5 Ways to encourage peer learning with user-generated content
by Oliver Kay
n the digital world, more and more jobs are in front of a computer. Increasingly communication is being digitalised and the question is how we can leverage that to improve learning opportunities within companies. A large part of learning within a company is from peers – either by casual chatting or observing. We strongly believe everyone has something to offer with different experiences yielding a vast array of lessons. Let’s think about a typical water cooler conversation. This kind of interaction is a perfect learning opportunity. Perhaps colleagues may casually troubleshoot a problem or advise on how best to approach a task. The problem with this is that the interaction is constrained to those participating i.e. around 2 to 4 people. In this article, we seek to leverage these conversations for the digital world so that the entire company can benefit from peer learning, and not just those in the right place at the right time. With this comes indexing which means valuable information can be at the fingertips of any learner that is relevant and timely.
Tools within SuccessFactors
Jam
Jam is the ultimate collaboration tool. The traditional way of learning is for the user to consume it alone or as part of the class. The nature of such training means that one only learns what is on the syllabus leaving no scope for ingenuity of experimentation. Jam facilitates the learners to add insights and clarification that previously wouldn’t have been there by enabling users to interact online in structured groups through forums and Q&As. What this inevitably means is that learners are benefiting from the entire groups and places the responsibility on not only the instructors but also the learners to think about the questions so that they can answer them together.
The nature of this kind of Self-service learning can cut down on Instructor time as well.
Collections
There are many occasions where an interesting article is sent via email but people get too many emails these days.
Collections allows any users to collate a group of related articles or media from around the web and share them to users completely within the system. This provides one place where users can edit their collections and a clear place where learning to access those collections that have been recommended to them.
Creating collections can be permissioned for only subject matter experts or can be used across the entire company and you can let the highly rated collections rise to the top based on user ratings and peer contributions.
E.g. Management – youtube video and article from google books
Quick guides
Have you ever wanted to share how to perform a task within you field of excellence that everyone could learn. Whilst collections are a good way of sharing pre-existing content it doesn’t allow the user to create their own content – quick guides do. Users can create a series of steps accompanied by images to explain a process that users wouldn’t otherwise understand.
E.g. How to create a ticket in HP Quality Center.
Peer to peer recommendations
What better than knowing about a course from a someone you trust. SuccessFactors HR Software allow users to recommend courses to their peers within the organization. This is often more impactful than featuring a course in the catalog as this serves as a personalized recommendation from someone you know and trust. There are product roadmap discussions around the inclusion of intelligent recommendation using Machine Learning algorithms.
Course Ratings
Allowing users to rate courses provides a powerful way for users share their feedback and to recommend courses to colleagues without choosing anyone specific to recommend to. Statistics show that a course with ratings is more likely to be taken by users when compared with the same course without any ratings. SuccessFactors allow admins to choose what courses should have ratings enabled while other courses may not have this feature enabled. This is usually enabled on courses that a user would typically self-assign instead of mandatory courses which are pushed to the user.
Conclusion
Companies have always seen the value in their employees and we have been seeing the somewhat recent proliferation of HR systems across all types of companies. We need to make the most of this digital world to leverage the knowledge from our employees and SuccessFactors is offering multiple ways to do this. We look forward to things to come.