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Riding the Digital Stream: Integrating Modern Learning Practice into Formal Programs
I was reading recently about the sad demise of theface-to-face meeting, and how much businesses would suffer from the loss of connectionsthat can be forged only around a table. While this may be true to a certainextent, I propose that the loss of in-person time in favor of digitalcollaboration carries the potential for so many other benefits, intended andnot.
Amplified by the interplay between formal learningprograms and informal and continuous organizational learning practice, what maybe lost at the conference table should lead to efficiencies and theincreasingly agile responsiveness that are coming to define our era. Learningprofessionals are the ones best suited to grab the torch and lead us torealizing that potential.
I present a few ideas here to help begin the journeyto break away from discrete training efforts and to join formal-personal andsocial-informal learning together in one continuous, systematic program. Butbefore diving in to specific ideas, let me set up some assumptions on which Ibuild my thinking.
Technology is (relatively) unimportant
Do you already have awell-accepted enterprise social network (ESN)? Great. Have no ESN in place or,worse, have an ESN that nobody finds useful? That’s OK, too. The tools andtechnologies to integrate communication and knowledge sharing are freelyavailable and needn’t be a monoculture. Some may use an intranet, othersTwitter, still others Facebook or (even) LinkedIn. That’s fine.
Whatever platform and toolsyou use today will be gone tomorrow: email can’t die soon enough, Twitter willbe replaced, and Facebook might already be at the end of its professional shelflife. Whatever time and tens of thousands of dollars your organization hasinvested in that new ESN will only be as useful as the ways in which people useit … that, and it will be obsolete in five years.
The key is the mindset youare nurturing. Getting integrated social learning off the ground is not atechnology problem: it’s harder than that, because the shift is more basic. It’sa practice and workplace culture problem. But, as we’ll see, it can beincremental and decentralized, which makes it much easier to begin, experiment,fail, and eventually find success.
Communication happens
We communicate in meetings,via email, on the phone, and in the hall. The fundamentals here are unchanged.What I’m proposing is that we substantively communicate as we always have, butadjust our practices to the digital technology we use to capture, retrieve,share, and synthesize our communication more meaningfully. We have changed andwill continue to change the media for communication (when is the last time youwrote a standard business letter? Or even had a lengthy, substantive phonecall?), but digital communication has native advantages that we’ve been slow toleverage effectively.
Collaboration happens
Again, nothing is beingreinvented here. We collaborate on projects all the time. The difference isthat the hierarchy of previous generations is being replaced by a network ofhubs, with each player in a collaboration interacting much more freely with theother players than was previously possible (or desirable?). Not that we don’thave clients and project managers, but we needn’t wait for gatekeepers for eachcollaborative partner to freely find information—and each other—at the momentof need. Efficient collaboration in the digital age, or what I call “thelearning age,” requires a somewhat different set of skills. Those skills arelearned, and we need to be deliberate about teaching them.
Learning happens
People learn. Nothing trainers,instructional designers (IDs), or teachers do changes that. Even if you feellike nobody in your company learns anything, if nothing else they learn what theycan get away with. Every day we continue to learn something about our jobs, ourvalue to our organization, our place in the larger professional context. Informal learning environments (synchronous or asynchronous), teachers, trainers,and IDs work hard to hold learners’ attention and deliver what we want them tolearn. But we are social learners, and the folks we admire are those whotake the initiative to learn the skills they need to thrive on the job. For therest, we need to teach, guide, mentor, and coach. That is our job: not tosimply make courses or deliver training, but to teach the skills to help ourpeople thrive.
Integrate eLearning and formal training programs in the digitalworld
Our work as IDs, eLearningdevelopers, trainers, L&D workers—whatever label you have that led you tothis publication and this article—is to rethink how our people learn, and how ourorganizations collectively grow, change, and iterate from that practicalknowledge. It requires thinking about our work differently, and it’s high timewe did.
When we separate andhomogenize content to make it into training, we remove the contextual cues fromthe content’s natural habitat and elevate that content to received wisdom:“This is how we do things here.” There may always be a place for that type offormal learning, but our approach should be to consider that as a last resort.If people could learn to function at a high level without the need for formaltraining, wouldn’t that be better?
To move toward that ideal,we need to begin to integrate the “natural” way of learning—contextual,on-the-job, and informal—into formal learning. I suggest there are numerousways to begin putting systems into place to align formal and informal learningefforts, but here I want to focus on how we can start to integrate our trainingand eLearning products into the broader stream of organizational knowledge.
Include social-digital learning in traditional eLearning and livetraining sessions.
When you have learners’attention during the short time of a formal learning activity, teach themsocial-learning practice.
- Directthem to add their thoughts or questions to a topic hashtag (#) or messageboard.
- Createa whiteboard (digital or not) or wiki for learners to learn from each other asthey move through the training you design. This space becomes a livingdiscussion and idea board for each cohort of learners.
- Ask learnersto go (physically or digitally) to their manager, the appropriate SME, or a stakeholderto get an answer to a question or to deepen the context of a particularlycomplex subject. Stakeholders’ work with novices helps solidify their ownunderstanding, and helps integrate them into social-learning practice, too.Make sure the key points are captured as an expectation of the learningactivity.
Teach learning skills as a high-priority component of yourorganization’s training program.
We expect that adults knowhow to learn. Looking closely, I have found that is far from true. Most thinkof learning as something that’s done in a classroom, not a daily activity thatneeds time for thought, reflection, and continual sense-making.
- Challengeyour learners to be systematic about how they learn.
- Teach themways to demonstrate what they’ve learned, such as curation, categorization,mind-mapping, regularly sharing, etc.
- Introduceproven methodologies, such as personal knowledge mastery (PKM) and otherknowledge management practices, and emphasize that ongoing personal learning isa top priority at your organization.
Promote all learners to become experts in their role or specificarea of work, and let them know you expect them to share that expertise.
Make sure that they knowthey can share their expertise via whatever social-digital tools are in play(ESNs, company intranets, specific hashtags, professional blogs and publications,etc.).
