Please share your real-life stories about enterprise peer-to-peer learning in action

[Nick Wayne]

As we all know, there's a lot of hype and discussion around integrating elearning platforms with web 2.0 collaboration tools. I'd like to put on hold all arguments about best practices and ask you to share your real-life examples of collaborative learning within an enterprise.

Are employees:
A) Taking the time to upload their "knowledge" to the company's LMS, Wiki, network, etc?

B) Aware that they can pull this peer-generated information from that same platform on demand?

C) Actually doing it?

Looking forward to your stories.

[Matt Murray]

Hi Nick,

Our company has found success in a "limited edit" wiki. Each team has their own space in the knowledge base that pulls in calendars of events and shift rotations as well as all of the information necessary to perform their job function. Depending on job role, an individual may have access to another department's knowledge base. I call it "limited edit" simply because we had a traditional "open edit" wiki in the past and it ended up being a source of not-so-great information over time. Now, when a person feels that information is incorrect or missing, they can simply ask a specific member of their department to add that info. This model has worked pretty well so far.

We are in the process of implementing a new LMS. Most likely, this system will be used to support our corporate level initiatives, compliance and other types of training. Users will be notified when they have learning assigned to them and in the future will also be able to browse a library of elective courses aimed at improving their performance in their job role. We will be tracking certifications and specific training programs and reporting all of this info to each manager in the company so that they may monitor their employees efforts. We will be able to provide executive level reporting to ensure that all are aware of how Training aligns with the companies vision etc...

Matt

[Nick Wayne]

Very cool. Thanks for the story, I look forward to hearing more.

Nick

[Peter Kelley]

Hi Nick,

On a professional level, I've struggled with the topic of p2p learning within corporate environments.

My company continues to be drawn into the cultural clash caused by the promise of social learning and it's integration with other blended learning solutions. On a conceptual level our clients are intrigued by the potential of informal learning, but falter when facing the fundamental desire for employees to express themselves freely and the corporate need to control the flow of information.

As a result, we've come to the conclusion or corporate clients simply aren't ready to embrace and realize the full potential of social learning as we envision ... Yet.

In the meantime, we've shifted our focus to the practical application of p2p tools to help solve fundamental problems experienced throughout the learning community.

As an example, one of our largest clients described to us a growing issue within their global learning development group. Due to the multitude of SMEs, ISDs, Project Managers, Developers, and Quality Assistants working on individual courses from throughout the world, projects were taking too long to progress through the early development and review stages and often appeared to be created in a vacuum, without any opportunity for real collaboration.

Our solution was to create a social networking plug-in for their key development tools (Lectora and Articulate) that allows all team members to review, comment and rate postings on each course screen within a live environment. All comments are automatically tracked and saved to a database for future review and export for project management processing.

Based upon the resulting success we experienced with our initial client, we began using this p2p plug-in on all of our client projects. In fact, we branded the plug-in "CommentCatcher" and recently rolled the Articulate version out to the public.

Bottom line, my experience has shown that p2p learning remains in the early, iterative, stages of corporate adoption. Identifying practical applications that solve "real" day-to-day problems is where we've found success.


Peter -

i3Logic (www.i3Logic.net)

[Nick Wayne]

Thanks for the reply Peter.

We must be getting close indeed -- using social collaboration to create training/learning materials. I'll bet someone more poetic than I could jumble that sentence around a bit and come out with the perfect mission statement for what our end goal is.

I checked out the CommentCatcher for Articulate plug-in on your website. It looks really promising, especially if you can replicate it for other authoring tools (and not necessarily just those related to elearning or training). CommentCatcher's success would definitely create a nice little wedge for the rest of us who are pushing end-user collaboration for learning and knowledge management purposes.

Best of luck, and thanks again for the story.

Nick

[Catherine Ogden]

Hi Peter,

Great info! I'm really interested in your "CommentCatcher" plug-in as we face a similar problem. Where could I get this?

Catherine

[Peter Kelley]

Hi Catherine,

Sorry for the delay in getting back to you ... I've been travelling quite a bit lately.

You can get more information on the CommentCatcher plug-in here: http://www.i3logic.net/our_methods/webbased_products/commentcatcher/

This page highlights the Articulate version of the plug-in and allows you to purchase the tool directly online as a download. We also have a version available for Lectora, which is just rolling-out. I can provide you with more information on this version of the plug-in if you desire.


Peter -

[juliehiipakka]

I'd like to add a fourth question to this thread if I could (consider it a precursor to question A): are employees taking/given the time to create the content? We have a lot of peer-to-peer learning initiatives in the works: one challenge we face is that employees don't have enough time to participate as they might like. There's tension between achieving business objectives and having the time to learn from each other.

Do organizations build this type of learning activity into goal setting or job responsbilities in some way?

[Jim Mitchell]

We're using a limited-edit internal wiki for our customer service reps to be able to access real time information about our organization's policies, schedule, pricing, etc. It's worked fairly well. In the past, our CSR's have not felt completely "in the loop," and this has been a source of frustration for them when trying to answer constituent questions over the phone.

[Nick Wayne]

Question for you Jim,

Does management feel any need to, or see any purpose in tracking and reporting which CSRs access the wiki and when? Or is it intended strictly to be a resource for the CSRs?

I ask because we have clients who track their employees' interactions with similar digital assets (they're all wrapped inside of an LMS environment) for reasons such as: discovering which content is most useful to employees in different roles and being able to assign/recommend it to others, judging an employee's motivation/curiosity, finding out what's missing from their new employee training programs (judging by the content that is accessed most in the wiki, for example), and so on.

In the customer service rep example, do you think it'd be helpful to know who was accessing what and when? What about giving the CSRs the ability to rate and comment on the material in the wiki? Would they actually do it?

Thanks,

Nick