Social Learning doesn’t mean what you think it does: PART TWO

Yesterday, in my first posting on this topic, I showed how “social learning” is not just about a new training trend or about adding social media into the “blend” or acquiring the latest Social Learning Management System, but a fundamental change in how we need to view workplace learning.  And that in order stay in tune with new ways of working and learning, the L&D function needs to move from a “Command and Control” approach to one that I called “Encourage and Engage”.  To highlight the differences between these two approaches I then compared the “Command and Control” response with the new ”Encourage & Engage” response for each of the 8 features of how Smart Workers are working and learning today. But  I closed by saying that one  of the important questions that people  have about this new approach to Workplace Learning, is how they measure employee “learning” as well as L&D’s involvement.  So that is the topic of today’s post.

 

Let’s first take a look at managing and measuring employee “learning”.

The traditional approach to measuring learning in the workplace, has been to monitor and track course attendance, or online test and course completions, and report success in quantitative terms – i.e. the number of courses each individual has taken and/or completed.

Some who have begun to introduce social approaches into the organisation, still think it is about measuring quantity; i.e. tracking the number of active participants and posts and comments people are making.

But both of these approaches are just about measuring “activity” and say very little about how individuals are actually “learning”.  In fact it is quite clear that even those who are socially inactive – (aka “lurkers” or “legitimate peripheral participants“) may still be learning.

In summary, as the recent article about social media marketing, The inconvenient truth about social media, puts it

”Quantity is an antiquated way of measuring success”

So how then do we measure learning in the workplace?

Find out by reading the rest of this posting on my Learning in the Social Workplace blog