As social learning grows does the requirement for traditional training departments shrink? U.K.-based eLearning development firm Epic asks this very question in its fourth E-learning Debate – and this Epic debate is being hosted only online.

The motion presented for discussion: This house believes that as social learning grows, so the requirement for traditional training departments shrinks. Those arguing in favor include Donna Hamilton, Head of Group Learning at Royal Bank of Scotland and Jane Hart, founder of C4LPT. Those arguing against the motion: Melissa Highton, Head of the Learning Technologies Group at the University of Oxford, and Clive Shepherd, Chair of the UK’s eLearning Network.

The debate is engaging people in an important discussion about topics that are vital to anyone working in L&D, with participants on both sides making some excellent points.

Those who favor the motion argue that the requirement for traditional training departments will shrink. Donna Hamilton points out, “We know that very little of what is taught in the class room ever makes its way into working life. Learners need to undertake fieldwork – repetitive, mindful, problem focused practice – to gain skills.” She also says that the role of the new learning department should be to support this on the job skill development with “the right coaching, expert teaching and challenging work based activities.”

Jane Hart, also arguing in favor, suggests there is a major new role that the traditional training department can play in helping people work and learn in the new social workplace. She says that role will involve “moving from a ‘managing learning’ to a ‘supporting performance’ mindset.”  Jane argues that the requirement for traditional training departments will shrink “as knowledge, work and learning become indistinguishable, [and] social learning (powered by social media tools) becomes an organizational imperative.” As Nic Laycock put it in his blogged response to the debate, Jane’s point is that “the traditional training department has run its course – with the opportunity now to transform itself into a true business added value function by leveraging new technologies to become a key business partner.” Donna Hamilton sums it up: “we are failing to take advantage of developments in social learning that are fundamentally reshaping the relationship between people and information. Traditional training departments need to evolve or be relegated to corporate history.”

What would cause training departments to shrink would be a change in how learning is perceived by the business.  -A. Jones (Thomas Reuters) via @eLearningdebate

Opponents, on the other hand, have pointed out that traditional learning is itself inherently social – and that social learning is nothing new. In a recent blog post Clive Shepherd calls attention to the fact that social learning is not the same as social media, and that L&D departments are not the only stakeholders in workplace social media. He points out that social media has a multitude of uses in the workplace with outcomes unrelated to learning such as collaborating on tasks, promoting goods and services, entertaining each other, exchanging information etc. Clive says, “What is important is that L&D is at the table, campaigning for the use of social media at work where this is likely to make a worthwhile contribution to the overall learning architecture.” Clive argues that social learning that employs Web 2.0 social media is new, and as it develops it should continue to complement formal learning – i.e. social learning is just one part of the learning mix.

Melissa Highton takes it a step further by saying that the role of training departments will in fact grow rather than shrink and that traditional training departments have an important part to play in the quality and accreditation of social learning. She argues that training departments should participate as equals in the open content movement by sharing materials developed in-house and by employees. She points out that when traditional training departments shift away from in-house production to shared, social learning their emphasis must shift to become more skilled at varied methods of assessment. In a nutshell, the requirement for traditional training departments to adapt and develop is inevitable and L&D’s new challenge is the accreditation of prior learning and peer learning.

Whether you’re for or against, what’s clear is that this debate has caused quite a stir, with thought provoking arguments on both sides and a number of key issues brought to light. As Dr. Naomi Norman, Director of Learning, says, “The debate format has proved incredibly successful at getting people discussing and arguing and encouraging thinking.” So if you would like to read more on what people have to say on this latest social learning debate or wish to share your own thoughts, visit www.elearningdebate.com.

While there are countless articles about the future of the LMS, it was arguably George’s blog post titled Future of learning: LMS or SNS? which kicked this discussion into high gear. So, I was not going to let the opportunity to debate this topic pass me by.

George believes that the future of both the LMS and the LCMS is quite strong, the obvious point being that there will always be a need for structured content and reporting to meet regulatory and legal obligations. However, those vendors who rely solely on this argument are very likely to find themselves quickly marginalized. To stay relevant, George believes training vendors should do two things:

1. Stop talking “learning” and start talking “capacity” and “execution” like the rest of the C-suite.
2. Augment their systems with components that provide opportunities for people to interact in social systems for informal learning.

