Why Social Learning Matters for Corporate Learning
Understanding Social Learning
While social learning may sound like a modern concept, in fact, it’s one of the most significant ways humans learn. You’ve been participating in social learning your entire life, from watching and engaging with your family as an infant and toddler to absorbing aspects of a new corporate culture.
Most people don’t like learning in a classroom setting; it’s frequently defined as dry or boring, and retention rates are low. Swap that structured classroom for a more casual and interactive one and your staff will not only like their learning experiences but are more likely to retain information and integrate it into their daily work.
Social Learning Face-to-Face
You might be surprised to realize that social learning occurs every day in the workplace. When one person asks another a question about the software, it’s an example of social learning. When someone on your staff takes the time to teach a new skill or provide information, it’s social learning. This kind of social learning occurs more readily when you create a collaborative and supportive workplace and provide opportunities for employees to interact with one another.
Social learning can also be more formalized. For instance, you might host workshops to learn about new software, with open laptops and free interactions between coworkers, or designate specific times for learning and interaction in a more regimented workplace. That could look like a later opening time one day a week or a special event to show off and try out new products.
Online Social Learning
While, on the surface, social learning sounds like something that requires people to be in the same building at the same time, that is far from true! In fact, companies with offices around the globe or with a remote workforce can still take advantage of social learning opportunities. These may look a bit different than social learning in person, but they’re just as valuable and offer the same benefits of collaboration, connection, and information retention.
What do opportunities for online social learning look like?
- Using video conferencing technology to bring staff together in one place for conversation, interaction, or demonstrations.
- Offering the ability to converse with others, both in and out of the office, through discussion feeds.
- Live streaming work events and training so everyone is able to participate.
- Enabling on-the-spot video chats for staff in multiple locations.
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YuJa Video Platform Facilitates Communication and Collaboration for Remote Workers
When the option for in person meetings isn’t possible, a robust, reliable video technology is critical. Not only can it support communication, but it can facilitate collaboration and synergy among those working remotely.
Video Technology Removes Barriers for Remote Workers
Video technology can solve many of the struggles associated with remote working, from feelings of isolation and loneliness to the ability to communicate and collaborate both synchronously and asynchronously. According to annual State of Remote Work reports conducted by Buffer, communication and collaboration, as well as loneliness, are frequently at the top of the list of challenges reported by remote workers.
Ongoing Communication is Key to Successful Projects
Real-time video conferencing provides an effective way to have synchronous conversations. Rather than relying on email or other forms of written communication, which lack the nuance of tone and facial expression, video meetings provide instantaneous feedback and can reduce misunderstanding and confusion. Real-time collaboration allows for immediate problem-solving, with no back-and-forth communication.
Solving Problems Together, No Matter Where You Work
One of the challenges of remote working is the ability to collaborate with colleagues. The YuJa Enterprise Video Platform facilitates collaboration with whiteboards that provide a canvas for annotation; access to file uploads, video chats and shared files, where employees can work on projects and solve problems together; and the ability to collaborate without application downloads or installs with the Video Conferencing platform.
Sharing Asynchronously Keeps Everyone in the Loop
Work doesn’t always happen at the same time for all employees. Asynchronous sharing and communication is perfect for employees in different time zones or who have other obligations that demand time during typical work hours. Employees can record to collaborate or troubleshoot and others can watch when it’s convenient for them. This way, no one is excluded from important conversations.
Understanding and addressing the challenges of remote work is essential to effective business operations. With tools in YuJa’s Enterprise Video Platform, companies, corporations and institutions of all sizes can proactively provide the tools their employees need to succeed, creating a stronger, more effective workforce.
Make Collaboration Easy With YuJa
The Harvard Business Review identified eight factors essential to effective teamwork and collaboration, most of which centered around modeling collaborative behavior, supporting a sense of community, and building relationships.
Offering collaboration opportunities in classrooms provides students with essential real-world experience that will continue to benefit them as they transition into the workforce.
Tips to Maximize Collaboration With YuJa
As the popularity of remote work and online education rises, collaboration becomes even more central to creating an effective remote environment. YuJa provides collaboration tools that can be applied in school and transferred to the workforce. Consider the following ways in which YuJa can enable effective collaboration.
Lecture Capture:
Recording lectures helps students feel like they’re a part of the class, no matter where they log in from in the world. Students can revisit the course and view conversations even if they weren’t able to attend live, increasing collaboration opportunities. When instructors use lecture capture, they can model and encourage collaboration through assignments and projects that mock real-world collaborative tasks.
Flipping Classrooms:
YuJa enables flipped classrooms, which is when students watch the lesson before the class meeting time. Class time is used for real-time collaboration, moving ideas forward and helping ensure the most effective use to time together.
Video Conferencing:
Conversations in the real-time discussions and video conferences enable students to develop key relationship and communication skills. And while video conferencing has always enabled students and teams to see one another, recording a conference can help capture and archive knowledge for future reference. Using tools like search-inside-video, viewers can quickly find what they’re looking for when they revisit a recording.
Content Management:
Proper file and content management helps ensure everyone has access to what they need when they need it.
With YuJa, instructors can effectively prepare students for collaborative work in the modern classroom, office or workplace. Students will develop the knowledge and tools necessary to succeed both in face-to-face and online collaborations.
How Video Training Benefits Corporations and Employees
YuJa’s software-based tools are an ideal choice for corporate trainers. Using a desktop computer or laptop, instructional lectures and supplemental materials like PowerPoint presentations can be captured, streamed in real-time, or archived to watch at a later time. File uploads of all types makes it simple to share instructional materials, while real-time chats and discussions allow for question-and-answer sessions, discussions and collaboration with employees.
Employees Want More Personalized Training Options
Many employees entering and in the workforce are digital natives. Online and video learning are facets of education they’re used to and embrace.
LinkedIN Learning statistics cited that:
- 68% of employees prefer to learn or train in the workplace.
- 58% of employees prefer to learn or train at their own speed.
- 49% of employees prefer to learn at the point of need.
Additionally, research says that employees feel empowered when they can direct their own learning.
E-Learning and Video Training Saves Your Training Budget
Corporate training and continuing education can be a significant cost for many businesses.
In fact, in 2020, organizations spent $82.5 billion in training expenditures, according to Statista Research Department.
Expenditures include training activities, spending on training-related technology, and the salaries paid to internal training staff, as well as training activities provided internally or externally.
Through efficiencies created in e-learning and video training, YuJa can help reduce travel and expand educational options available to employees, all while making training sessions more cost effective.
Personal capture can be used to create training videos that can be used time and time again — eliminating redundancies, along with creating onboarding sessions, and updating staff on company news and insights. Corporate events can be live streamed securely with desktop and hardware appliance-based tools. Audiences are delivered a crisp video no matter how many are viewing at once.
Other Corporate Training Benefits
According to research done by the United States Department of Education, online learning leads to better performance, including among older and non-traditional learners. Other advantages include:
- Real-time streaming and playback can enable individuals to attend training sessions from anywhere.
- Easy and convenient video interactions allow for feedback, questions, and an improved learning experience over other online options.
- Lecture capture technology can be used to “flip” corporate training. Employees can watch material before training sessions, enabling on-site time to be used for various exercises, as well as questions and answers.
- YuJa is easy to integrate into current training programs and technologies.
- Designed to be quick to learn, corporate trainers can embrace all of the aspects of YuJa in a very short time, bringing training programs online without extensive preparation.
How YuJa Supports Social Learning in Education
What is Social Learning?
Historically speaking, the most well-known theory of social learning was researched in the 1960s and theorized in the 1970s by Albert Bandura, who emphasized the importance of observing, modeling, and imitating the behaviors, attitudes and emotional reactions of others.
Also referred to as “observational learning,” social learning presents three core concepts to learning, including that people can learn through observation, that internal mental states are essential to the process, and that learned behaviors don’t necessarily result in changed behaviors.
