Collaborative Learning

Disruptive Insights: Collaborative Learning

This paper delves into the disruptive trends in collaboration and learning, exploring the learning technologies driving innovation and how these collective learning approaches empower remote and hybrid workforces.

As the learning landscape experiences an ongoing digital transformation, organisations must prioritise providing high-quality tools and experiences to match the latest collaborative learning theories. However, the definition of ‘collaboration’ varies among vendors. This paper equips you with the knowledge to harness the power of effective cooperative learning strategies.

What is Collaborative Learning?

As a process, collaborative learning involves two or more people learning together. It is an activity through which people learn with and from each other. In the real world, a lot of learning, particularly in a classroom context, involves collaboration. But in the transition to online learning, organisations mainly prioritised putting content online, and on e-learning that individuals completed in isolation rather than together.

The drive to digitise learning content therefore came, to some degree, at the expense of collaboration in learning – especially in corporates focusing on compliance. It’s a different story in academia where educational technology made collaboration more fundamental to the learning process. As online learning developed beyond launching and tracking e-learning content, an increasing interest also arose for informal learning, as well as the more traditional formal and compliance e-learning.

Learning Management System (LMS) vendors adapted too, adding functionality to enable discussions and collaboration, as well as occasionally, functionality to support communities of learning. Over time, these collaborative elements of learning systems have evolved further, with new specialists arriving with a disruptive focus on collaborative learning as a primary strategy.

The main areas of focus for these vendors are as follows: