Learning Management Systems

Learning Management Systems Amar Dhaliwal, Chief Technology Officer, Saba Software. Abstract Learning Management Systems have been part of the mainstream technology landscape for over two decades. Originally described as Training Management Systems or even Education Administration Systems these tools were developed to support the activities of the training department and to basically automate a set of existing manual processes. In the years since the Learning Management System has been primarily used to schedule learning events in the form of instructor led classes, e-learning courses, or as blended solutions. Learning Departments, as they are now generally called, have had the responsibility of tracking and managing this learning and this is how managers and other parts of the organization have been conditioned to think about the function of training – to simply create, deliver, and track courses - as Harold Jarche points out. “Since the latter half of the 20th century, we have gone through a period where training departments have been directed to control organizational learning. It was part of the Taylorist, industrial model that also compartmentalized work and ensured that only managers were allowed to make decisions. In this context, only training professionals were allowed to talk about learning.” In most cases this training required learners to take time out of their daily jobs –travelling to a classroom or sitting in front of an online course – context switching from what they had been doing; they had to stop what they were working on in order to study the course. But things are changing … Keywords: Learning Management Systems, Social Learning, Mobile Learning, Blended Learning, Formal and Informal Learning, Corresponding author: Dhaliwal, Chief Technology Officer, Saba Software Inc, 2400 Bridge Parkway, Redwood Shores, CA 94065. adhaliwal@saba.com Introduction It is obvious that most of how we learn and what we learn happens outside the auspices of the training function, it happens in the workplace itself, as we do our jobs. Some studies have suggested that this may in fact account for 70% or more of all learning in an organization. Informal learning is, of course, not a new phenomenon. Sharing of information, water-cooler conversations, communities of interest, best practices have always been part of the learning culture within organizations. It is, however, very important to appreciate that the way we learn in the workplace is very different from the way we learn in training. Most training content is structured and follows a logical progression where the pedagogy of learning is very important. Learning in the workplace is by its nature unstructured, Despite the relative significance of informal learning, formal training still has a key role in all organizations. The business environment has seen an increased focus on compliance (financial, regulatory, legal, safety, and environmental) and the consequences of a failure here can have significant negative consequences. The Learning Management System and formal training is necessary to ensure that there is a framework and process for compliance management and audit. Informal learning has over the course of the last several years morphed yet again into the current descriptor of choice, social learning. The rise of Social Learning Social learning is collaborative, community-based and continuous learning that enables real-time knowledge sharing between employees, partners and customers. Social learning allows learners to sustain expertise gained from formal Learning Management System -based training programs by connecting with the community, experts, coaches and interest groups, collaborating and getting critical questions answered in real-time to deliver better results. Additionally, Social learning helps companies to unlock critical tacit knowledge from retiring workforce, engage new generation of employees with collaborative interfaces and rapidly build new skills across the organization to respond to changing business landscape. Social learning shifts the paradigm from finding the content to finding the expertise within the business network and relying on them to increase effectiveness quickly. It significantly reduces training costs with user-generated, experiential content and increases user adoption as well as frequency of usage to realize greater ROI from the investment into the learning management solutions. The rise of social learning was incumbent on the development of a set of supporting technologies, most importantly universal internet access, web 2.0, video, mobile, and social networking. What are the key elements for a Learning Management System to meet today’s requirements? How do you know you have a right Learning Management solution that will effectively solve your business problems? What key capabilities should your learning solution posses to help you fulfil your use cases? After working with hundreds of customers who have managed compliance and formal training needs and established methods to leverage collaboration capabilities for enhancing the learner’s knowhow, the following summarizes some of the key elements you should look: • Expertise Locator: Your learning solution should have ability to identify people who can provide domain specific expertise and answer critical questions. A unified people profile provides a comprehensive view of people’s expertise, interests and endorsement by the community about their subject matter expertise to make the expert identification seamless. • User generated content: Ensure that your solution allows experts and practitioners to create content quickly, provide comments/input based on real world experiences, rate the content to demonstrate the value perceived by the community as well as tag and bookmark it for future use. • Secure communities of practice and discussion forums: Your learning solution should help learners to engage with targeted communities, discussion forums, ask questions to experts, exchange best practices, and get help from coaches to become more productive. It should allows you to create class groups create cross-functional secure communities of practice that nest students in the area of the learning concentration at the discipline level, at the team level, at the organizational level but also at the category, curriculum and certification level. Shared interest and context is the greatest driver of success in social learning. • Knowledge sharing: Your solution must deliver capabilities such as rating, tagging, bookmarking, following experts or groups, sharing resources directly with the mentees fosters rapid knowledge sharing and unlocks tacit knowledge from experienced workers and executives. • Embedded online collaboration: Built-in online collaboration, web and video conferencing capabilities are essential for allowing learners to collaborate with remote co-workers, experts and coaches, conduct virtual training sessions, record these knowledge transfer sessions and share them with rest of the community. • Mobile, anytime anywhere capabilities: Your social learning solution should allow learners to get answers to key questions while being in the field, review video tasks performed by experts and launch an online collaboration session with an expert via a mobile device such as iPhone and iPad. • Course channels to create a YouTube-like ease of video sharing to the enterprise by organizing recordings and videos of all kinds, enabling video content to be arranged by subject or topic or course or other organizing principles. These video channels allow students any time access to key learning experiences highlighted by the instructor or by other students. • Scalability: Your solution should scale to millions of users as the network grows and extended-enterprise learners start participating. Conclusion As your business, employee demographics and work environment changes, so must the role of the Learning Management System to ensure that it can support and drive formal training, informal learning and social learning to keep pace with change and expectations. This does not mean you are replacing the traditional Learning Management System. Quite the contrary, informal and social learning should be a seamless component of your existing Learning Management System, augmenting it to provide a continuous and relevant learning environment. However, with some legacy systems this not always possible due to the inherent limitations of the technology platform. In such circumstances companies should seriously consider replacing their legacy Learning Management System with a newer technology platform that will support the different aspects of the learning experience. Additional Reading Informal Learning, Harold Jarche ; http://www.jarche.com/2012/01/informal-learning-the-95-solution/ What is the future of the LMS?, Jane Hart http://janeknight.typepad.com/socialmedia/2010/05/what-is-the-future-of-the-lms.html Social Learning, Saba Software http://www.saba.com/social-learning-software