Social learning. It’s a topic that most of us have been hearing about for well over a decade at this point. But it has recently been making a resurgence in the learning landscape, only this time, it’s for different reasons.
With the growing emphasis on learning in the flow of work as well as new and emerging technologies, social learning has been steadily gaining traction again as a rising trend. But with what is now happening with COVID-19, the focus on it is likely to intensify dramatically as we look for ways to adapt to a (previously unimaginable) new era of social interaction.
In this episode of Leading Learning, we further discuss the reasons social learning is particularly relevant right now and offer our definition of it, including its four dimensions. We also share four simple steps to help your learning business design for it.
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Listen to the Show
Read the Show Notes
Why Focus on Social Learning?
[00:18] – Social learning is a topic we have written about extensively and done at least one Webinar on before, but we have not dedicated a podcast episode to it. Now seems like a good time to do that for a number of reasons.
One is that it showed up recently as one of the “innovation triggers” in the eLearning Hype Curve from Web Courseworks, which we discussed with Andy Hicken in episode 229.
We think social learning is resurging because, with the growing emphasis on learning in the flow of work (another item from the innovation triggers area of the Hype Curve), more people are recognizing, even if only intuitively, that it’s often the brief, informal exchanges with colleagues that do the most to help us pick up new information, modify our ideas and perspectives, and learn at the pace that the modern work world demands—and for that matter, the modern world in general demands.
Additionally—and completely related—as our understanding of learning, in general, has grown, more people understand that learning is a process, not an event, and social learning very much aligns with this perspective. Social learning typically occurs through multiple interactions, often with multiple people.
And, as Andy rightly noted, some newer technologies have emerged—with Slack being the main example—that have helped social learning gain much more of a foothold in the workplace.
For these reasons alone, we would expect social learning to continue to build steam in the coming year, but with what is now happening with COVID-19, the focus on it is likely to intensify dramatically.
As people have to deal with social distancing and the move toward many more people working at home, we’re naturally going to need to learn to use technology better to support productive, meaningful social interaction—and a key goal for learning professionals of all stripes will be how to ensure these interactions facilitate learning.
At the same time—and this is really critical—
The average person is likely to become much more receptive to using technologies that can help support scalable, distributed social learning. We’re already seeing this, in fact, with many more people in our own lives starting to take advantage of technologies like Zoom, for example, to come together online because they don’t have the option to come together in person.
So, with all of that in mind, we want to spend some time talking about what social learning is and, given our audience, offer some guidance on how to design for it.
Reflection Questions
[02:55] – You might consider the reflection questions below on your own after listening to an episode, and/or you might pull the team together, using part or all of the podcast episode for a group discussion.
- What role has social learning played in your portfolio of offerings in the past, even if you weren’t fully conscious of its role?
- In what ways might you be more intentional and strategic about designing for and facilitating social learning going forward? How might you leverage technology to help achieve your goals?
What is Social Learning?
[03:30] – So, what is social learning? First, it seems important to stress that, while technology is one of the factors bringing it back into the spotlight, social learning is not fundamentally about technology.
The way we define social learning is quite broad. Our definition is adapted from an article in Ecology and Society. There are three major components to it:
- Social learning occurs through social interactions and processes between actors within a social network—so, we talk with other people, we read what they’ve written, we observe what they do, we react and respond.
- Social learning facilitates change in the individuals involved—so, our knowledge, our behavior, our perspectives, our attitude, or some combination of those is altered.
- Social learning potentially becomes situated within wide units or communities of practice—so, it has the potential to change not just individuals, but organizations, communities, and entire societies.
To state all of this a bit differently:
People learn through interacting with each other; this learning—like all learning—changes them as individuals, but it also has the potential to change the broader groups within which they participate.
Obviously, this last part is particularly powerful if you’re focused on organizational change or on impacting an entire field or industry. While it’s not necessarily true that all social learning has to generate broader change, the fact that it can has tremendous strategic implications.
The Four Dimensions of Social Learning
[05:31] – Really, when it comes down to it, the vast majority of learning is social. But that doesn’t mean all social learning is the same kind of social. The four dimensions to social learning (which note that Celisa has written about before) are:
- Immediacy
- Structure
- Scale
- Transparency
Along the first dimension, immediacy, the continuum for social learning runs from direct and instant involvement of learners (think of face-to-face conversations) to delayed and indirect exchanges.
