Social Learning – Revolution!

Imagine!

You study in Sevilla. You go to your profile in your school’s online campus. There is an invitation to join the course Intro to Biotechnology. The invitation is from Amy, a teacher at the Mandela High School in Cape Town, South Africa. Wow! Who is Amy, and how did she find me and know that I love biology? Who are the other students? You click on more info. Amazing! The course has 25 students and 4 teachers from 10 schools in 5 countries! You click on the student John. He is from Lincoln High School in Boston, where he won the Biology Project Award. You click on the second teacher Sandra, from Colegio Chapultepec in Mexico. You see that she has a PhD in Biology from MIT. Awesome! But, how did they find me – you ask yourself again? It turns out that Jane, your Biology teacher in Sevilla, also tutors at the Mandela High School, where she is connected to Amy. You click on Join Course.

This is social learning! Or, this is how we define a Social Learning Management System at Sclipo – a platform where educational entities, its teachers and students can learn, teach and socialize with others of their own and other entities. To make Social Learning possible, Sclipo offers a platform of instructional and social applications where students and teachers can connect and share with members of any entity.

Here is how Sclipo works. Schools, companies, independent teachers and people who love to teach can open their own Web Academy on Sclipo. The Web Academy is their Learning Management System (LMS) with state-of-the-art instructional and social applications, such as:
* Courses to teach and manage face2face and online courses
* Library to share content in any format: video, presentations, audio, images…
* Live Teaching to teach one or many students anywhere via webcam, screen-sharing, whiteboard, chat and other live collaboration tools
* Groups to organize online collaborations for research, test prep, etc.
* Events to organize offline edu events, such as conferences and workshops

Students and teachers can connect, share and organize activities beyond their own Web Academy. All Web Academies and its members can connect and share with other Academies. Students can learn at one or many Academies. Teachers can teach at one or many Academies. They can also form groups, organize face2face educational events, conduct discussions and build a network of students and teachers anywhere. A Web Academy also has privacy controls, if it wants to restrict access to courses, content and activities.

What do you think of this kind of Social Learning? Wouldn’t it substantially expand the possibilities of how we learn today, what and with whom?

Such Social Learning is however not possible in your school or organization, if it runs on a traditional LMS. These are walled gardens. Each LMS installation is its own island, with no connection to others. You can’t share content and activities; you can’t find and connect with people of similar interests; you can’t create courses, groups, events or any other activity beyond the walls of the LMS of your educational entity.

But hey, wait a minute! Social Learning is the buzzword of the moment. Every LMS provider makes a big fuzz about how “social” its software is. They claim their solution has groups, discussions and maybe even a wall. Yep, but its students, teachers, content and activities are still confined to that one system installation. You cannot connect and share with other entities.

Just adding “social tools” to a LMS does not make it a social learning solution. It makes learning more collaborative among the members within its walls. This is great, yet it is a far cry from what technology can do today to revolutionize learning.

The Social Learning buzz started with the breathtaking success of Social Networking sites Facebook and LinkedIn. These offered something revolutionary: software that boosted connecting and sharing among people. It did so by pro-actively recommending new contacts based upon current relationships and behavior. As a result, people’s networks could suddenly expand effortlessly. One did no longer have to search for people with things in common. Connecting now happened in a breeze, because the system could make relevant new contact recommendations. As a result, sharing of content and activities grew exponentially. This was not possible before in Group or Community sites. These enabled collaboration only among members of the same group or community – just like a traditional LMS.

This is why we must not call a LMS with just collaboration tools a “Social LMS”. To be “Social”, a LMS must enable sharing among teachers and students from different educational entities. It cannot be a walled garden.

At Sclipo, the world’s largest Social LMS used by teachers and students in over 100 countries from thousands of educational entities, we firmly believe that social learning has the potential to revolutionize education – and this revolution will be more significant than the one ignited by LinkedIn and Facebook! Sharing in education has a huge impact on how we learn and thus on our whole life: it is after all during our education when we find our friends and jobs.

Welcome to the Social Learning Revolution!

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Here is a link to the Catalan version of this post, La revolució del social learning, published at El Blog del Llibre Digital from Grupo Santilla.