Enabling Collaborative and Social Learning through Enterprise Social Network

In my previous blog on collaborative and social learning, we discussed about the need for technology to evolve and be enabler to support the self-directed informal learning. Technology platforms such as social networks allow individuals to share their ideas, their innovations, get feedback, improve their products, collaborate and help foster new way of learning we call ‘social learning’. These collaborative networks allow anyone and everyone to share information and be a student, a mentor, a designer and publisher.

Taking the informal learning to next level are the Enterprise Social Networks, where employees collaborate with each other across all sorts of boundaries. There is no limitation of department, or business function or location. Employees can connect to the right people when they need it, can share information across teams or even organize around projects to be successful and go further, faster. This allows individuals to tap into their network and discover wealth of information which is not available via formal means, allowing them to make quick decisions and getting things done. With these benefits of social network at enterprise level, what if someone wants to give structure to the information as a content object or a course and share with their network? What if someone in the network has successfully deployed a product and there is need to transform that as an instructional video to help others? What if someone has shared information with the network and others have rated that individual as an expert and there is a need to capture that expertise level? What if the benefits of enterprise social network can be extended with an integration to learning management system allowing employees to insert the training content as a course making it part of their social DNA?

This allows enterprises to transform their social networks into learning communities. Employees can access and share the knowledge within the network they spend most of their time. It empowers subject matter experts to capture their knowledge into structure courses and share with their network without any need to worry about connecting or logging into another application or tool. Not only it allows blending the formal and informal approaches to learning, it also allows ability to track the completion of content and giving credits to individuals to view or access the information shared through these courses. Many social network and learning platform providers are taking step in this direction and are partnering to make this happen. One of the popular enterprise collaboration platform and social network is delivered by Yammer. Yammer is used by 85% of the fortune 500 companies and it provides growth platform for these organizations to listen to each other and adapt quickly. Edubrite is an LMS provider and they have an app for Yammer allowing anyone in Yammer network to start training and assessing their teams easily. This enables and extends the enterprise social networks to offer integrated LMS environment making it easy to transform the informal content into shareable courses and truly enabling collaborating and social learning. For more information on EduBrite Yammer Integration.