Social learning: Learners organize themselves
Karlsruhe, December 2014 - "Social Learning is a frequently used term, but one that's understood in many different ways. To me Social Learning provides a fundamentally new way of learning whose use has to be carefully considered and planned. Simply opening a forum doesn't constitute a web-based training program," explains Ellen Trude, moderator of the conference section on Social Learning on 27 January at 11:00. Social Learning makes special demands on both trainers and learners because the learner is not merely the object of a training program, but also actively organizes the learning process and learns to do this in constant contact with other learners. A learning group should be able to decide which tools its members want to use. According to Trude, Social learning means "co-creation": sharing experience and knowledge, the joint development of problem solving, and the discovery of new, innovative ideas.
Trude comments, "Of course, learning objectives and content have be decided upon before a course begins, but are the fixed learning-path objectives defined in the learning-management systems really always necessary? Yes, the learning objectives have to be reached and the learning content understood, the trainers have to monitor this, but how this should achieved, however, should be left to the learners."
In her introductory talk, Trude will discuss a ten-week online course for the training of community managers at Robert Bosch GmbH. "Community managers play a decisive role for networked organizations that is comparable to the project manager’s significance for the project business. However, there is no clearly defined job profile, so for the course, we determined the social, professional, and technical skills that a community manager has to have and built them into the curriculum. It was obvious to us from the outset that the training program could not be done in a conventional format: Only a person who has experienced a community can be a community manager, so from the very beginning, we set the course up so the participants learned in a networked way that they themselves organized."
The course coordinators presented the learning content in various forms in a Wiki and formulated individual and team tasks. Trude explained that during the course, the trainers and instructors remained out of the picture: "A true peer-to-peer learning environment has no place for teachers." One participant commented, "What a person really learns is what she or he experiences. This can’t be replaced by any textbook in the world, though I would never have thought this when we started."
