Based on contemporary advancement in technology, the learning industry is constantly evolving to tackle the problems of learner engagement. For e-learning companies in Mumbai and around the country, there is a reason why both social learning and content curation are two of the most popular trends in recent years. In view of overwhelming availability of information out there, these two learning strategies offer to manage data effectively while creating the right experience for learners.
But, what is social learning or content curation? Let’s get in that in detail.
Social Learning
Social learning represents an age-old learning practice. It is a strategy that ensures better engagement from learners based on the basic fact—people like learning in groups.
Social learning predominantly features collaboration among the learners, be it between two students in a classroom or two professionals at workplace. Here, collaboration is achieved through online platforms that may include forums and informal chat sessions. Learners may also engage each other in sharing sessions and by creating learning circles among themselves.
The rise in social media is largely due to people’s tendency to connect with communities of likeminded individuals. Hence, social media offers an indirect contact strategy, which is very useful in implementing social learning.
Social learning finds its roots in the Social Learning Theory put forth by the famous cognitive scientists, Bandura and Walters. As per the theory, social learning can be identified as a cognitive process carried out within individual social context. This means, learners can share knowledge as they already share the perspective, leading to a scenario where the environment and behaviour influence each other to help learning.
Integration of social learning promotes informal learning, where learners can network and collaborate to share and exchange ideas using the following strategies:
- Learning management systems can integrate social interactions, such as allowing users to like and comment. This encourages learners to share experiences and improve self-affirmation.
- Establishing knowledge repositories leads to better engagement, as experts can interact with learners regularly.
- As already demonstrated by a number of e-learning companies in India, large organisations can learn together and grow in view of better exchanges of ideas.
Content Curation
In recent years, content curation has gained a lot of support as it offers to deal with overwhelming amount of information to help learners find what they want. Curating information is an important L&D strategy, allowing e-learning companies to manage large amount of information. Learning Management Systems or LMSs offer to provide just-in-time information that includes timely delivery of relevant data.
As implemented by many e-learning companies in Mumbai, content curation promotes sharing of information. It has been shown to be on the rise, mainly due to its following features:
- Implementation of ideal methods of content curation includes a collaborative process that facilitates social rating. Here, values of the content are based entirely on the feedback from the learners.
- Semantive type of content curation offers to categorise information based on relevant keywords.
- Needs of the learners is considered when offering supplementary learning materials.
- A mind map is created that allows the course developer to focus on the main areas of interest. Here, a single idea is expanded further by incorporating learners’ requests and the ideas of developers themselves. This strategy allows merging of discordant concepts, where one finds overlapping points to connect the different concepts.
- It becomes a matter of great priority to create your own ranking process when listing the sources of content. The general ranking provided by search engines is used to find credible websites and news sites. It is crucial to rely on original sources rather than content aggregators.
- Further stages of content curation include implementation of advanced as follows:
- Aggregation of relevant information at a single place
- Distillation of collected information to find the most relevant content
- Elevation of available content based on current trend identified as important
- Merging of different content sources to present a new perspective on available data and
- Chronological arrangement of information to create a timeline of content sources.
As content curators, you have to connect your learners to relevant content. A good content curator guides his audience to a world of valuable information. Many future-focused organizations have adopted content curation as one of their L&D strategies. It is time you did too!