eLearning Guild Research: Is Your LMS Social Enough?

How important is social learningto eLearning Guild members? It seems to be close to crossing the tipping point.The eLearning Guild’s recent research report, Evaluating and Selecting a Learning Management System, asks a few questions related to social learning thatgive us some insights about how respondents were feeling in September 2012,when they completed the survey about their learning management systemsexperiences and insights.

How important are social media features to users?

It wasn’t too long ago that sociallearning wasn’t even a part of LMSs. Now many LMSs support one or more socialmedia features. In the survey, we asked respondents to tell us how importantthese features were to them; Figure 1 shows their responses.

Figure 1: Importance ofsocial media features

The author of the report, Steve Foreman, analyzed theresults and found that, on average, just under half of the respondents ratedthe individual social media features as veryimportant or extremely important.The social media features are most important to respondents using academic LMSproducts. Knowledgebases, discussions, online communities, and user ratings arethe most important of the social media features, followed by wikis and blogs. Foremanfound that those using academic LMSs were more interested in social mediafeatures than those with corporate LMSs and wondered if that was because of thesecurity challenges in corporate environments. This challenge is discussed inmore detail in the research report.

The future role(s) of the LMS

Social learning comes up again when looking at the futurerole of the LMS. Many things are changing in learning, including informal andsocial learning, mobile learning, and performance support. Many of us aretalking about the changing role of formal learning and therefore the changingrole for learning management systems. Some are even questioning the need forlearning management systems.

With that in mind, we asked respondents to select astatement that best describes their view of the role of the LMS in theirorganization in the 2013 – 2015 timeframe (Figure 2).

Figure 2: The future role ofthe LMS in the 2013 – 2015 timeframe

Most respondents agreed on the need to continue using theLMS to manage traditional course delivery. Formal learning programs, at leastin the next few years, will continue to be important, especially forcompliance, onboarding, and certification, and for academic courses.

The Experience API

But notice there was also a lot of interest in using the LMSto manage social and informal learning! The key enabler for tracking andreporting on social and informal learning is the Experience API. Want tounderstand more? Because of the changes in tracking, Steve has included anappendix within the report (Figure 3) on the Experience API (Tin Can) to helpreaders understand how that will be changing the future role of the LMS. You’lldefinitely want to download and read this.

Figure 3: Appendix: The Experience API

To understand why social and informal learning is so important to your organization’s learning, take advantage of your eLearning Guild membership and download the research reports on informal learning and social learning as well as this LMS report.