Business Development
The Significance
BY KEN THOMPSON
In recent years the concept of Informal Learning, also known as Social Learning has gathered strong support.
This kind of learning blends 3 main strands of experiential discovery: self-directed research, on-the-job experience and conversations with colleagues, mentors and bosses.
Proponents of Informal Learning suggest metrics such as 85-95% of practical working job knowledge being gained this way. Other supporters argue an 70-20-10 rule i.e. 70% of learning is on the job, 20% is learned from others and 10% from reading and courses.
However what happens when this growing trend for Informal Learning collides with an equally strong trend in companies – the desire and need to virtualise and asynchronize the learning process? Are these two trends fundamentally opposed or can they be harmonised in some way?
The diagram below represents the 4 different virtualisation / asynchonisation options:
Option 1: Same Time/Same Place
This equates to a group of people all in the same room at the same time. This works really well for Informal Learning as you can break the group into teams and have them conduct an experiential exercise, such as a business simulation game.
Such experiential exercises stimulate learning conversations between the team members themselves and the team members and various experts who are can also be in the room (for just part of the time if required) such as facilitators, business leaders and subject matter experts.
Option 2: Same Time/Different Place
To make this option work you need to think carefully about the learning design. For example, if you can have 3 teams each of which is sharing a room in a different place and the 3 rooms are connected by video conference this will make the conversations much easier than if you have all 20 participants in 20 different places.
In the latter scenario you need to think carefully about how to augment the sessions with good video conferencing and peer to peer messaging and perhaps having structured follow-up sessions dedicated to people sharing their experiences.
However none of today’s technologies today are really capable of capturing the mood of a participant or powerful non-verbal communications such as body language or the expression on a colleague’s face.
Such technologies will inevitably appear so any skills gained in learning in these environments should be a good investment for the future.
Option 3: Different Time/Same Place
This is even trickier than Option 2 and represents a shared space (physical or virtual) which learners all visit at different times. Interestingly this is how many biological species communicate through the discipline of Stigmergy, by leaving signs in their physical environments for others to follow.
So for this option to be effective each learner must be able to have access to the feedback of other previous learners and must be able to add their own experiences into this mix in a simple way. This could either be in the form of a physical learning room with different learning boards which can be accessed or more likely a virtual learning room where the relevant historical learning feedback and conversations appear automatically once the learner logs in.
34 | TRAINING MAGAZINE EUROPE APRIL 2015
of time and place