I'm working on an eLearning course that attempts to increase participants ability to collaborate with their peers - think sharing ideas, asking questions, etc. Tricky business teaching someone to collaborate without anyone to actually practice collaborating with...Any ideas for an eLearning activity that I could build into the WBT to help learners practice collaboration?
In an ideal world, you would pair the self-paced portion of this with another training method for practice. That could be a live webinar format, an asynchronous discussion board, a wiki or collaborative document, Skype or Yammer chat, Twitter chat, live classroom session, live coaching with a manager, etc.
If you can only use self-paced e-learning, I'd probably go for scenario-based training where you practice having conversations or responding collaboratively to requests.
I'm curious--what is the actual problem you're trying to solve? Is it that people don't have the skills to collaborate (like asking questions), or is it an organizational culture that doesn't support collaboration? If it's the latter, training in any format is perhaps not the best solution, although training for managers on how to encourage collaboration might help.
Hi Alicia. What an interesting challenge! Like Christy, I've also been wondering what specific collaboration skills you're focusing on and why. I think understanding this will help you identify the best solutions...only some of which may be training.
That being said if there's a gap that training can fill, I could see using some sort of pre-assessment or skills inventory as a good way of helping learners see where they can improve. And, as Christy suggests, using scenario-based interactions to help learners practice certain skills would probably be the best approach in an e-learning course. Ideally, the topic of collaboration might be best explored collaboratively.
Whatever the need, I'm really keen on hearing where you go and what you do with this topic!
2 Replies
In an ideal world, you would pair the self-paced portion of this with another training method for practice. That could be a live webinar format, an asynchronous discussion board, a wiki or collaborative document, Skype or Yammer chat, Twitter chat, live classroom session, live coaching with a manager, etc.
If you can only use self-paced e-learning, I'd probably go for scenario-based training where you practice having conversations or responding collaboratively to requests.
I'm curious--what is the actual problem you're trying to solve? Is it that people don't have the skills to collaborate (like asking questions), or is it an organizational culture that doesn't support collaboration? If it's the latter, training in any format is perhaps not the best solution, although training for managers on how to encourage collaboration might help.
Hi Alicia. What an interesting challenge! Like Christy, I've also been wondering what specific collaboration skills you're focusing on and why. I think understanding this will help you identify the best solutions...only some of which may be training.
That being said if there's a gap that training can fill, I could see using some sort of pre-assessment or skills inventory as a good way of helping learners see where they can improve. And, as Christy suggests, using scenario-based interactions to help learners practice certain skills would probably be the best approach in an e-learning course. Ideally, the topic of collaboration might be best explored collaboratively.
Whatever the need, I'm really keen on hearing where you go and what you do with this topic!
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