The second dimension, structure, is more or less apparent in social learning—it can be more or less formal. (Note, as this dimension makes clear, that social learning is not necessarily informal learning; it may be, but the two are not coterminous.)
On the less structured end, social learning might have us match a mentor to a mentee, and that’s the extent of our design. Or we can take a more structured approach —we could provide mentors and mentees with a set of activities and questions to work through according to a set timeline, for example.
The third dimension you write about is scale. So social learning can be small-scale or massive. At one extreme, social learning needs only two people—think of author and reader, mentor and mentee, two colleagues at the legendary water cooler.
At the other extreme, it can involve thousands, even millions of learners. When Stephen Downes and George Siemens offered arguably the first MOOC in 2008—an online course called Connectivism and Connective Knowledge—over 2,200 learners signed on.
Coursera’s Learning How to Learn MOOC, which we discussed with its creator Barbara Oakley back in episode 104, currently has almost 2 million enrollments right now—and the course is still running and welcoming more learners.
Transparency, the fourth dimension, is about how aware the learners are about the social aspect of the learning. This relates to the first two dimensions—immediacy and structure—in that the more immediate and the more structured the social learning, the more likely learners are to see how the learning is social.
But we include it as a separate dimension because, even in the case of immediate and structured social learning, the designers get to decide whether to forefront what they’re doing in a particular learning experience to support social learning or whether to be opaque and bake the social learning in without calling attention to it (maybe like brownies that have spinach in them, or the custard pie with summer squash, but only the chef knows?)
For example, hot seats at workshops can be a great social learning tool. (We made use of these at both our face-to-face and online events and have come to call them collaborative coaching.)
If you’re unfamiliar with the concept, a learner volunteers to be in the hot seat—an actual stool or chair where other learners can see and hear her if it’s a face-to-face event, a metaphorical seat, if it’s an online event.
She briefly shares a problem or an opportunity she wants help with, and then the room of other learners offers her, in rapid-fire fashion, ideas for how to address the problem or seize the opportunity. The person in the hot seat listens but shouldn’t respond during the rapid-fire suggestions. At the end, the facilitator offers her two cents, and then the hot sitter may choose to respond, but briefly—often a “thanks” is enough.
A hot seat can be more or less transparent—the facilitator can talk about how the other learners are learning by listening and generating ideas, getting practice in brainstorming and critical thinking, even if the problem or opportunity raised by the person in the hot seat doesn’t directly apply to them.
Or the facilitator can skip that and just focus on providing the rules. That is, she can be more or less transparent in her use of the hot seat as a social learning tool.
So, immediacy, structure, scale, transparency. We think it’s really valuable to break social learning down into these dimensions because it gives us a way of appreciating and clearly articulating the many ways in which it happens.
We should be clear, though, that there is no value judgement here: no particular point along any of the four dimensions is inherently better than any other. It’s not necessarily better for social learning to happen on a large scale or be more immediate. It’s not, de facto, better for itb to be less structured or more transparent – it really comes down to what your goals are and what makes sense for achieving those goals.
So, having said that, and having defined social learning, let’s look at how to design for social learning.
Sponsor: Web Courseworks
[11:29] – But first, we want to highlight our sponsor for this episode.
Web Courseworks is a leading learning technologies and consulting company that is forging a path of innovation in the eLearning industry. The company’s experiences and expertise guide its partners to become the leading providers of education in their fields. Web Courseworks channels organization learning efforts to deliver on the promise of revolutionary performance improvement.
CourseStage, the learning management system from Web Courseworks, is built for organizations and professional development initiatives. It enables organizations to customize learning experiences, track users’ success, and make data-driven decisions. CourseStage LMS is designed specifically to handle continuing education and professional development activities for organizations who want to grow their learning business.
Access a demonstration of the CourseStage LMS as well as other valuable Webinars from Web Courseworks at leadinglearning.com/wcw.
You can also download Web Couseworks’ 2020 eLearning Hype Curve Predictions by going to leadinglearning.com/hype.
