Tony Karrer raises a valid point in his post Social Learning Measurement : eLearning Technology. Just the point I was thinking of after wanting to have a social model implemented in my own organization. It seems very interesting and attractive to have means to access information informally on-the-job and have it exactly when you need it. But I see the following challenges in the implementation of social learning at workplaces:
- How do I ensure the information is organized well enough for an individual to access it when needed? The search feature has to span across all available information resources related to the subject to give me what I need.
- How to ensure the authenticity of the information? We are in an organization dealing with real customers. Hence we can't take the risk to goof up based on something written in a social learning network. At a high-level I can imagine a reviewer/moderator model being implemented where all of the information entered is validated by experts. But this hard to implement given the amount of time commitment needed from the product experts when compared with thier priorities upfront. This model also needs to make space for new ideas that crop up and not just depend on legacy and proven information.
- How do I ensure I am getting the latest and most current information?
Thinking about measurement, which is the most critical factor in deciding if this model is getting us real tangible results, I can suggest a few ideas at a high level:
1. Have polls on topics to gather information about whether the information has been useful or not.
2. Every post should have a rating associated with it. The search should list posts that have received good ratings at the top level.
3. Do regular sanity checks as information in organizations change as fast as the shelf life of a particular release of a product and are outdated quite quickly.
4. Finally, the most important is to measure the learning outcome in terms of how it helped make the product better, or received appreciation from a customer, or helped tackle a complex business problem. This would be the true reality check and can be enabled by maintaining metrics or statistics that can be collected from the online systems and consolidated into reports that can be queried from various perspectives. Much like how we measure effectiveness of formal training.
But let's admit it, measurement is the key to prove that social learning forms have helped employees bring value to an organization.
- How do I ensure the information is organized well enough for an individual to access it when needed? The search feature has to span across all available information resources related to the subject to give me what I need.
- How to ensure the authenticity of the information? We are in an organization dealing with real customers. Hence we can't take the risk to goof up based on something written in a social learning network. At a high-level I can imagine a reviewer/moderator model being implemented where all of the information entered is validated by experts. But this hard to implement given the amount of time commitment needed from the product experts when compared with thier priorities upfront. This model also needs to make space for new ideas that crop up and not just depend on legacy and proven information.
- How do I ensure I am getting the latest and most current information?
Thinking about measurement, which is the most critical factor in deciding if this model is getting us real tangible results, I can suggest a few ideas at a high level:
1. Have polls on topics to gather information about whether the information has been useful or not.
2. Every post should have a rating associated with it. The search should list posts that have received good ratings at the top level.
3. Do regular sanity checks as information in organizations change as fast as the shelf life of a particular release of a product and are outdated quite quickly.
4. Finally, the most important is to measure the learning outcome in terms of how it helped make the product better, or received appreciation from a customer, or helped tackle a complex business problem. This would be the true reality check and can be enabled by maintaining metrics or statistics that can be collected from the online systems and consolidated into reports that can be queried from various perspectives. Much like how we measure effectiveness of formal training.
But let's admit it, measurement is the key to prove that social learning forms have helped employees bring value to an organization.
You are right. Recently I came across this collaborative tool for programmers which handles the request in Q&A fashion. This tool takes care of success measurement with these exactly same factors you've mentioned here. Worth take a look.
ReplyDeleteTool - Stack Overflow (http://stackoverflow.com/)
@LSP, thanks for that. Its a good example of social learning but not a measurement tool. What i was speaking about is more on these lines- Social Network Analysis thanks to Clark Quinn for sharing this during the 24-hr conversation session.
ReplyDelete