By doing this, George argues that vendors (LMS in particular), and the organizations they sell to, will begin to see their product no longer as simply an event-based tool for learning, but rather as a process-based tool for capacity planning and workplace effectiveness. When this happens, the LMS will move past somewhat of a marginalized view to something that is more systemic and more broadly leveraged across the organization.

The problem lies not in this goal, but how learning vendors are choosing to get there. Dan Pontefract, in his most excellent post The Standalone LMS is Dead makes the following argument:

“Set up your ‘Facebook for the organization’ by embedding an LMS (or LMS like features) into your enterprise-wide collaboration platform. Coaches, mentors, online buddies need to coexist within the wiki’s, blogs, discussion forums, webcam meetings, online presence, etc. which needs to coexist within the list of formal classroom and eLearning offerings which needs to coexist with your documents, knowledge management, videos, podcasts, which needs to coexist with the profiles, skills, and recent activity-feed happenings of all employees. Blow up your LMS. Find a way to integrate it into your collaboration platform.”

This argument, while spot-on, has fallen on deaf ears. Instead of partnering with social media vendors who are already firmly entrenched in the enterprise and integrating their own best-of-breed LMS features into these platforms, we are instead watching LMS and some LCMS vendors develop their own set of social media functionality. Here is why I believe this strategy will not only fail but risk further marginalizing L&D:

1. Companies will choose best-of-breed social business software vendors for enterprise social learning deployments, not niche players

Below is Gartner’s 2009 Magic Quadrant for Social Software in the Workplace, G00171792 [see note at end of post]. This is a list of roughly the top 35 or so social media vendors providing a broad core set of social media capabilities. You’ll see with the exception of Saba, there are no learning vendors on this list. This is due either to a lack of revenues derived from social software licenses or to having a specific industry focus, or both.

In this report Gartner defines the main uses for these vendors’ social software tools, two of them being the following:

“Empowering communities of experts and interested parties (bonding people by specific interests, capturing best practices, disseminating lead-user innovation and providing an informal support network).”

“Accessing relevant knowledge and expertise that can be used to formulate a plan of action when decisions need to be made.”

Wow! These sound a lot like the definition of Social Learning. This poses an interesting question: If best-of-breed broad ecosystem social software vendors can meet the requirements of social learning in addition to other social functionality required within an enterprise, what sense does it make to implement the social learning solutions offered by the LMS/LCMS players?

Indeed, in this same report, Gartner makes the following observation:

“Being smaller with a specialist focus rather than broader ‘ecosystem’ players, they are struggling to demonstrate enterprise credibility and long-term viability through partnerships, alliances, integration options and examples of customer success.”

2. Learning-focused social functionality simply reinforces L&D’s status as a small, siloed organization with minimal enterprise influence.

With social media, the hard reality is that small niche players like LMS and LCMS vendors will always lag behind dedicated social business software players. Referring again the Magic Quadrant report for Social Software in the workplace, Gartner states the following:

“They (niche players) are still held back by breadth of functionality, by product road map urgency or by lack of an innovative growth strategy.”

A quick social media search also turned up a number of comments on the subject. Here is one I found interesting from @jacobboone:

“. . .I was at the CLO symposium in 2009 and eLearning vendors are coming at it from the other angle…providing collaboration platforms wrapped around their content. The problem is that this results in informal learning about formal training content only…and the usability is way behind. . .”

Despite this, Gartner does believe that niche players do have a viable growth strategy available to them by focusing on specific verticals or supporting specific activities. Obviously, this is the sweet spot for LMS/LCMS vendors offering social media functionality. However, we need to face another harsh reality posed by Gartner:

“Products from specialist vendors continued to be preferred for first and follow-on deployments, but many smaller vendors are struggling to close large enterprise-wide deals.”

This poses another interesting dilemma. George Siemens believes that LMS vendors need move past their current marginalized view by providing process-based social media tools that are systematic and leveraged broadly across the organization. But, how can L&D break out of their siloed state and exercise enterprise-wide influence when they utilize point social solutions that lack the ability (both in terms of functionality and vendor influence) to extend beyond training? I’d say they can’t.

