I've been working on a Community of Practice for all those involved in any way with online learning across my organisation. Last week saw the startup event, which was very encouraging.
Why a CoP?
We've just been through one of the biggest mergers in UK corporate history. During this we found that there were lots of people with an interest in online learning who didn't know each other. Some were creators, others regular purchasers from external suppliers. Some relied on 'e' for their formal learning programmes, others were L&D people who wanted - and needed - to understand better the range of media encompassed by 'e'. I was particularly keen to get talking with the people who regularly buy from outside suppliers as I had a suspicion they could only visualise what they'd seen before - page turning tutorials - and the suppliers would be only too happy to provide the staple diet. Not only were there no standards across the organisation about 'e' but there was no common language even about what online learning was.
My managers and I also realised that we'd only understand social learning by doing, and that this was a golden opportunity to learn about how to set up a CoP by actually doing it.
What form does it take?
There's an online element and a face to face element. The online element consists of a forum, a resources page (with links to top bloggers like Tom Kuhlmann, Charles Jennings and Clive Shepherd) and an internal blog platform. The forum and blog are hosted on our server, external to the firewall. That way we're not forced to use the over-controlled corporate Sharepoint. Even then we still have quite strict limitations on the kinds of software we can use, and the ones we've chosen are just enough to get us using these facilities. If the idea catches light, then we'll be in a better position later to discuss better, more dedicated platforms like Yammer. We launched the forum first, with a 'Who Are You?' topic, as part of the build up to last Thursday's launch event, where we attracted over 50 to our conference centre.
There we had a keynote talk from the Director of Learning, who is an iconoclast and a great enthusiast for this sort of thing, from Charles Jennings, opening our minds to the end of the separation of work and learning, and an after-lunch rant from me about the things that set my teeth on edge in elearning. The most important part of the day was a 'knowledge cafe' style discussion, first in small groups then in the larger group on the theme of 'what are we going to do about it, then?'. To kick this off we had very short introductory statements from three of us (along the lines of 'scrap formal and compliance training', ' don't throw the baby out with the bathwater', ' conversations are more powerful than training ').
I'd been very particular about calling this C of P 'online learning' rather than 'elearning' and the day certainly spent a lot of time talking about knowledge sharing, user generated content and performance support as well as 'traditional' elearning.
The large group conversation brought up a lot of the expected barriers - Group IT and Group Brand being the main ones - but also the encouragement of the Director of Learning to try new ideas, to be willing to experiment and learn from failure, and to enlist his support in the bigger internal battles that we'll meet when we try to extend our role beyond order-taking to consultancy.
I was delighted by the response - both in terms of the numbers that came and the enthusiasm with which they threw themselves into the discussions. And the main objective - that they should simply get to know each other - seemed to have been met. We're now in the crucial phase of not letting it all get beaten by the Return to the Inbox. I'll report back after some time on how it's gone.
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