsive to business needs
• Learner access was simply a URL sent by email
• Peer pressure was used to ensure contribution – you looked pretty silly if you tried to bypass the text box by simply writing ‘xxx’, as it was captured under you name for all to see.
• It was practical for learners – they know why they were doing it – there would be something for them at the end of the week that they could use the following week to help solve real sales issues.

Although the learning exercise was formal (i.e. created by L&D), the purpose of the activity was practical and work-based. This is an example of the kind of blended learning I was referring to last post. LearnShare was an example of the L&D role transition from the classroom to ‘enabling’ work-based sharing.

Why do e-learning providers hate this kind of technology? Because it’s L&D generated, and the results can’t sit in a LMS. I am yet to see this learning technology made available commercially.

Although it meant I had learner reports in 2 databases (the LMS for courseware, and LearnShare), consider the higher order assessment of learner skill I was able to achieve with LearnShare compared with LMS trackable multiple choice.

Most of all, LearnShare enabled L&D to play a pivotal role in workplace sharing. LearnShare enabled creative thinking and problem-solving happen quickly in response to changes in in field conditions.

I’d love to read your comments about the LearnShare learning design. Please feel free to comment.

A question from an organisational learning partner:

What are some tips for implementing social media into formal learning?

Implementing social media for formal organisational learning is not easy. It’s success is very dependent on learner motivation. We can expect students to participate in online social learning activities as part of assessment for tertiary programs, because the carrot is a qualification and the stick is no qualification. And, as anyone who has taught in a tertiary institution knows, students will usually contribute the least amount possible to gain the assessment points.

Additionally, it has been well documented that social media works because it is the users choice (“I Choose”). The personalisation available on social media platforms makes them work “just for me”. Such personalisation is often missing in the functionality of corporate and academic social media platforms.

So, how can we implement social media into formal organisational learning? The ease of adoption is dependent on at least four considerations:

1. The length of the course or program. If the course is short, then likely not enough time will have passed to enable participants to become familiar with the rules and norms of contributing in an online space. Additionally, participants may not have had the opportunity to get to know each other well enough to have built trust to share openly and meaningfully in an online space. Longer programs, such as a 12 month Graduate program, has a better chance of success.

2. The degree of clout you have to enforce contribution. If the activities designed in the social media space are intended to help embed learning into the workplace (for example, through action learning), then this must be driven by an online facilitator who ensures learner accountability. If the activities are not mandated and reported upon, then it is highly unlikely employees will do the activities.

3. Synchronous versus asynchronous social media. Asynchronous social media (e.g. blog, discussion forum, wiki) take a lot of effort for learners to contribute. And their contributions are captured for ‘eternity’ – so bad luck if your posted opinion is ill-informed. This makes asynchronous learning activties unattractive.

Synchronous social media, such as webinar (virtual classroom), instant messaging and video streaming takes far less effort to attend, respond and contribute. In my experience, if you are looking to implement social media into formal learning curricula, a well designed and facilitated webinar is a good option. Webinars are very successful pre and/or post classroom events to support learning transfer - just one example.

4. Facilitator skill. A number of pedagogical frameworks have been proposed to help guide the design and facilitation of social learning activities. For example, refer to Gilly Salmon’s 5 stage model. Designing and facilitating in a social media space is a new and very different skill for most organisational learning professionals.

Other tips such as proximity of the platform to participant workflow, ease of use, clear purpose etc are similar to my work-based social media tips and should also be considered in formal social learning design.

Social media and blended learning

If you are considering social media for your formal learning offerings, then you will probably need to think creatively about what this will look like, and the motivation of your intended audience. Perhaps the best approach is to create a holistic, blended learning approach; to use social media to create informal work-based opportunities that will support participants to embed what they have learnt from the formal learning event. Our role as learning practitioners in this scenario is to be an informal guide to learning; to be very familiar with participants, their work, behaviour and motivation.

I hope this post has been useful. For more posts and video tutorials on social media, click “Social media” in the categories list.

If you have a tip you would like to share, or a question, feel free to comment or use the Contact Us form.