The Social LMS

What does a successful social learning management solution look like, and can it be integrated within an existing LMS?

In the age of social media tools such as Facebook and Twitter, the traditional model of a learning management system must either quickly evolve or risk rapid obsolescence. Yesterday’s LMS can no longer support the pace of lean, agile organizations and their digitally native learners.

Social learning itself is nothing new. It has always represented a large percentage of the organization’s total learning. It’s just that in the past, employees would chat with cubemates or place a phone call to informally transfer knowledge.

Today’s learners view their organization as an extended social network in which there is someone who knows the answers to their questions — or knows where the answer resides. This self-directed, social-networked approach reshapes the learning model within the organization, and it exposes critical gaps in the traditional LMS solution. Further, because social learning is often unstructured and user-initiated, it can be very difficult to track. Traditional LMSs focus on such quantifiable events as course enrollment, SCORM-compliant e-learning and post-test results, but learning executives can’t directly measure the number, outcomes and ROI of social learning.

Yet social learning has matured to a point where its advocates desire a portion of the organization’s learning and development budget. Therefore, the adoption of a social learning strategy requires the organization to re-examine its technology infrastructure as well as its approach to the learning process. It should achieve the following objectives:

1. Encourage social learning throughout the organization.

2. Measure outcomes that align with learning and business objectives.

3. Support a culture of agile, continuous improvement.

Chief learning officers also should ask themselves: What will a successful SLMS solution provide to the organization? Can it be integrated within an existing LMS? What features will be needed to facilitate social learning for a diverse audience of both digital natives and digital skeptics?