I Came, I Saw, I Learned...

Collaborative Learning: Strengthen Your Team

by AJ George

 

A group of your team members has just wrapped up some training. Now that the learning is finished, it's time to get right to work, right? Wrong! The training itself is just the first step. Read on for what to do after the formal training to ensure that the real learning begins.

 

If You're in Management

 

While it can be a distraction when your employees are busy "Liking" Lady Gaga, now is not necessarily the time to crack down on social media at work. Instead, consider embracing social media to see what it can do for you and your team. Use SharePoint. Use Google Docs. Use wikis. Use Facebook. Use LinkedIn. Use something that allows your team to congregate and collaborate.

According to July's T+D magazine, Millennials will make up more than half of the workforce in the next five years. Increasingly, not only will access to collaborative learning strengthen your team, but those Millennials who will be taking over your workforce, they'll expect it. To illustrate this, below is a chart outlining the respondents who answered "high" or "very high" when asked to what extent social media tools helped them to achieve tasks at work (you can click the image for a larger view).

Image source: www.astd.org.

If You're the Trainee

Have a question? Ask it! Know an answer? Share it! Many students rely on their instructor after the class if they need more assistance, but don't seem to take into account that the instructor is just one person. Why rely on just that one person if there is an entire network of people who could help you? Knowledge is one of the few assets that people are willing to pass along to other people, not only willingly, but happily. If you took your training class with fellow team members, hopefully you have some sort of shared workspace at your office where you can collaborate freely. If not, all is not lost. Ask your instructor how you can connect with fellow students after the class. Often training companies have Facebook or Twitter networks that they would love for you to join and add to the conversation. If not a network, perhaps your instructor maintains a blog with archived articles that you could search. Don't forget to check the blog comments for helpful feedback from people in your same situation.

If You're the Trainer

Don't let the training be the end of the communication with your students. Follow-up with students and outline exactly what they should have learned from the course. Believe me, if your students feel they didn't learn it all, they'll let you know.

Provide a link to your blog and make sure you are diligent about responding to your blog comments. Invite students to become a fan on Facebook, but be sure not to drop the ball. Respond to any questions thoroughly and promptly to foster a reciprocal community. Direct students to your Twitter account so you can keep them updated with all things related to the field and pass along useful information.

As your class wraps up, this is not the time to bombard your students with sales pitches. However, if you offer additional learning in the field (an advanced class perhaps), make sure students know about it.

Still not convinced that collaborative learning could make your team all that and a bag of chips? Check out this list of 44 Benefits of Collaborative Learning from the Global Development Research Centre. I'd love to hear how you are using collaborative learning, please leave your comments below.

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About the author: AJ George is IconLogic's lead Technical Writer and author of both "PowerPoint 2007: The Essentials" and "PowerPoint 2008 for the Macintosh: The Essentials." You can follow AJ on Twitter at http://twitter.com/andrayajgeorge.

Online Training and eLearning: Are You Helping to Save the World?

by AJ George

If you're using eLearning or attending your classes online, you just might be helping to save the world... without even thinking about it. How? Believe it or not, you are drastically helping to reduce CO2 emissions by not traveling to an onsite class. Take a look at the picture below. It's a visual representation of a single metric ton of CO2 presented by high school science teacher Dave Ames (you can learn more here).



In honor of Earth Day, read on to learn how many of these cubes of CO2 can be saved just by not traveling to receive training.

Let's compare a 17-person onsite class with a 17-person online class. The onsite class will be held in a centrally-located city in the U.S., Topeka (I mean Google), Kansas.

To attend the onsite class, all 17 people will have to fly in from cities all across the country (and a few from outside the country). The instructor, who lives locally, will drive to the training facility.

So let's start with the instructor. She lives 35 miles away from the training facility and drives a 2004 Toyota Camry. Her roundtrip travel carbon emission for the day: .03 metric tons of CO2.

Now let's talk about the students. There's someone from Maryland, California, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Illinois, and North Carolina. There are two people from New York and from Colorado. Additionally there are three people from Minnesota. But that's just the United States. There are also students from the United Kingdom, Puerto Rico and Quebec. The roundtrip Domestic travel carbon emission: 7.12 metric tons of CO2. The roundtrip International travel carbon emission: 4.9 metric tons of CO2. Total: 12.05 metric tons of CO2 (or 26,565.43 pounds). And that's not including travel incurred by students to get to their respective airports and from the airport to the training location.

I've just added up the CO2 requirement for one hypothetical onsite class. A training company can easily run 15 classes each month (we do... and that's 180 classes a year). Given the fact that many students will take the courses from home (the rest will attend from the office), it doesn't take a math wizard to see the dramatic CO2 savings online classes can provide each day and each year.


Photo source: http://www.sustainablemilton.org

Carbon footprint calculated using: http://www.carbonfootprint.com/

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About the author: AJ George is IconLogic's lead Technical Writer and author of the book "PowerPoint 2007: The Essentials" and the just-released "PowerPoint 2008 for the Macintosh: The Essentials." You can follow AJ on Twitter at http://twitter.com/andrayajgeorge.