Le eLearning Guild a fait paraître en septembre dernier un rapport visant les décideurs en entreprise intitulé “Social Learning: Answers to Eight Crucial Questions“, où les questions suivantes ont été posées par ses auteurs, Patti Shank et Ben Betts:
- What does ’social’ learning mean?
- What are the benefits of facilitating a more social approach?
- What are the risks of facilitating more social learning?
- How can we make social interactions meaningful for learning?
- How can we get started?
- How can we measure the impact of our work?
- What are the tools of social learning?
- What is the role of the learning professional in a more ’social’ world?
Patti Shank vient d’écrire un article qui souligne que cette façon de voir l’apprentissage, où les apprenants vont acquérir des connaissances, des habiletés, des compétences au contact des membres de leurs réseaux personnels et professionnels, n’est pas en soi un phénomène nouveau. Par contre, l’émergence et la popularité grandissante des médias sociaux a fait en sorte que certains décideurs ont liés l’utilisation d’outils tels que Facebook, Twitter et plusieurs autres aux formations intégrant le processus de l’apprentissage social… Parce que ces outils sont parfois perçus comme des distractions (et pas nécessairement comme un soutien à la productivité!), certains gestionnaires ont donc décidé de restreindre ou carrément bloquer l’accès auxdits sites et de favoriser plutôt les formations se donnant exclusivement en salle de classe. De là, les auteurs se sont concertés pour tenter d’expliquer à ces derniers quels sont les bénéfices d’un mode de formation plus distribué pour leurs employés, en lien avec trois éléments: apprendre de l’expérience de collègues, apprendre en présence des collègues et apprendre à l’intérieur d’un groupe.
Un passage dans l’article de Shank m’a plus particulièrement interpellé, où elle cite Ben Betts qui présente pourquoi l’apprentissage social serait plus efficace qu’en classe dans un contexte de formation continue:
“Why does social learning work better than classroom instruction?Betts explains why this works:
Learning from another person has … been shown to be vastly more effective than learning in a larger classroom group. Benjamin Bloom conducted his famous “2 sigma” study that showed that students learn much more effectively in a one-to-one environment than in the classroom. One-to-one tutoring in Bloom’s experiments was so effective that it transformed a “C” student into an “A” student—a movement of 2 standard deviations (or 2 sigma in statistical terms). This is a profound finding—we’re all capable of being “A” students when we learn from a tutor.
Almost a century earlier, Lev Vygotsky, a famous Russian educational psychologist, was studying the one-to-one relationships between apprentices and their masters when he coined the phrase “zone of proximal development” (ZPD) as an explanation of how this tutoring could be effective. Vygotsky suggested that the more experienced “master” provides help for the apprentice to grasp concepts just beyond their current level of understanding—the “zone.” This concept involves a social relationship between two people where the master can adapt the tutoring to the student’s needs. We might think of this idea as “scaffolding”—providing the support for a learner to build up his or her own knowledge, one level at a time.
The ability to help someone learn through one-to-one relationships does not need to come from a teacher, tutor, or expert. It only needs to be someone with more knowledge and skill. As a result, it has profound implications in academics and the workplace.
Consider for a moment the repercussions, for example, of helping people in your workplace get up to speed on a new system implementation. You could hold classes for people across the country. This is expensive, of course. But even more problematic, it’s likely that the classes would be held prior to the implementation, and then people would forget much of what they learned by the time the implementation occurred. Or you could try another scenario, which better fits the way people learn, as discussed in the Guild research report Smart Companies Support Informal Learning. You could keep a number of volunteers across the organization well trained, then provide asynchronous training and performance support tools for the new system and allow these local volunteers to support people at their site.”
Dans un contexte de formation en entreprise, l’exemple d’une formation asynchrone préparée par un petit groupe de formateurs prêts à donner du soutien sur l’utilisation d’un nouveau système donne tout son sens à un tel paradigme.
Source: Shank, Patti. “eLearning Guild Research: What Are the Benefits of Social Learning?“, Learnign Solutions Magazine, 11 octobre 2012.