YuJa Video Platform Facilitates Social Learning
The social learning theory has numerous real world applications, particularly in educational environments. Since Bandura introduced the theory, researchers, parents and teachers alike have been implementing innovative educational methods to help students learn.
YuJa offers practical and easy tools to help implement social learning into educational models.
Flipped Classroom: In a flipped classroom model, instructors pre-record lectures and students watch the video as homework. In class, teachers are available to answer questions and students can work collaboratively. Social learning is applied through observing behaviors and actions of other students and applying successful methods to their own learning. With YuJa’s Video Platform, instructors can:
- Record their video and voice alongside slides, documents and screen captures.
- Create video tutorials, pre-recorded lessons and clarifications, all within their favorite web browser.
- Pull in instructional material from any source and create a multimedia recording that can be published with a single-click.
Gamification and Simulations: Gamification adds game design elements to the educational environment to promote interactivity, motivation and engagement. Instructors turn an activity into a competitive game, host a mock trial or digital simulation. Through these experiences, students learn from their peers.
- YuJa offers video quiz gamification capabilities in which instructors can design a choose-your-own-adventure type video quiz.
- A decision point question type provides the ability to customize the linear progression of a video-based quiz depending on the response to a proposed decision point.
- It enables an interactive user experience where video content can be sequenced in a non-linear fashion based on interactive input.
Peer Coaching: Student peers serving as coaches is another way students can learn from one another. Whether it’s peer editing, helping solve equations or working together on a project, instructors can match students whose skills complement each other.
YuJa facilitates peer coaching in many ways, some of which include:
- Students can review lecture captures, ingested media, and curated content within unified media channels through mobile playback.
- The Video Platform features integrated real-time Q&A discussions. Post-class conversations flow naturally across all devices.
- File and presentation sharing is made easy within the Video Platform.
There’s no argument that social learning benefits students. With YuJa, it’s simple to find ways to incorporate it into your everyday teaching style.
Evolving Corporate Learning for Increased Impact
The Evolution of Corporate Learning
Changes in corporate learning and professional continuing education are essential in today’s marketplace. In a world of ever-changing technology and best practices, keeping employees up-to-date, involved, and capable is essential. Traditionally, corporate learning is provided in short, periodic bursts, like a professional conference. This model remains commonplace, and offers some distinct benefits; however, it may not address all corporate learning needs.
Evolving corporate learning strategies rely upon the latest technological innovations to create a multi-faceted plan for continuing employee, staff and management training that facilitates learning, commitment and growth.
Leadership
Effective corporate learning should be guided by and supported by management, and should include and integrate management into the corporate learning process. When companies empower management and encourage excitement and involvement in the learning and continuing education process, employees have the ability to grow and expand their skills. Management goals and priorities should include time for employee support and mentorship to make the most effective use of corporate learning programs.
Flexibility
In today’s rapidly changing world, it is essential that corporate learning strategies be flexible. Many enterprises involve multiple locations, and may incorporate virtual teams or remote workers. Corporate learning programs should facilitate learning and collaboration between all of these workers, including those working virtually and remotely.
While traditional models of in-person teaching require workers to be available at the same time and place, opting for newer models that integrate online learning options can facilitate employee learning on their own schedule. In addition, mobile accessibility means that staff can fit corporate learning into available windows of time, including during business travel.
Development
Technology is, today, changing so fast that it can be difficult for corporations, management and employees to keep up. Planning corporate learning events once a year or every other year is simply not adequate to meet the needs of today’s business world.
An evolving model of corporate learning is continuous, rather than merely occasional. Continuing employee training could be a set period each month, or even weekly. Working with modern corporate learning options, like video learning, can enable employees to learn at their own pace, gradually and over time. Repetition and review facilitate retention of new information and new skills.
Ferrazi, Keith. “7 Ways to Improve Employee Development Programs,” 2015. https://hbr.org/2015/07/7-ways-to-improve-employee-development-programs Accessed September 9, 2017.