3. In most organizations, social learning initiatives will be driven outside L&D

Back in April, I had the opportunity to chat with Ben Kiker, the Chief Marketing Officer at Jive Software at the time. Although we never hear about it in the training blogs, Jive is actually driving some of the biggest and most successful social learning projects today in terms of scope, size, adoption and engagement.

When I asked Ben who was the driving force behind these projects, his answer was not L&D, but rather the COO or General Manager of a substantial business unit. He then provided me some pretty stunning examples of social learning in action and across the enterprise. You can listen to the podcast here, but check out the stats of these two examples:

Swiss Re (global reinsurer operating in >20 countries): Internal Collaboration – The goal here was the efficient exchange of subject matter expertise across worldwide business units, locations, and time zones. Within seven weeks of implementing their social network:

• The adoption rate surpassed 60%
• 2,200 people created profiles and/or joined groups
• >1,000 people engaged in discussions
• >600 users were creating content

CSC (92K employees in >90 countries): Expertise Location – The goal was to quickly located experts and relevant assets for rapid turnaround and effective communication with key accounts. Within 20 weeks of implementing their social network:

• Adoption surpassed 25K users
• Over 2,100 groups were formed across practices, communities of interest, competencies, etc.
• Activity was robust with over 1million page views and >150 actions per month

So, social learning is happening and it’s happening in a major way with vendors who provide a broad range of capabilities, not the niche LMS/LCMS social media players. Social learning doesn’t work unless it permeates the enterprise and this cannot happen on the departmental level. So perhaps it’s time for learning vendors to rethink their social learning strategies. L&D shouldn’t be thought of as an island in a social world. It needs to be part of an overall enterprise content development and delivery strategy.

Note:

The Gartner Report(s) described herein, (the “Gartner Report(s)”) represent(s) data, research opinion or viewpoints published, as part of a syndicated subscription service, by Gartner, Inc. (“Gartner”), and are not representations of fact. Each Gartner Report speaks as of its original publication date (and not as of the date of this Prospectus) and the opinions expressed in the Gartner Report(s) are subject to change without notice.

One thing that has always been of great interest to me is what I’ll refer to as the integration of social and formal learning content. So when I got to the part of Jane’s article that said it’s time to re-think the design and delivery of formal learning initiatives, I felt we were on to something. Jane nails it when she says:

“It is also not just about churning out content (however well instructionally designed) but also about the social aspects of learning. Individuals need to have the opportunity to discuss, collaborate and share their experiences – and thereby add to the body of knowledge around a topic. UGC (user generated content) should therefore be seen as a valuable aspect for formal learning context – as much as expert generated content. ”

The industry accepted statistic that social learning evangelists often refer to is that that formal structured learning (FSL) accounts for only 20% of an individual’s learning. This is true. However, it doesn’t mean that the development of formal expert generated content is going to go away. Rather, it’s the delivery of this formal content that will change – in the form of less courseware and more guided delivery at the point-of-performance, with social media platforms providing a critical publishing channel.

Moreover, it’s crucial that we focus on ways for UGC to make its way into formal content development processes and leverage this rich source of information to create better learning products, drive new instructional design models, and most importantly, increase the richness and instructional value of learning content.

How User Generated Content Can Make its Way into Formal Learning:

1. Integrate UGC into formal learning content management: Feedback from forums and content from blogs and/or wikis are examples of valuable information that can be pulled or linked into learning content repositories to provide a unified view of organizational and social content. This pool of connected assets gives authors and instructional designers a more powerful arsenal of resources for creating compelling learning (formal or not).
2. Create Subject Matter Networks (SMNs): Socialize formal content by creating communities around its subject matter to foster rich dialogue around topics and to leverage connections between content authors and their networks. In this way, formal content is now supported and supplemented by an ecosystem of experts and related information. For example, at Xyleme the “Frequently Asked Questions” section of our user guide comes primarily from our product SMN.
3. Make social media part of formal workflows: Allow social collaboration to be another step in the review process by publishing formal content to internal (or external) communities for peer review prior to its wide release. Capture this valuable user-generated feedback and route it into the formal review workflows.
4. Republish UGC with (as part of) formal learning products: Monitor your social learning networks and capture the relevant UGC identified to be of potential value to the organization’s learning products. Send this UGC through the formal editorial workflow to check for appropriateness and quality standards, and then re-publish this content – in the appropriate context – to formal training publications to supplement and enrich these products. For example, supplement your product training materials with instructional demos created by your users and posted on YouTube.

