How can we help our employees get their heads above water and finally learn what they really want? How can we view training not as an obligation but as an opportunity supported by the entire company? It’s high time we rekindled this enthusiasm for training, uniting our employees to enable them to thrive professionally together. Your organization’s institutional knowledge is its most valuable resource. It’s up to you to put it into practice! We began applying the Collaborative Learning methodology to organizational learning several years ago. Our goal at the time was to enable companies to capitalize on internal knowledge quickly and easily. Little did we know how indispensable Collaborative Learning would become.
Collaborative Learning
Collaborative learning is a learning methodology in which members of a company share their knowledge and expertise while learning from each other. It is, therefore, the ability to learn with and through others. Group learning enhances the training experience by capitalizing on the skills, ideas, and institutional knowledge unique to each member of the company.
Collaborative learning is often confused with cooperative learning because both concepts involve the notion of a group. In cooperative learning, learners work together in small groups to solve a problem or conceptualize an idea. They are, therefor, working toward a common goal. Cooperative learning is a relevant pedagogy but is complex to deploy across an organization. It remains primarily used in high schools and higher education. Like cooperative learning, collaborative learning encourages reflection, problem-solving, and teamwork. However, it is much simpler to develop across all departments.
Collaborative learning is part of a broader approach that leans toward interdependence. Organizations are gradually moving away from vertical management and toward a horizontal model: little hierarchy and, therefor, little authoriy,and greater responsibility for each employee. Individual projects are giving way to more teamwork to achieve visible results on a large scale.
The 5 Advantages of Collaborative Learning
Unlike traditional corporate training, Collaborative Learning is decentralized, relevant, quick to deploy, scalable, and impact-driven. What does this mean in practice?
Collaborative Learning is decentralized and open to all
Most corporate training as we know it is part of a vertical approach. Management, L&D managers, training managers, or even Human Resources define training needs and then create or purchase training tools. With Collaborative Learning, this is no longer the preserve of these professions: members of all teams can declare a specific training need.
This way, everyone in a company participates in the learning process: they are more engaged. Some employees suggest training needs, and others use their skills to develop training programs that meet these needs. The training team supports learners throughout their course completion, monitors quality, and ensures that each employee has the necessary elements to succeed.
Employees express specific training needs that allow them to learn what they want. As a result, they are more motivated, and the knowledge-sharing process is seamless between employees and departments.
Collaborative Learning is relevant.
With Collaborative Learning, training courses are created from scratch by your colleagues. Their content will, therefore ,be nuanced and better adapted to your organization’s context than external training courses.
In a traditional training model, a training team will create the training content or purchase it from a third party. The process of creating a training course typically involves a team of technically skilled instructional engineers. This can take several months and often requires huge budgets.
Conversely, with Collaborative Learning, training teams and all employees work together to create and respond to the various learning needs expressed. Employees are more engaged in the training process and contribute to the creation of quality content. Training managers no longer need to purchase these courses externally.
Collaborative Learning is fast.
What’s driving the current learning crisis? The lag time between training demand and supply. By the time L&D teams assess and develop the resources needed to meet the training need, it’s already too late to maximize its impact.
Collaborative Learning unites employees by allowing them to identify training needs, share their knowledge and expertise, and create training content to address pressing issues quickly. This allows organizations to seize growth opportunities faster.
Collaborative Learning is scalable.
Creating training modules is often a long and costly process, and updates to these courses are infrequent. The priority of Collaborative Learning is precisely to facilitate the creation and modification of training material so that it is easier to keep them updated based on new information received and feedback from employees.
The iterative method has become essential. Courses quickly become obsolete as technological or structural changes occur. Overly static training designs hinder flexibility and slow employee learning.
With Collaborative Learning, you can distribute learning paths and then refine them based on feedback from your employees. This way, they can access information exactly when they need it, allowing them to make better decisions.
Collaborative Learning is results-oriented
Traditional training programs focus purely on creating deliverables, relying on metrics like completion rates. In contrast, Collaborative Learning focuses on long-term results.
In most L&D departments, performance is measured by the number of courses created and completed by employees. This approach provides little insight into how employees interact with course content or what they gain from the experience. It’s difficult to establish a training ROI under these conditions!
The success of collaborative learning is measured by its impact rather than the volume of training publications. Since all departments are actively involved in the learning process, their feedback indicates whether a training module is successful.
How does Collaborative Learning work?
But what does Collaborative Learning look like in practice? How can it contribute to your company’s success?
Collaborative Learning, in effect, allows learning programs to be decentralized and andflexible, and promotes peer-to-peer learning.
Collaborative Learning allows businesses to remain agile
A training platform that supports collaborative learning keeps employees up-to-date on recent changes by creating courses in minute, rather than months. This allows you to respond quickly to technological and structural changes and difficult-to-predict global crises.
Problem It’s difficult for training managers to keep up.
Recent events have shown us that an organization’s priorities, goals, and even its structure can change overnight. For example, in March and April 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic forced many employees to transition to remote work. Employees had to adapt to new ways of working and technologies they’d never experienced before. All this in record time, and without any prior training.
In an ideal world, L&D departments would have taken charge of organizing this transition. Unfortunately, most training platforms don’t allow for fast enough course production. Producing a single training module often requires months of collaborative work, forcing training teams to call on instructional engineers to develop the courses. In addition to being resource-intensive and particularly costly, the entire process is cumbersome to manage.
The solution crCreateodules that anyone can master.
With Collaborative Learning, eyou can asily create and share training courses and quickly generate revenue. Every employee in your company can learn how to create a module in no time, without requiring outside help.
For example, your sales team can demonstrate new product features. Customer service can create a tutorial to help salespeople address a specific recurring issue. Sébastien from accounting can explain the new procedure for submitting expense reports. All of these modules can be easily shared, and educators (the module authors) receive rapid feedback from all stakeholders as they iterate and continually improve their training courses.
Collaborative Learning is ,therefore, accessible to everyone in the company and opens the way to new training opportunities. It allows you to create onboarding modules for your new recruits by integrating them into specific paths, but also to develop micro-paths relevant to certain departments or even a given position. Create modules to respond to a temporary change in your organization, valid for only a week or a month, for example. Develop content quickly and update it as developments or changes impact your market.
For example, If your company adopts new invoicing software, Account Managers will quickly develop best practices and create a dedicated training module to learn how to use the software. This way, all employees will be able to use the software as soon as it’s implemented. Account Managers can continue to update the module to better answer questions from their employees as they arise.
Collaborative Learning is human-centered
Your employees are your most valuable asset. A collaborative learning platform helps you leverage this competitive advantage by enabling all departments to learn from each other rather than assigning standard training based on position.