We are all experiencing a great transformation in our personal and consumer lives with the onslaught of amazing social platforms and functional utilities on our mobile devices. We see it every day, from apps that find us lunch and the best prices on products to ones that show us the constellations in the night sky and play our favorite music.
Our amazement regarding these technologies is warranted, but we are slowly shifting from amazement to expectation. We are now expecting that there is an app for whatever we need and expecting to be empowered in a way that we weren’t just yesterday. At a recent business conference, I turned down the standard set of pamphlets, maps, and agendas, assuming I would be able to find it all on my phone. I was not disappointed.
Is the transformation we’re experiencing in our personal lives being replicated in our workplace? For most, it is not. For both technical and philosophical reasons, some organizations—and some entire industries—have not been able to fully take advantage of these advances as quickly as they happen in the personal and consumer environments. Where adoption is more readily happening, it is usually in core business applications and rarely in learning and performance support solutions.
Going social and mobile with learning.
Social and mobile modalities are not new. We’ve been discussing them for over a decade. What is new, however, is the question for Learning and Development organizations: “Is there an app for learning and performance support in our workplaces, and are we using it effectively to meet our users/learners’ expectations?”
First, let’s recap what we mostly agree on regarding these modalities:
Mobile
- Mobile’s flexibility for the user/learner to engage outside of work and during non-business hours helps both the user and the organization tremendously.
- Short, digestible snippets work best.
- Mobile devices are perfect for communicating system or process changes and the resulting impacts and workarounds.
- Mobile devices are best suited for instances in a performance support mode when you are troubleshooting or trying to remember.
Social
- The power to connect across time, geography, culture, role, and business area is undeniable with social media.
- Social platforms very quickly allow a body of knowledge to be built, as opposed to dreaded email silos that trap nuggets of learning forever between the sender and receiver only.
- Success has been seen when allowing:
- Users to Rate
- Subject matter experts to Curate
- Business leaders to Moderate
- Corporate instances of social networks rarely discuss politics, lunch, or dancing cats.
Blending the new with integral parts of the old.
There are many more discussion points to consider regarding both social and mobile, but the key topic that must be addressed is that neither social nor mobile can stand alone. Just like ILT or WBT rarely provide a complete solution, neither will social or mobile when it comes to achieving a set of learning objectives surrounding a new initiative or desired performance shift. While these modalities do not provide a complete solution, they do provide significant affordances to positively influence learning and performance support solutions and will go a long way in boosting user engagement.
GP Strategies is using the concept of Agile Learning to improve performance through the integration of both social and mobile as key elements of outcome-based learning campaigns. The flexibility and portability of these platforms make them perfect for tailoring programs to specific audiences and quickly updating program content based on learner feedback and changing business conditions.
Look for more info regarding Agile Learning and outcome-based learning campaigns coming soon. In the meantime, let us know how you’ve altered traditional ILT/WBT interventions by incorporating mobile and social into your curriculum/program design.