(Note on this post: “Subject matter network” is a term I picked up from Harold Jarche when I commented on his Social learning in the enterprise post; also, the points I make regarding SMN are based on quotes from leading Social Business Software vendor, Jive Software. )

“As work becomes more complex and the level of information explodes, speed-to-competence will depend on an organizations ability to allow learners to support themselves by tapping into the knowledge of others.”

Social learning is all about providing more flexible and responsive ways for delivering this knowledge through user generated content, engagement, and feedback. The Web 2.0 revolution has brought learning networks front and center with “Connect and Communicate” becoming the new mantra for training organizations.

As with any revolution or uprising though, there is a natural tendency to take on the attitude that everything has changed and “all bets are off.” How many blog posts do we read these days whose title ends with the words “IS DEAD”?

Social learning is disruptive and training organizations need to evolve or die, there is no disputing this. However, let’s take a step and examine more closely some the most common current proclamations.

The 5 Myths of Social Learning:

Myth #1: User-generated content in social media platforms will replace formal content development processes.

Reality: User generated content will supplement the formal content development process and create efficiencies in Subject Matter Expert (SME) contribution, knowledge capture, and content review.

The obvious point here is that due to assessment, certification, and regulatory issues, training content will still require formal development processes. That’s true, but it goes much deeper than that. Social learning is bi-directional and user-generated content and feedback can be a valuable asset for instructional designers to develop more compelling and timely learning, whether that learning is published to a formal course, a non-formal podcast, or an informal blog. We are seeing this today. Leading social media vendors like Jive Software are integrating with the top ECM platforms to provide unified search, workflow, and storage of enterprise and social content, proving a cohesive environment where formal content is supported by an ecosystem of users that contribute expertise and relevant information.

Myth #2: Learning objects are dead.

Reality: Reusable content elements are even more critical for the deployment of content to social learning platforms to support incremental learning.

Charles Jennings of the Internet Time Alliance calls performance support the silver bullet for training, where learners are guided incrementally via relevant nuggets of information delivered at the point-of-performance. And as Charles demonstrated with the Thomson-Reuters Learning Exchange during his session at LearnTrends, social networks are becoming the de-facto performance support platform for SMEs to deliver targeted information. So, while many like to proclaim the death of learning objects, the fact is that social media applications, including mobile, are inherently designed to leverage small reusable content components and are more valuable tools to learners when they do so.

Myth #3: Training and development organizations will make stand-alone social media platform decisions.

Reality: Social media platforms have great organizational significance and will ultimately become part of the enterprise “fabric” just as we have seen with email, instant messaging, and other collaboration tools.

Although it starts as a groundswell, the fact is that if social learning is to be successful, it needs to go across the entire enterprise as a core infrastructure. McKinsey’s data supports this assertion: companies that reported the highest level of satisfaction with their social media deployments, more than half of all employees are using them. For all others, it’s about one in four.

Given the need for enterprise adoption, Forrester reports two key criteria that organizations need to look for in their community platform vendors:

1. Full solution services: In addition to the technology, they must bring experience branding in this new medium and deploying communities, strategy & education services, and community management services.
2. Integration with other enterprise systems: Organizations should seek vendors that understand how communities ties into other systems such as CRM, customer support, and marketing dashboards.

While many learning vendors have thrown their hat into the Web 2.0 ring, community needs to be a core competency, not simply an extension of an existing learning silo. Contrary to what we’d like to believe, social learning doesn’t always start at the training department and work its way up, quite the opposite. So while implementing social media tools provided by an LCMS or LMS vendor may ensure departmental adoption, experience and today’s market show us that enterprise adoption of these tools is not a likely reality.

Myth #4: Social media platforms can be implemented “organically” without any formal planning or oversight.

