These are my live blogged notes from a webinar presented by Brandon Hall on Wednesday, April 26 2011. (I joined about 10 minutes late, so missed a bit!)
Tom Werner, Chief Research Officer, Brandon Hall
LMSs are adding social features – including RSS feeds, peer ratings of content. In Brandon Hall’s research, haven’t talked to a single LMS vendor who is NOT adding these tools.
Social media allow:
- Conversations to continue after training
- Peer-to-peer interaction in groups – so learners can continue to learn
- Find individualized answers (by approaching instructors and fellow learners)
- Share your own content
Makes training more efficient
- Can shorten formal training, because the conversation continues.
- It’s now available on demand as it’s needed.
- More content can be created by more contributors.
- Can get more feedback about what’s working!
Social media can reach different audiences:
- New employees and recently trained can now connect with each other
- Expert employees who got missed by training – now have a way to contribute and can become mentors and coaches.
- Social media communities can now create communities for external learners – customers, resellers, technicians.
Best practices of social media for learning: (these 3 examples one Brandon Hall Awards of Excellence):
Chrysler Academy 2.0
- Doing more real time certification and performance support for dealer personnel.
- Customers are now so knowledgeable about cars using the Internet.
- Wanted to make learning “an everyday event”.
- Draw knowledge from dealerships.
- Used Ektron (www.methodfactory.com) a content management system – which allowed search, tagging, RSS, links, blogs, polls, surveys.
- Everyone has their own profile like they do on Facebook.
- Reduced time to deliver info to dealers from 2 weeks to 1 day.
- Reduced cost of new-vehicle launch kits from $100,000 to about $15,000.
Cisco Learning Network
- Cisco wanted to support certifications around the world for technicians who service their networks.
- Wanted to increase # cert holders worldwide – the network experts – wanted more resources and options.
- Traditional one way web pages weren’t enough.
- Wanted more collaboration and conversation, so people could access already certified people’s expertise. Wanted to move away from certification as in individual pursuit.
- Video, podcasts, discussion forums, games, mentoring programs (Partner new learners with those already certified).
- Polls, blogs, search (similar to chrysler).
- Measured results in terms of usage – 7 million site visits over 20 month period.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise Sales Fitness Center
- Sales professionals.
- Wanted to minimize formal training to minimize time spent out of field.
- Wanted to connect sales training with day-to-day selling (if sales people don’t immediately apply training to their real-world experiences, they tend to reject it quickly).
- Create a safe place for people to ask their questions
- Sales people could share their own content.
- Used Microsoft SharePoint – blogs, wikis, messaging, polls, surveys, RSS feeds (get alerted when content is updated).
- Want sales people talking about real-world sales experiences with their peers.
- Saved $7,500 per learner (over formal training).
- Survey findings (level 1 evals) showed positive reactions from the learners.
3 key take-aways from these case studies:
- Don’t rely on “if they build it they will come” – still use some ‘push’ technolgoy – like email – to draw learners in so they start to see the value
- They don’t obsess about measurement. They try lots of things.
- They don’t worry if not everyone loves it. It’s not going to work for everyone. Not every single tool needs 100% participation.
Ann Shea with Quick Lessons http://www.quicklessons.com/
Social media tools for learning
Risks and concerns:
Biggest challenges for orgs – benefits are not clear
To start using social media…don’t need to be as big as HP or Chrysler!
Tools that you bring in to your org. What considerations?
- Costs – both of tool and the opportunity cost
- Look at terms of use and legal implications (who owns the content created in a site)
- Does the site let you export your content?
- Can you control access and create private groups?
- Is it easy for learners to use? (Everyone’s familiar with Facebook – people wouldn’t have the same resistance to FB as with a new tool).
- Are these tools being built into your LMS?
Intranet:
What can you do on your Intranet already? (e.g., SharePoint) – profiles, tags, ratings
Private social networks:
- yammer (widely used in corporate world – over 100,00 corporate users!)
- edmodo (originally developed for teachers and schools – includes grading features
- social go – sharing features, including video, blogging and works with Wordpress
- allow microblogging, profiles, groups, messaging, questions, polls, tagging, search
Public social networks:
- Ning
- Yahoo Groups
- Google groups
- Some of these have member control and private groups
the most accessed site in 2010! 1/8 minutes online is spent on FB! Why companies consider blocking it, but should also be a place for companies to consider going… 40% of users are 35+ – the demographic has changed!)
Jane Bozarth! – Trainers can use FB to fill the gaps and keep learners engaged between formal events.
90% of facebook users don’t return to a fan page once the click the like button
The most popular types of content on FB:
- image with text
- image
- video
- text
- external links (put actual link not a shortened link – people on FB want to know where they’re going.
- polls
- keep these in mind when you design…
a new linked in user every second!
A more business-oriented environment. But it’s not as user friendly as FB. Good for external training, partners, vendors.
Members only groups on LinkedIn for training – set up a private group (members have to request to join or be invited – and then approved by the manager)
Reminder – anything posted on the Internet can potentially be viewed by anyone…
Very real time oriented – the pulse of what people are talking about
Use hashtags # on topics and @ signs for people
Can share links, take online notes
File sharing for collaboration:
- As trainers work to develop content – share with each other and share with users
- Drobox, Google Docs, Box.net
Video Conferencing
- Skype, ooVoo, Google Voice,Vuroom, Vonage
- Good for more immediacy, for more expressive training, can do screen sharing
- recording sessions so they can be shared later
- Can also create user groups within a conference call so you can have chat
Presentation Sharing Sites
To share PPTs, PDFs, videos, etc.
- SlideShare
- Prezi, SlideSix, SlideRocket, mybrainshark
Online Polls & Surveys
Mix polls ad surveys with social media for more engagement and better material
- PollDaddy
- SurveyMonkey
- (Facebook has just added this to groups)
Video Sharing
- Trainers can use video sharing sites to post videos…
- demo a product, present lecture-type content, share tips, etc.
- YouTube, Vimeo
Wikis
Share text, images, hyperlinks
Social Media Policy
The list goes on…blogs, RSS feeds, whiteboarding, etc….
Product Pitch for Quicklessons http://www.quicklessons.com/
collaborative online course creation in the cloud
Lots of connection with facebook and Izzui– invite people to courses, share them, people can like them..”an entire social network surrounding your content” – it’s still in beta. They will be at ASTD ICE in Orlando. Izzui is SCORM compliant.
