COLLABORATIVE ONLINE LEARNING ACROSS YOUR ORGANIZATION. { perspectives } LEARNING DESIGN & DELIVERY

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1 COLLABORATIVE ONLINE LEARNING ACROSS YOUR ORGANIZATION { perspectives } LEARNING DESIGN & DELIVERY

2 ABOUT CORPORATE LEARNING Harvard Business Publishing Corporate Learning partners with clients to create world-class leadership development solutions for managers at all levels. Our team leverages the management insight, thought leadership, and expertise of Harvard Business School faculty and authors from Harvard Business Review to create tailored leadership development solutions. With more than twenty years of practical experience, our innovative, technology-enabled solutions drive meaningful and lasting business results. Corporate Learning is a market group within Harvard Business Publishing. ABOUT HARVARD BUSINESS PUBLISHING Harvard Business Publishing was founded in 1994 as a not-for-profit, wholly owned subsidiary of Harvard University. Its mission is to improve the practice of management and its impact in a changing world. The company achieves its mission through its relationships with customers in three market groups: Higher Education, Corporate Learning, and Harvard Business Review Group. Through these platforms, Harvard Business Publishing is able to influence realworld change by maximizing the reach and impact of its essential offering ideas Harvard Business School Publishing. All rights reserved. Harvard Business Publishing is an affiliate of Harvard Business School.

3 COLLABORATIVE ONLINE LEARNING ACROSS YOUR ORGANIZATION The demographic shift to the millennial generation. The ongoing globalization of the economy. The increasing formal and informal use of social media in the workplace. These trends combine to make collaboration an important part of the future of online learning. BY JENNIFER GASPAR AND TC HALDI MAKING SPACE FOR GOOD CONVERSATION AS PART OF THE EDUCATIONAL PROCESS PROVIDES THE OPPORTUNITY FOR REFLECTION ON AND MEANING-MAKING ABOUT EXPERIENCES THAT IMPROVES THE EFFECTIVENESS OF EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING. DAVID KOLB AND RON FRY Peer-to-peer, or collaborative, learning is increasingly playing a more prominent role in leadership development, and the use of social learning tools Internet-based applications that enhance and contextualize the online learning experience is supporting this growth. More and more individuals are connecting with colleagues and peers through online media. A July 2012 McKinsey & Company report on the social economy indicated that of 4,200 enterprises worldwide surveyed, 70% are using social technologies for communication and collaboration. Interacting with peers can be one of the most engaging and effective aspects of a successful learning experience. While peer interactions always have been central to good face-to-face classroom experiences, incorporating collaborative learning into traditional elearning programs has been difficult. As the use of elearning continues to rise, however, learning professionals must find ways to drive and facilitate learning from and with others as part of their online learning delivery. The demand for this approach is only going to grow. The workforce is changing, and as employees use Internet-based technologies outside the workplace, they expect these technologies to be part of their professional HARVARD BUSINESS PUBLISHING CORPORATE LEARNING { 1 }

