What are the business drivers for Web 2.0 based learning or Learning 2.0?

By Harvey Singh

www.instancy.com

While Learning Management Systems need to continue to support the deployment and tracking of traditional structured eLearning courses and training event, but next generation eLearning systems need to be extended to support informal learning such that social networking can surround online learning courses and topics for ad-hoc and curriculum based learning.

Web based Learning 1.0, as we know, is mostly a simple web-based expression of classroom based training in the form of an eLearning course. eLearning courses tend to be linear, one-way flow of structured content between the expert and group of learners.

So one of the most fundamental issues with online course-ware in Learning 1.0 is that it is difficult to extract just the nugget of knowledge.

Web 2.0 is the ‘brave new world’ of the web and there are a lot of people pushing the idea that the web site must be Web 2.0 or you’re going to get left behind. Web 2.0 is a collection of concepts and ideas that are transforming the Internet and our collective Web experience.

Web 2.0 is a trend in web technology driving companies towards providing web sites that are primarily about users sharing information. So Web 2.0 web site use features like blogs, wikis, social networking and folksonomies. In a nutshell, it’s content driven by your web site visitors, your customers and your audiences.

So, web 2.0 carries many advantages for the business and to name few, it’s a very powerful tool which can help build communities around your product or brand. If you can use it well, it will really boost the online component of your business and engagement with your customers or audience.

And one of the things that we’ll be doing in this series is to look at how Web 2.0 can transform learning and education, but before we do that we need to ask the questions – Why? Why should we bother with something called Web 2.0?

From a content point of view, Web 2.0 hopefully will drive people towards thinking about how they can be focusing on their customers.

From a technical point of view, it’s quite easy. But from a content or communication point of view, it requires oversight and facilitation. You can even share this responsibility with some of the key and influential members of your online community.

Having said that, we must also discuss business pain points:

One of the key business challenges today is that a typical Knowledge-worker is multi-tasking, changing job-descriptions and jobs every increasing pace.

We are losing the knowledge as fast as we’re creating it. People’s attention spans are declining equally fast.

And job requirements and information needed to perform the job-tasks are constantly changing.

We have no time to organize the information and systematically create and deliver training programs for geographically dispersed work-force.

We need to tap into the expertise of others around us or others in the same team but in different offices around the globe – and those people may not be physically located in the next cubicle, but through web-based collaboration can share best practices, ideas, problems-solutions and their wisdom. We need to tap into the collective intelligence.

We need Learning On-Demand and Social Learning environments in which learning and performance support is available on demand at the point of need which performing a job-task and the responsibility of collecting, organizing and updating the knowledge is shared within the community rather than controlled within a traditional, top-down bottle-necked process.

We can increase the speed at which issues can be brought up and corresponding solutions may be discovered and shared with Web 2.0 based learning systems.

While structured learning will continue to have a place in the skill and competency development, informal and peer-to-peer collaboration will continue to gain more significance in workplace learning.

To learn more please visit www.instancy.com.