Creating cyber coaches

One of the collaborative benefits with a learning application may be in opening up previously private conversations.  Let’s say one of our 8% of active recipients asks a question of one of our 2% of active participants.  If this conversation were conducted by email, it would remain private and the effort of answering the question would deliver benefit only to one person and the handful of people with whom he or she shared the response.  If this was a public conversation, observed and witnessed by as many of the 90% as had expressed an interest in a particular topic, then the benefits of that online functional coaching would potentially be shared by many.

Of course this requires our subject experts to be primed to carry out this role and as soon as you ask people to be available to respond to this kind of unsolicited approach, you may find significant resistance. The subject expert needs to be tasked with sharing their knowledge and rewarded accordingly.  If these roles and time commitments don’t feature in their own performance objectives, you could have set the system up to fail.  It only takes one person not to get their question answered in a timely manner to undermine the whole network.

Learning Communities

You’ll notice that I studiously avoid this term.  I’m unconvinced that they actually exist.  I think learners have very different reasons for learning something – for many it is because they have no choice – the training or required competence is mandatory and may be a tick in the box exercise for both organisation and learner.

Others are looking for advancement or promotion or to build their CV pending their next move (which may, of course, be out of your organisation).  Others still will be new to the job and learning the ropes or wanting to make their life easier in some way.

The central essence of a learning community seems to me to be predicated on a common agenda – including the reasons why its membership is learning something in the first place. The second feature of the so-called learning community is based on an idea that we will all happily share our successes and failures as part of the learning journey we have embarked on together.

In the real world, this hardly ever happens.

Applying my ratio of 2:8:90, most so called learning community members contribute not at all – hardly the benchmark of any community. Furthermore, many will be deeply mistrustful of contributing – “publish your failures and problems here.”  Not that attractive a proposition for the learner. Some will even apply a ‘school swot’ classification to any of their number who chooses to contribute.

This is where business collaboration media differs very significantly from social media and why ultimately, social media is destined to be unsuccessful when applied to the business context.  Even in US universities, where facebook was first developed, students rebelled when required to use facebook as a medium for keeping in touch with tutors and study groups.  Learning may be a social act in the widest application of that term, but social media is social in a much narrower definition.  What people need from collaborative software in the workplace is the ability to more quickly and conveniently access information in order to undertake a business transaction as part of their work process.  Whether anyone ‘likes this’ or wishes to apply a smiley face symbol to it is a matter of complete indifference to your users, and it should be to you too.