Reality: The vast majority of organizations will not deploy an enterprise social media strategy without governance policies for the use and oversight of these tools.

While one of the big benefits of social media platforms is the ability to create content quickly and eliminate rigid taxonomies for classifying content, policies will need to be put in place to ensure the integrity and proper use of this content. Many people feel that this is the antithesis of learning networks. But remember, even Wikipedia has formal processes for making sure user generated content is accurate – the organization has over 100 people worldwide dedicated solely to ensuring content integrity and penalizing those who attempt to use the platform for self promotion.

Myth #5: The LMS is dead.

Reality: No, it’s not.

This has been a topic discussed for ages (there is actually an absolutely excellent recent conversation on George Siemens’ blog with additional commentary by Jane Hart on her own blog as well as on the Learning Conversations blog) and I won’t spend much time on it except to say if you need tracking capabilities, an LMS is your only option. In order for social media platforms to totally eclipse the function an LMS plays, they would be forced to support interoperability standards like SCORM, AICC or Common Cartridge. Does it really make sense to build all of this functionality into social media platforms? The answer is probably no. This is why we are seeing LMS vendors merge social media tools into their platforms. So, the real discussion should be around the viability of an LMS as a social media platform. Will this strategy enhance the role of an LMS within an organization, or will their role continue to diminish as new network tools continue to arise?

A little background: We’ve been working on the Xyleme Voices podcast library for over a year and a half now. We consider it a contribution to the learning community so it’s something we take very seriously and dedicate a lot of resources to. To get not one, but four of the industry’s most notable experts together for a discussion as important as the future of CLO’s and their training organizations told me we were doing something right and I eagerly (and anxiously) awaited our discussion.

I’ll be understated here : these guys are good! During our discussion, Clark Quinn called the Internet Time Alliance a dream team and it quickly became obvious why this is indeed the case. While geographically dispersed across three countries and multiple time zones, they are nonetheless a cohesive unit and they truly build upon and leverage each other’s experience and perspectives. It’s obvious they practice what they preach regarding collaborative learning and social networks.

In addition to the obvious hands-on expertise these seasoned professionals provided throughout the 5 parts of their podcast, training executives can also glean some relevant insights on how to work with and get the best out of a top-notch team. Simply listen closely to how Harold, Clark, Charles and Jay worked so respectfully with each other in order to provide a discussion on social learning whose value is much greater than the sum of the points made by the individual participants.

OK, enough about how great they are, let’s get to the discussion. There were three common themes that ran through the entire panel discussion:

1. The ITA feels it critical to challenge conventional thinking.
2. The ITA is not afraid to call out the short comings of CLO’s and their learning organizations.
3. The ITA is bold enough to believe that CLO’s can become major C-suite players.

These gentlemen had some pretty provocative statements to make. So much so, that I’ll be blogging about the topics discussed for the next several posts, but let me round up some of my favorite points made from each participant for you:

We’re not seeing the end of the training department, but the end of the training dept as we know it in the 20th century. As work becomes more complex, it becomes less about developing content and more about developing networks. Connect and communicating – adapting to the networked business model is what the training department will be all about. -Harold Jarche

I disagree that CLO will have equal footing. I think that the CLO should be more important than the others because human capital is the core competence of corporations, so I see the CLO going up and beyond where other C-levels have presided. Their role will be that of the super CLO. –Jay Cross

We cannot isolate learning in one business unit because that is not how you leverage knowledge for competitive advantage. Collaborative networked learning has to go across the entire organization organically as core infrastructure. Jay calls this learnscape, I call it the performance ecosystem. Regardless of what you call it, it has to be like air and water – it has to be everywhere. -Clark Quinn

There is a real discomfort of doing things differently when adopting social media. It’s a real barrier and an interesting one because at this moment in time there is a real pressure to innovate. You can’t innovate without doing things differently, so there is a real paradox here. When we step out of our comfort zones, we throw up barriers: i.e. we can’t measure it so we can’t act on it. But you can measure it, you just need different approaches. –Charles Jennings

And my personal favorite:

Compliance is the enemy of the networked business model. -???

Check out my next blog post to find out who made this bold declaration.