Leveraging Learning
Informal learning is one of the buzzwords in corporate learning these days. Sure, part of the reason for that is an economic crunch that has caused some organizations to believe it’s not worth paying for well-designed learning solutions. But there is another factor at work here – and that is the rise of web 2.0.
The web 2.0 effect is getting us increasingly comfortable with the idea of decentralized content creation – and that is going to continue to be true in learning as well as everywhere else. This (fairly lengthy) slideshare presentation goes into the details – but the concept is overviewed in this image that I snagged off of Tony Karrer’s post on LMS and Social Learning back in March. He also quotes a great post by BJ Schone asking whether LMSs have Jumped the Shark
The answer, I think, will end up being not one or the other, but both. Let’s face it – some things should be learned in a formal way. As long as there are well-established (or policy-mandated) processes that organizations of one sort or another want large groups of people to use, formal learning will be a good way to get those processes across to large groups of people. There is great value in a consistent message when you are looking for a consistent result.
Other things are best presented in an informal learning. We know that 70% work-related learning is informal anyway. A 2008 survey also showed more than 75% of corporate managers consider rapid rate of information change to be one of their top challenges. A traditional LMS may not be needed to – or particularly effective at – dealing with informal learning solutions. But some sort of system is certainly needed within organizations to help increase productivity.
This will be true for both formal and informal learning solutions. On many topics, there is more free, quality information available than most people want to read – certainly enough information out there to allow people to build knowledge and sometimes even skill. There is also an awful lot of free, bad information out there. The value a learning designer brings into this environment is not so much the gathering of information, but the evaluating and classifying of that information. The learning designer’s job is to pare down and focus attention on that information that is most likely to be useful to the individual they are trying to assist. And, at the end of the day, the job an LMS, whether formal or informal, is to make those judgments easy for learners to leverage.
Does your LMS do that?
Tags: social learning