Introduction
With the massive shift to remote working over the past few years, ted learning has been working with clients requiring more long-term learning solutions. They are looking for off the shelf and bespoke learning opportunities to work through in their own time with a balanced level of social learning activities and collaboration. Now, social learning has become quite prominent over the last few years and gaining more traction within the education industry (Semeshkina, 2022) but what does it mean and how are we embedding it at ted learning?
Social Learning Definition
Social learning was first defined in 1971 by Albert Bandura at Stanford University (Bandura 1971). Its general principles were that people learn more when they engage with each other or experience other people working. They also observe the direct experience of others actions and consequences to help inform their own learning and behaviour. To summarise, learning from each other by experiencing positive feedback, having challenging conversations and understanding where we went wrong leads to understand more about ourselves and improve performance.
Social Learning in an Online/Blended setting
How could this work within a blended or online context? Well, it means a lot more thought and pre-work is required to be put into an organisation’s learning journey if people won’t be physically together or will be working asynchronously. That also means it needs to be cost effective and available 24/7 to suit multiple learning needs. Social learning has risen and continued to trend amongst organisations (Growth engineering 2022) but does anyone get it right?
There is a lot of avenues to learn independently but it can be difficult to find availability for synchronous sessions for staff. Finding a happy medium of engaging learning asynchronously is the puzzle to solve here and to be ready to navigate a world of workers learning online, blended and remotely.
Social Learning via a learning platform
The managing director of Oxbridge, an online college, sums it up perfectly in this recent article “While online and edtech platforms do offer greater flexibility to fit around lifestyle and personal circumstances, maintaining an element of structure is still key” (Remote education is here to stay – optimising the home learning environment – FE News, 2022)
To ensure that social learning can happen within a dispersed workforce, it is essential that organisations use their VLE or LMS effectively to ensure they have the essential structure and tools to navigate through multiple modalities of learning content. In ted’s experience, often how people interact within the platform is an afterthought to just enrolling them and letting them get on with it. On our own ted hub platform, the preference is to onboard learners first and get them familiar and interacting with the system before working though the platform. That ensures that learners are understand what social and collaboration tools are available (discussions, blogs, real time chat, gamification, leadership boards, zoom sessions and learning groups) so they can utilise and share experiences whilst they navigate through our courses.
At ted we believe in designing and delivering learning experiences that provide an opportunity to approach the learning in a social and emotional way. That establishes a connection between learners and the learning material and when learners connect socially & emotionally with what they have learnt that link becomes stronger and that’s when it begins to make an impact in their personal and work lives Colin Hickie, Director of Digital Learning
Benefits of social learning for remote workforces
A well thought and planned learning environment, will ensure several benefits for your organisation:
- That learners can be engaged and thrive without much intervention from internal staff. With several clients, we have included lots of clear learning goals and pathways to follow alongside social learning tools that will ensure learners are good to go when undertaking their own learning. The less internal staff such as L&D or HR reps have the better and that only comes from having that pre-development work completed before launch.
- Social learning tasks should be seen as important to F2F delivery training. We advise clients and people managers that time should be set aside each week to work on any training they have and that they are given plenty time to discuss and share their learnings. Often the VLE or LMS is not seen as important to their roles when it comes to training even though most of our clients have learners who spend all day on their own devices. It’s important that learning is not seen as something “when you have time” and rather “make sure you spend 15% of your working week on training”.
- Courses in health, compliance and data are perfect for this type of approach to learning as you can either set up your learning journey to work through these types of courses on demand and when the learner has time whilst contributing to social learning activities coming out of the main themes of the learning. It means learners have the freedom to learn when and where they want but the journey has been well thought out so the whole organisation can arrive at the same outcomes. It can also be set up in blended style with F2F and online/remote learning. We recently advised one of our clients Claranet to set up their learning pathway in Inclusion, Equality and Diversity using a blended approach between virtual and asynchronous training as they have a geographically dispersed workforce.
How social learning can still be fun
The one trap you can’t fall into with having asynchronous learning is to make it boring, text heavy, no narrative and generally a slog for the organisation to get through. If you do that, then it’s no wonder learners won’t want to engage socially around it. You need to make it fun and a talking point amongst staff as people only want to share thoughts on the learning if they have enjoyed it or been challenged by it. Give them some excitement and challenges in their learning journey and you will reap the benefits of their engagement later!
References
Bandura, Albert (1971) Social Learning Theory. Standford University
FE News. 2022. Remote education is here to stay – optimising the home learning environment – FE News. [online] Available at: [Accessed 30 March 2022].
Growth Engineering. 2022. 16 Key L&D Trends For 2022. [online] Available at: [Accessed 30 March 2022]
Semeshkina, M., 2022. Five Trends The EdTech Industry Should Pay Attention To In 2022. [online] Forbes. Available at: [Accessed 30 March 2022].
Colin Hickie
Colin is our Director of Digital Learning and is responsible for the strategy and overseeing our Production and Online Learning Team.