Designing Social Learning
[12:39] – Please do visit Web Courseworks. Their sponsorship is critical to our being able to produce this podcast each week and provide it as service to the learning business community. We’ll note, too, that their platform, CourseStage, has many features that support social learning, but of course that begs the question: How do we design for a type of learning that, when it works best, seems to arise naturally?
It’s an important question and it points to two common—and antipodal—tendencies when it comes to designing social learning.
One is to underthink it and focus on social learning tools rather than social learning philosophy.
This approach provides the mechanisms, the tools, for social learning, and assumes social learning will happen naturally. While we made the point that there are no value judgments related to the different dimensions of social learning, we should point out that the structure dimension runs from more structure to less structure—and there’s a big difference between no structure and even just a bit of structure.
We can’t just assume that because human beings have an affinity for social learning that all we have to do is provide a way for two or more learners to connect—put them in the same room or add them to the same online community and, voilà, social learning. We all know that rarely happens.
We just won’t be very effective at designing social learning with the “underthinking” approach.
Of course, the other tendency is to overthink social learning and underestimate our natural human capabilities and experience with it. Odds are you have a great deal of experience with social learning. Odds are your organization is doing it now. At your face-to-face conferences and workshops, your facilitators are (hopefully) incorporating peer learning. They’re having learners work in pairs or groups to solve a problem. They’re encouraging questions and using those to adjust where they focus their time. They’re not (hopefully) just saying, “Talk to each other.” They’re scaffolding and structuring the discussion, the social learning.
So we’ve come up with four simple steps to help you in the designing of social learning: describe, assess, learn, and improve:
- Describe your products in terms of social learning. How are you using social learning in each of your products? Inventory your use of social learning in each product in terms of the four dimensions: immediacy, structure, scale, and transparency. Do you see patterns? If all your social learning is very loosely structured or done on a large scale, that may suggest an opportunity to experiment at other points on those dimensions. Do you see no patterns? That may suggest the need for your organization to be more holistically aware of social learning. Are there products you can’t adequately inventory for social learning because you don’t know enough about them (maybe face-to-face concurrent conference sessions)?
- Assess the effectiveness of your products in terms of social learning. For each product, what is the learning you’re trying to achieve? An awareness of the context can help you assess whether the current mix of immediacy, structure, scale, and transparency is appropriate. For example, in the context of set curricula or exam prep, the social learning may be more highly structured to allow it to speak to the curricula or exam content. In the context of learning focused at the higher end of Bloom’s taxonomy (synthesis and evaluation), the social learning may be smaller in scale and more immediate to really get learners engaged. Again, there are no value judgments, no across-the-board right or wrong approaches—you have to think through what each product is trying to do. How would you rate the effectiveness of your educational products’ use of social learning?
- Learn more about social learning. What social learning are you experiencing beyond what your organization offers? Sample other social learning, both social learning that is similar to what your organization is doing (or trying to do) and social learning that is different from what you’re after. If you’re being a thoughtful social learner, you’ll pick up ideas and tools that may apply to what your organization offers—or will offer in the future.
- Improve how you’re using social learning. Based on what you know from the other three steps, where can you improve what you’re currently doing with social learning? Where can you play with the mix of the four social learning dimensions to get a better match with the goals for the particular education product? Where can you more consciously design social learning? Don’t be afraid to experiment—as long as you’re prepared to learn from what works (and what doesn’t) and adjust accordingly.
To circle back to some of our comments at the beginning, this really is a time for meaningful experimentation. We know that social learning can be so important for supporting learning in the flow of work, learning that may not lend itself well to formal methods, but we’re still learning how to do that most effectively. And, with so many people now facing restrictions on face-to-face social interaction, we’re all going to have to experiment and learn together about how to connect online in ways that effectively support social learning.
[18:28] – Wrap-Up
Reflection Questions
- What role has social learning played in your portfolio of offerings in the past, even if you weren’t fully conscious of its role?
- In what ways might you be more intentional and strategic about designing for and facilitating social learning going forward? How might you leverage technology to help achieve your goals?
Also note that we issued a report titled Social Learning in the Association Space a while back so make sure to check that out.
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[20:59] – Sign off
See Also:
Virtual Conferences in the COVID-19 Era – Webinar Recording
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