4 experiences as well. The new generation of online learning programs must provide social learning tools that enable collaboration. Collaboration Is the Future of Online Learning Cultural forces demographics, globalization, the Social Web that are changing the world at large are helping transform online learning from a solitary activity to an increasingly collaborative experience. DEMOGRAPHICS In Plugged In: The Generation Y Guide to Thriving at Work, Tamara Erickson notes that those born between 1980 and 2000 Generation Y, or the millennials will dominate the workforce from 2010 through As Karie Willyerd pointed out in her Learning 2009 presentation, A Hitchhiker s Guide to the New Learning Ecosystem, millennials, the ones you need to hire to replace the retiring boomers, are networked 24/7 and expect the company to accommodate pervasive connectivity. In order to attract and retain promising new talent, organizations will have to provide collaborative technologies. GLOBALIZATION The emerging workforce will also be more geographically dispersed. As organizations continue to expand globally, and as more workers perform their jobs remotely, organizations must provide their workers with the ability to communicate seamlessly in ways that emulate real-time, person-to-person interactions with their colleagues in other locations. THE SOCIAL WEB We now have access to a wealth of tools and technologies that enable around-the-clock interaction via the Web. Most likely your organization is starting to use these tools for recruiting, working groups, and even learning. But if you haven t begun to implement these tools within your learning programs, it s time to reconsider. Your learners and not just the millennials are going there. A survey conducted several years ago by Harvard Business Publishing found that by early 2010 more than 40% of the learning professionals surveyed were already seeing the impact of social networking tools within their leadership development programs. Why is this so important? Research has long supported the notion that the majority of training at organizations takes place informally, where workers interact with each other and try things out on the job. (The Institute for Research on Learning, 2000) Elliott Masie, founder of the Learning Consortium and The MASIE Center, noted in Learning TRENDS 2009 that social learning was an emerging practice in which organizations provide structures to enhance the informal social learning taking place there. Bersin by Deloitte sees social learning as a catalyst for the transformation in L&D. In The Corporate Learning Factbook 2013, they wrote, We believe that the evolution to informal learning will be of a similar magnitude as the switch to elearning that began over a decade ago. The challenge in creating more collaborative online learning programs is to understand the tools and technologies available and how to select the social learning tools that you can implement to best promote collaborative learning at your organization. Choosing the Right Tools Of the many social learning tools available, not all will necessarily be appropriate for online learning in your organization. Why is this the case? For one thing, many organizations are not equipped technologically or culturally to implement the full spectrum of options. Others can t implement social learning tools because of security and privacy limitations. And some need more evidence of the value and effectiveness of the tools. Thus, organizations need to make carefully considered, strategic decisions regarding the social learning tools that will best support their specific online learning efforts. These are the types of selective decisions that we made when designing the collaborative features in Harvard ManageMentor, an online resource for management essentials. How does Harvard ManageMentor take online learning to a new level? What social learning tools does it include? And how will these collaborative capabilities impact your learners and your organization? { 2 } collaborative online learning across your organization

5 Bringing Collaborative Learning to Online Learning Harvard Business Publishing s learning heritage is drawn from Harvard Business School, which established the case method, a participant-centered learning approach that is the foundation of its curriculum. As a result, participant-centered learning informs the way we approach the design of all our products and programs. In a self-paced, online learning experience, the inclusion of social learning tools allows for more peer-to-peer-based participation and collaboration around learning than does a static elearning experience alone. With its collaboration features, Harvard ManageMentor builds on a highly successful approach to online learning and performance support. It incorporates social learning tools for collaboration around proven, high-quality content, underscoring Harvard Business Publishing s interactive, contextual approach to learning. In doing so, Harvard ManageMentor focuses on providing all learners from traditionalists to millennials with intuitive methods for making informal learning opportunities more effective and available and for institutionalizing organizational knowledge in a way that appeals to a broad spectrum of learners. Harvard ManageMentor s social learning tools include: RECOMMENDATIONS Learners can rate specific content elements at a granular not just modular level and view and link to the most recommended pages. DISCUSSION FORUMS Dynamic feeds of the most recent postings give learners the ability to discuss core concepts in real time. COMMENTS Sections on each page allow learners to share their thoughts with their colleagues. The ability to within content pages provides learners with a familiar way to quickly and easily share and exchange information about content. POLLING Learners can provide valuable feedback about the online learning content in and of itself and within the context of your organization. Harvard ManageMentor offers two types of polling: ooorganization-specific poll: a poll that an administrator can populate with his or her own questions to initiate responses and promote sharing among employees. oolearning poll: placed at various points throughout the content, learning polls allow learners to submit answers and see how their colleagues respond within the context of the learning content. Hybrid Approach Drives Engagement As Masie has observed, there are two different approaches to social learning: o odesigned social learning requires high levels of facilitation and guidance to get people accustomed to using social media tools. o ograssroots social learning, on the other hand, assumes that learners will utilize social networks (internal and external) to support and extend the learning experience. The millennials who will compose the majority of the workforce during the next few decades will be more likely to use these tools as a matter of course, without requiring (or wanting) structure. Both of these models of social learning are exciting and appropriate in different learning situations. (Learning TRENDS, February 24, 2009) Harvard ManageMentor s hybrid approach to social learning incorporates a carefully selected blend of designed and grassroots social learning, providing a powerful collaborative online learning resource for a variety of learning situations and learners. In addition, Harvard ManageMentor offers configurable content components, or widgets. Widgets highlight conversations taking place among employees and call out the most recommended and commented pieces of content. These widgets not only generate daily interest and promote usage and return visits, they also help drive further collaboration within an organization s specific business context. HARVARD BUSINESS PUBLISHING CORPORATE LEARNING { 3 }

