Social Learning Platforms

In today's internet age, continuous learning and interaction is necessary in all businesses. Every organization wants its employees to get engaged with their learning and complete their e-learning courses as well. In the past, these may have seemed mutually exclusive, but social learning has flipped the script. Learning doesn't need to be a lengthy or time-consuming process, but rather an experience that's quickly accessed, executed and enjoyed by everyone within an organization or community.

Social learning involves learning through observing other people's views, behaviors and attitudes, then looking at the results of all those actions. Later, the learner adapts those attitudes or behaviors and models them. Therefore, with social learning, the knowledge sharing process is quite spontaneous and automatic, as learning happens just by watching others in action or while interacting with them.

If used properly, social learning is the ideal learning approach for learners/employees of most organizations. Hence, we wrote this Buyer's Guide to help you better understand how a social learning platform works and detail everything you need to know before making the final purchase decision.

Here's what we'll cover:

What Is a Social Learning Platform?
Common Features of Social Learning Platforms
What Type of Buyer Are You?
Benefits of Social Learning Platforms
Key Considerations

What Is a Social Learning Platform?

To put it simply, social learning is learning from and with others. A social learning platform allows users to collaborate, share and comment on their organization's formal and informal learning experiences on a secure and trusted network. The solution includes course sharing and commenting, course ratings, course discussions and blogs, all of which allow learners to share knowledge and interact with one another.

Such solutions also help organizations improve employee engagement by providing the necessary data and tools within a single platform. Also, system administrators can create customized learning experiences for each employee/user from any type of data or content stored in the system.

User profile in the Spoke social learning management system

As with most complex challenges, selection of a suitable social learning platform is much easier when it's broken down into parts. In the next section, we'll break down the most common applications and features of social learning platforms.

Common Features of Social Learning Platforms

Vendors offer a variety of functional breadth and depth in their social learning platforms. The best social learning platform vendors might offer some or all of the following differentiating capabilities:

Live chat	Quick communication method for learners who are looking for instant knowledge sharing. If you need quick help, view the list of 'available' learners and contact them immediately in real time.
Social stream	Display all the latest news, updates and announcements from all learners. Also used to share each learner's key achievements since it's visible to all on the platform.
Groups	Create distinct groups based on specific knowledge criteria, such as job roles, experience levels or training topics. Similar learners get an opportunity to experience better knowledge sharing discussions.
Experts area	Allows learners to access the knowledge base of a variety of different 'subject matter experts' who act as knowledge silos.
Surveys	Allows you to identify what your learners exactly want to learn. Send a quick questionnaire to your employees seeking feedback on which type of content they enjoy or need the most.

Give our advisors a call at 855-998-8505 if you need help determining which vendors offer which specific features.

What Type of Buyer Are You?

Before you start evaluating different social learning platforms, you'll want to know what buyer category you belong to. We believe almost all buyers fall into one of the below categories:

• Corporate training professionals. Social learning platforms are quite necessary in the corporate training domain. Highly regulated industries, such as financial or insurance, require their employees to remain updated on important news in order to better comply with various government and industry standards. Social learning platforms help employees quickly learn about the latest industry events.
• Education-industry professionals. Schools, universities and other educational institutes are another major category of buyers of social learning platforms. One of their primary purposes is to facilitate the spread of knowledge among students. Content such as assignments, course information, a teacher's knowledge base, syllabus and test information can be securely shared on social learning platforms for students to access from any location.

Benefits of Social Learning Platforms

Some of the benefits of social learning platforms should already be clear from our discussion above, but they can be distilled as follows:

• Enhanced collaboration and engagement among employees. When employees are learning from each other, collaboration among them improves significantly. In addition, you'll also develop a robust learning community that'll grow stronger each day and will reinforce itself.
• Capture and leverage organizational knowledge. While it's important to focus on the training needs of your employees, it's also critical to remain open to the possibility of your employees teaching a specific topic or two to their peers or seniors. Hence, a social learning platform helps leverage the collective knowledge of your employees on different topics on which they have good understanding. The platform also encourages employees to think outside the box and share their ideas with other employees.

Key Considerations

Social learning platforms can be purchased either on their own, or as part of a learning management system (LMS) suite. Keep the following considerations in mind while you evaluate vendors to build an effective shortlist:

Does the software support integrations? Check with the vendor to see if the social learning platform supports integration with your existing software, such as your learning management system (LMS) or human resources (HR) software. Quick integrations would be helpful to import and export data efficiently.

Is the software scalable? You'll need to check with the vendor on scalability of the social learning platform you're considering as it will help when your organization grows. The software must be able to support multi-location IT network infrastructure of your organization for when you grow in future.

Does the vendor offer customer support? Check whether the vendor offers 24/7 support, support only during business hours or none at all. Other than that, ask for what support options are available, such as email, phone or live chat.