Feel like an old school training castoff? Learn how to hop on the Social Learning Boat
Would your SAP end users like to learn at their own pace, without feeling like they’ve been shipwrecked alone on island?
On December 3, Amy Feldman and Mark Tarallo from SAP Education in North America will reprise their nautical-themed ASUG Fall Focus presentation about social learning in a webcast starting at 2 p.m. Eastern.
In this session, they’ll discuss how to rescue learners and keep them afloat by blending e-learning and social media. E-learning combined with social media can build user knowledge about how their role fits into the new world – all while allowing them to work at their own pace with minimal disruption to your business.
I spoke with Amy about the session earlier this week. She promised to make the session fun – as it was at ASUG Fall Focus (minus the Lifesavers). But she also stressed that she and Mark want to share their real-life experiences and ideas about combining e-learning and social media to help the people in your organization.
Get ready to hoist your sails. Smooth sailing ahead!
Our customers often ask us how they can (and why they should) integrate social media into their SAP user adoption efforts. As we explored the how and why, Mark and I started to wonder how we got to this question in the first place! Aren’t we already doing enough to drive user adoption with all the different forms of learning and organizational change programs? What’s really missing?
One thought that kept repeating itself was that as workforces become even more burdened with work, and practices like telecommuting increase in popularity, we’re losing the human touch in our interactions. We dash off emails or instant messages to ask and answer questions, but we struggle to truly collaborate. For those of us who are less “social” (myself included!), that sounds like the perfect way to work. But we risk becoming disconnected. And sometimes, connections are the best, and only, way to truly understand and adopt new processes.
For me, the real awakening came when I switched laptop operating systems at work. I've always prided myself on being able to figure out anything when given access to a set of instructions and the Internet. However, retraining my brain to use a MacBook after 18 years of using PCs has been an eye-opener. The directions and video I was given were nearly useless when I couldn’t even grasp why my mouse kept pointing the wrong direction! My first lifeline was a friend who spent two hours helping me figure out mundane settings that made using the Mac much easier.
There’s also a chat room that I follow daily because I realized that people were asking questions that I didn’t know enough to pose. They put context around the questions, and share ideas and solutions that would have taken me hours or days to discover. Their posts and responses have saved me much time and frustration, and while I can't say that I've fully embraced my new laptop, I have stopped dragging out the old one during times of frustration and am committed to learning how to use the new one correctly.
This must be similar to how new SAP users feel. We've changed a system that they knew well, and sometimes have used as long as I've been using PCs. We give them training and communications, and set up the organizational structure for success, but if we don't find a way to connect them with each other and improve their access to information (and questions they don't know to ask), we are not giving them all of the tools that they need to truly become successful SAP users.
That is what Mark and I will be discussing during this webinar. How do you tie learning programs and adoption programs together with social media to give users an extra edge that helps them feel comfortable and not be tempted to bring out that old operating system? We look forward to sharing our ideas, and of course, learning from you too!