Using Social Networking and Social Media as Teaching and Learning Strategies

While I was conducting my research, I learned a significant amount about using social media in my subject area of corporate learning and development. It was hard to find a lot of content about success stories about businesses that included social media and/or social networking in their employee development programs. This is most-likely because this trend has just taken off in the past few years. Although the quantity of articles was not abundant, the quantity of great ideas was. I learned how large companies, such as Adidas and Intel, used social media as a very large portion of their training programs. For example the Adidas Group Learning Campus replaced classroom-only training programs with social and interactive online-learning offerings, which are open to everybody and accessible 24/7. Another example of a successful social media learning platform is Blue Corona, an inbound marketing, analytics and optimization company. They use several social media tools to channel training, both formally and informally. Its Facebook Page is used to post interesting, informational articles that employees come across. Moreover, the company has a wall of short YouTube videos that provide great information for new employees. The learning platform ideas I learned about ranged from Facebook groups to Twitter hashtags and content curation websites. This all tied together with what we had learned in previous modules of EDTECH 543.

This applies directly to my job as a training specialist. I am responsible for the product training that our (mostly remote) sales representatives receive. This new way of training via social media not only convenient, but it's effective. It is also fun. It allows employees to learn with each other and also to learn from each other. As a first step toward applying what I learned, I have already begun to develop a LinkedIn group, a community of practice, for our training and sales teams at my company. Here, the team can ask questions, discuss ideas and share relevant info. I will moderate the page and to make sure the procedural answers are correct and share useful training resources. I am also thinking about creating a YouTube page with video tutorials that can be accessed and discussed.

All of these success stories and social media programs I learned about can be found on my Bundlr content curation page.