From Theory To Practice: 3 Collaborative Learning Solutions In Action

From Theory To Practice: 3 Collaborative Learning Solutions In Action
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Summary: Let's look at 3 examples of Collaborative Learning case studies in action, from using subject-matter expertise to boost course completion rates to supercharging new hire onboarding and building a decentralized culture of Collaborative Learning.

3 Collaborative Learning Solutions Case Studies

In our ebook, we take you on a tour through the prime uses of Collaborative Learning in the workplace, the science explaining how Collaborative Learning leads to stronger employee engagement, the benefits of Collaborative Learning for remote workplaces, and much more. We’re here to make all of that theory real.

How Collaborative Learning Boosts Engagement Rates To Over 90%
From benefits to tried-and-tested strategies, this guide has everything you need to launch a successful collaborative learning program for your remote workforce!

Example #1: How AlphaSights’ Unlocked Its Subject-Matter Expertise

AlphaSights is a leading industry research platform with a mission to unlock humanity’s knowledge to power progress for individuals, businesses, and society. This organization has 900+ employees in nine offices around the world, including New York City, London, and Hong Kong.

AlphaSights offers a great example of peer-based Collaborative Learning in action. By onboarding 240 subject-matter experts to contribute to digital training programs, AlphaSights turned a massive 27% of its workforce into expert contributors to course content. This Collaborative Learning solution not only helped AlphaSights’ learning content to be more current and informed; it also helped them boost their course completion rates to 95%.

By collaborating with the organization to digitize training, AlphaSights’ Professional Development team gained visibility into various training initiatives across the company, enabling them to ensure every team training meets their quality, brand, and compliance standards.

With the help of 360Learning, the Professional Development team also assessed reactions and learning in real-time. The team monitored learner reactions, relevance scores, course engagement, and exam results available in the Dashboard and ran daily surveys with new joiners to gain additional qualitative insights.

The results AlphaSights achieved through implementing this Collaborative Learning solution were astounding:

  • 97% of in-course Reactions were positive, indicating new joiners found training content useful and relevant
  • 98% of new joiners felt that digital training effectively prepared them for live training
  • 99% of new joiners found digital training to be highly intuitive

Example #2:  How Appen Saved $240k Every Year In Onboarding Costs

As Appen demonstrates, the right Collaborative Learning solution isn’t just a great way to support your subject-matter experts to share their knowledge–it’s also a fantastic way to save time, energy, and expenses with your onboarding.

With new interactive learning platforms, organizations can develop and test learning content in a small group, before scaling it out to wider teams, divisions, and clients. AI consulting firm Appen offers a great case study highlighting this in action.

For Appen, keeping up with the speed of business and keeping employee motivation high was proving especially challenging in three core L&D scopes:

  1. Onboarding: Every year, Appen hires 100+ employees, and must onboard them in a highly distributed and global environment.
  2. Client training: The Professional Services team was spending 12 hours onboarding each new client through face-to-face training. The team needed a scalable solution.
  3. Post-integration training: 150+ new team members joined Appen as a result of the Figure Eight acquisition. Training them on Appen’s culture and solutions was critical to ensuring a smooth transition.

Like many high-growth companies, the Appen team moved quickly to meet their teams’ training needs. However, in meeting these training needs, a new challenge emerged: an increasingly complex learning tool stack. Just to complete data privacy training, employees had five different places to go.

Now, thanks to 360Learning’s easy-to-use Authoring Tool, the Appen L&D team has been empowering and coaching subject-matter experts to create training materials within days instead of weeks. With decentralized content creation, Appen now trains employees and customers on new releases and processes faster, using guidance from the experts who know them best.

Appen has saved a huge amount of time and energy as a result of this Collaborative Learning solution, including:

  • 102 days of training saved in three months due to streamlining employee onboarding.
  • 10% decrease in internal IT tickets thanks to the improved employee onboarding.
  • $240K annual cost savings by optimizing client training.

This example demonstrates what can happen when you make human interactions the key focus at every step of the learning journey. This way, rather than just setting a standardized curriculum of course content and tracking completions, you can support open conversation, dialogue, and collaboration. With the right practical exercises, you can encourage experts and learners to work together, rather than just passively completing learning activities. This is an excellent way to boost employee engagement and motivation to learn.

Example #3: How Safran Overcame The Challenges Posed By COVID-19

Safran is a French high-technology group. With over 79,000 employees, Safran plays a leading role—alone or in partnership—in the global and European aviation, defense, and space markets.

By defining training as, “the power to co-create, share, and transmit knowledge,” Safran strives to transform training by allowing each employee to become a creator and transmitter of knowledge. And recently, Safran has started using a Collaborative Learning solution to pursue this goal. Safran’s challenges related to training have evolved in the wake of COVID-19. Now, Safran’s employees need better learning experiences in order to face the new developments in their changing markets. In addition, a large portion of the group’s personnel is retiring, meaning Safran is also facing a generational transformation. Lastly, widespread digitalization requires a shift in the way the group organizes work and supports its employees.

Safran employees are adjusting to new working and management methods, which means the group needs to upskill, regardless of seniority level. This is why Safran’s L&D team proposed tools that enable proactivity and agility so that training validation processes can be improved, and so the group’s transformation challenges can be addressed more quickly. The goal is to put the learners and their managers at the heart of the training process and to make Safran University best-in-class when it comes to Collaborative Learning practices.

In April 2020, Safran University launched an innovative project to scale their blended learning training. Safran’s L&D teams decided to choose the 360Learning platform, centered on Collaborative Learning, and which met all the demands of their training challenges.

By working closely with 360Learning, Safran was able to:

  • Refocus their training offer on key, strategic issues for the group, while also addressing challenges linked to internationalization and the “all-digital” reality
  • Place employees at the heart of the learning process, thanks in large part to the social and collaborative features in 360Learning
  • Transform Safran into a Learning Organization through continuous knowledge sharing

This project had some incredible positive impacts for Safran in 2020, including:

  • The publication of 5,000 courses
  • Courses were created on the platform by over 300 subject-matter experts
  • There were over 40,000 active users 136,000 hours of digital training were completed

Now, thanks to the peer-to-peer approach enabled by Collaborative Learning, internal experts as well as L&D teams use the 360Learning platform’s authoring tools to create learning Paths in-house, to quickly share knowledge.

With this Collaborative Learning solution, Safran embraced a decentralized approach to its training programs. With social interactions (commenting, sharing, reacting), employees use the 360Learning platform to continuously create, share, and iterate courses based on their subject-matter expertise. This helps them drive better learning outcomes through capturing institutional knowledge.

Conclusion

As these three examples show, Collaborative Learning solutions offer a new way for us all to face the current learning crisis, connect our subject-matter experts with learners, and boost rates of learner engagement to over 90%. You can also simplify the process with employee training templates and other time-saving features by choosing the right collaborative training platform.

Looking for insider secrets to change mindsets about online training and get employees actively involved in the process? Download the eBook How Collaborative Learning Boosts Engagement Rates To Over 90% to discover how the collaborative approach breaks down barriers and maximizes your organization's L&D potential. Also, join the webinar to learn how to hit 90%+ learner course completion with collaborative learning.

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eBook Release: 360Learning
360Learning
360Learning is the learning platform powered by collaborative learning. We foster internal mobility to solve the talent shortage by empowering companies to upskill from within.