How to capture and utilise your team’s knowledge as user-generated content

Boost your learning by sharing user-generated content throughout your organisation.

Informal learning is thought to account for more than 75% of all workplace learning. In other words, the training and corporate learning delivered by your organisation might count for less than 25% of the learning undertaken by your team. The rest of their knowledge is built by observing, talking to and informally interacting with colleagues.

In a modern workplace, that raises two key questions. Firstly, in a time of remote, hybrid and asynchronous working, are we losing important learning opportunities that previously happened over the water cooler or across the canteen? Secondly, given the technology at our disposal, isn’t there a better way of capturing all this knowledge that floats around our organisation?

Let’s explore some of the key ways to make use of your team’s knowledge in the form of user-generated content.

What is user-generated content?

In the context of online learning, user-generated content is learning content that is created or shared by a learner. While most formal learning would come from an educator or admin, user-generated content comes from the other side of the virtual teacher’s desk.

What is the benefit of user-generated content?

User-generated content helps to replace some of the informal learning that might have been lost within your organisation. It’s also a handy way for your team to share knowledge with each other. This could be expertise in a particular subject area that’s been built over many years or just something they’ve stumbled upon in the course of doing their job.

Whatever the circumstances, the key benefit of user-generated content is that it encourages the spread of important or useful knowledge throughout your organisation.

How to capture user-generated content

The easiest way of capturing user-generated content is to encourage and facilitate the sharing of useful information. This usually means putting in place technology that makes it easy for your users to share knowledge with others, but equally creating an environment that each learner knows they should visit to seek out informal learning of their own.

Sharing user-generated content with everyone

Here are some of the ways you can start capturing user-generated content and sharing knowledge across your organisation.

Workspaces

Workspaces are a key feature of the Totara Engage learning experience platform. A workspace is essentially a topic-specific water cooler. People gather there to exchange knowledge or ask questions on that subject matter.

You could create workspaces for specific courses, roles, software, clients — whatever makes sense for your organisation. The workspace becomes a font of knowledge on everything and anything to do with that topic.

Learning playlists 

Another Totara Engage feature. This one lets users curate and share their own learning content playlists. It could be useful videos they’ve watched, articles they’ve read, podcasts they’ve listened to, presentations they’ve delivered and so on.

Just like you’d build a music playlist to showcase a particular artist, genre or mood, your users can create learning playlists that serve as the perfect introduction or guide to any subject area that’s important to your organisation.

Forums

On platforms like Moodle LMS, Moodle Workplace and Totara Learn, the forum module gives another opportunity to capture and share knowledge. A forum dedicated to a particular course, topic or department helps to encourage informal learning.

By promoting forums as the main form of correspondence, you can bring conversations between educators and learners, and among team members, to a wider audience. It’s an easy place for people to ask questions, share answers and browse through previous threads to build knowledge.

Talk to us about informal learning and utilising user-generated content

If you’d like to talk about putting in place the technology to share more of your team’s knowledge and experience throughout your organisation, just fill out the form below and we’ll be in touch soon.

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