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CASE STUDY ON SOCIAL LEARNING

Prepared By Arpita Mandal

Abstract

Social Learning was initially introduced by Bandura in the year 1977 on one of his learningtheories. Now it is a buzz in the world of Learning by the introduction of Social MediaTechnology. In today’s world Social Media Technology is increasingly aligning to social learning.It acts as an added advantage to social learning, shaping our daily life as an approach to createand share new knowledge.

This is the tale of one of the software companies which implemented the concept of sociallearning along with social media technology at their workplace . The company’s learning

services department decided to get strategic by reducing training hours and budget of thecompany’s sales di vision. By seeing the emerging demand for Web 2.0, company brought socialmedia into the workplace. Leveraging open source technology and company’s innovationculture, it created learning exchange, a collaborative multimedia portal on which employees canpost, view ,rate, tag ,share or download content to computer or wireless iPod devices. This casewill examine company’s business challenges that drove its decision to apply social network technologies to a sales training and the impact of social learning on business.

Overview of the Company

Sun Microsystems offers a variety of software, systems, microelectronics, services that empower everything from consumer electronics to developer tools and the world’s most powerful data centres. The company conducts business in more than 100 countries around theglobe. Worldwide it has 33,423 employees.

Problems Faced

Company was facing two challenges:

a) To serve the needs of the post- Google generation.

b) To meet the learning requirements of the sales team with a small budget and few traininghours.

The implications of Sun Microsystems were to find the best way of serving the needs of the salesteams by availing necessary selling tools at their fingertips with minimal “clicks,” as well assupport in the field. In addition, the sales teams do not have the information when they need it.Consequently, sales professionals have a hard time closing sales.The second set of problems was inadequate budget or training hours to meet the trainingrequirements of sales professionals.

Best Practices Adopted

Company’s learning function made social learning (informal learning) a centrepiece of its

strategy. They made the decision:

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To design an open, informal learning environment that is accessible, fast and userfriendly.

To emphasize on Enterprise 2.0 technology and provide a structure that will facilitatelow-cost, socially managed content.

To embrace change, as well as the momentum for learners and technology.

Implementation of Enterprise Social Software

In the venture, social software can be applied to support or augment any scenario, in whichpeople collaborate, share information or content, or talk with one another.Enterprise social software is based on “Web 2.0” technologies, easy to use, lacking in imposedorganization.The significant difference between previous ways of collaboration, communication andknowledge-sharing is that today’s social software platforms do not attempt to enforcepredefined workflows or categories of information. Instead, they allow the power of the groupto supply structures that have the potential to prove, ultimately, more useful to the group, sincethey are based on organic needs and usage.Learning exchange was released to all Sun Microsystems employees worldwide in mid-2008 tothousands of partner organizations (e.g., sales partners, resellers, system integrators anddistributors) providing just-in-time product and competitive information to help Sun win in themarketplace.

What changed?

One week after launch, there were 3,338 unique users (employees and contractors)from 51 countries; 315 pieces of new content uploaded and 19,508 content views.

Uploaded content doubled in two weeks, beating the goal by 10 weeks.

Today, the system receives up to an average of 100 pieces of new content uploadeddaily; making it one of the most frequently used learning programs across the company.

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Conclusion

Learning exchange became successful because of the astounding speed at which content can bedeveloped and accessed, the universal 24 / 7 on-demand deployment, and the appeal of user-generated content. Now the same environment that makes their personal lives fun and coolhelps employees succeed at a given task or their jobs overall. Implementation of social learningat workplace enhances the knowledge, skill and attitude of individuals.

Question Desk:

1. Examine the challenges that drove Microsystems’s decision to implement social network technologies to a sales training program.

2. On your opinion, how and when social learning and collaboration communities aresuccessful?

3. Analyze the importance of early and frequent communication in change management done by the stakeholders of Enterprise Social Software.

4. What are the impacts of social media technologies on social learning in corporate?

5.

Can you come out with the negative impact of implementing Enterprise Social Softwareon organization’s social learning environment?