Bulgarian
English
Approximate reading time: 1m 31s
Using social media is an easy and affordable way to make your trainings more interesting and engaging. Instead of investing in new technology, you can use the tools your learners are already using.
Strategies from social media that you can use in your training
E-learning has many successful strategies, but online courses are often not social and collaborative enough like in-person trainings. To change this, you can use social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. They will make your training more engaging and appeal to more learners.
Before the course starts:
Change Management. Create buzz and enthusiasm for your course. Use social media to send a marketing message to your learners about your upcoming training. This will make your new course more popular before it has even started.
Personalized training. Similar to the way Amazon and Netflix make recommendations to their users based on their interests, you can target your training to your learners' individual needs.
Pre-training. Send materials or direct learners to a YouTube video before the course begins. Send documents via tools such as Slack, Google Docs or Dropbox.
During the course:
Create a community. Increase learner collaboration by creating communities of learners. Use familiar tools such as Twitter and Facebook.
Encourage participation. Use gamification elements, such as badges and leaderboards, in your training to encourage friendly competition and increase learner engagement. Take a cue from sites like Udemy and organize online Q&A sessions, or discussion panels. Encourage participants to tweet, blog or share what they're learning about.
Additional content. Direct learners to external activities and materials to support learning objectives. Take examples from relevant websites or use YouTube videos.
After the course:
Feedback. Ask learners to rate and recommend your course. Collect survey data and share results with participants.
Follow-up. Set post-course activities, provide post-course support and encourage self-development. Use social media to ask how learners have put new knowledge into practice.
Ongoing collaboration. Encourage learners to continue sharing ideas, resources and best practices. Use Facebook groups, Twitter, wikis, blogs, and other useful tools to encourage the ongoing exchange of information.
Conclusion
Many people today turn to social networks when they need to find answers or solutions.
Many social networks are free or available for a minimal fee. And once learners are using these tools, the barriers to their use in the learning process are easy to overcome.
Creative use of social networking can increase learner engagement and learner cooperation meeting minimal investment of resources.
Source: https://www.allencomm.com/blog/2018/05/elearning-solutions-inspired-by-social-media/.