6 What s Not Included in Harvard ManageMentor No gratuitous technology. Your online learning content dictates which technologies will be deployed, not the other way around. The social learning technologies in Harvard ManageMentor simply enable collaboration around the content that your organization is already delivering. No blogs or wikis. As exciting and useful as blogs and wikis can be, they require frequent content generation, and many learning professionals simply do not have the time or resources to devote to this task. Most organizations that are interested and invested in more time-intensive social learning tools are already implementing them outside of the bounds of a specific online learning program like Harvard ManageMentor. As a result, we chose not to include blogs or wikis in Harvard ManageMentor. The Value of Using Harvard ManageMentor s Social Learning Tools The tools that we did select for Harvard ManageMentor are those that allow learners to quickly and easily generate and share information with their colleagues within the context of their own experiences and within the context of organizational culture and goals. These social learning tools provide great value to learners and organizations in the areas of: RELEVANT, CONTEXTUAL CONTENT While employee-generated knowledge and insights are highly valuable to contextual learning, this information traditionally has been difficult to capture and disseminate. Harvard ManageMentor provides an intuitive, collaborative platform for capturing institutional knowledge that, when delivered in conjunction with Harvard ManageMentor s top-quality management and leadership skills content, provides an unparalleled online learning experience. HIGH-IMPACT LEARNING EXPERIENCE As the educational theorists David Kolb and Ron Fry pointed out nearly forty years ago in their article Toward an Applied Theory of Experiential Learning, which appeared in Theories of Group Process, Human beings naturally make meaning from their experiences through conversation. Making space for good conversation as part of the educational process provides the opportunity for reflection on and meaning-making about experiences that improves the effectiveness of experiential learning. Social learning, in other words, is how human beings learn instinctively, and it s how they derive the most meaning from their learning experiences. Today, the conversation that Kolb and Fry deemed so important may well be taking place online. INCREASED USAGE An engaging and collaborative online learning experience helps drive higher usage and understanding of content. SCALABILITY Harvard ManageMentor scales to allow learners in geographically dispersed organizations of any size to engage in collaborative learning, in real time and asynchronously. ACCESS TO MORE TIMELY INFORMATION Harvard ManageMentor features, such as discussion forums with recent posting feeds, provide learners with instant access to the most up-to-date information about specific content, increasing its relevancy and applicability. Collaboration Provides a More Powerful Online Learning Experience Harvard ManageMentor is a truly collaborative online learning resource that enables iterative implementation of social learning functionality based on each organization s technological and cultural preparedness. With learners themselves blurring the lines between the formal and informal use of social learning tools in the workplace, Harvard ManageMentor s approach is a both timely and appropriate one for a workforce in generational and geographical transition. Without careful consideration of the audience, the content, and your organization s culture, collaborative online learning won t succeed. Nor will just tacking the latest social learning tools onto a leadership development program. Fully integrating social learning capabilities within the design of a learning solution, so that they help fuel discussion, exploration, and learning around critical content, is what will move the needle for learners and for organizations. { 4 } collaborative online learning across your organization

7 ABOUT THE AUTHORS JENNIFER GASPAR is director of enterprise learning for Harvard Business Publishing s flagship product line, Harvard ManageMentor. She is responsible for managing the solution s portfolio throughout its life cycle and developing strategic partnerships and initiatives. Her background includes over fourteen years experience in managing and creating experiences across multiple media formats for both consumer-facing and elearning solutions. She can be reached at jgaspar@harvardbusiness.org. TC HALDI is director of learning design for Harvard Business Publishing Corporate Learning. She is responsible for overseeing the pedagogy, content, and user experience of Harvard Business Publishing s portfolio of corporate leadership development solutions. Her background in developing technology-enabled learning solutions spans fifteen years. She can be reached at tchaldi@harvardbusiness.org.

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