Growing Interest in Social Learning: Results from a Recent Poll of Practitioners

Topics: Social Learning

Contents

For the last three years, Corporate University Xchange has been hosting an ongoing community of learning leaders who have an interest in advancing workforce learning through the use of social media (i.e., "social learning"). This community — the CorpU Social Learning Executive Council — includes many widely recognizable global brands:

The monthly dialogue among senior leaders of these learning organizations has been timely, lively, and instructive: the leaders have shared their experiences about what has been working with respect to different approaches, tools, designs, and measurements of introducing technology-enhanced social learning across the enterprise. Over this time, the awareness, maturity, tactical capability, and experience has grown, and companies that initially were piloting a few socially-enhanced programs have now implemented full-scale, corporate-wide social learning initiatives. Many are still experimenting with different social learning tools and/or platforms, looking to find the right approach for their culture and needs. In order to benchmark the change year over year, CorpU has been conducting annual surveys to get a snapshot of what this highly motivated group of learning leaders have learned and applied. The answers to these targeted surveys inform us as to what those learning leaders who already have their eyes on social learning as a development strategy are thinking and doing in regard to collaborative, networked learning, and will prove to be an interesting comparison to the data from a social learning trends survey that will be distributed to the general corporate learning population in 2012. 

Most recently, we surveyed this select group of learning leaders in December of 2011 and received a 44% response rate. While this response rate denotes a decent representation of the Social Learning Executive Council's views, the responses cannot be generalized or applied to the entire population of corporate learning organizations. That said, the data did reveal some interesting trends among many of the companies that are on or are very interested in the cutting edge of social learning.

The remainder of this article provides more detail on their responses, along with some commentary as to what it suggests for future directions in technology-enhanced social learning in organizations.