What is collaborative learning?

L&D teams are facing a crisis in learning. There are too many competing demands on your teams, and learners don’t have the space they need to learn the way they want to. 

At the same time, budgets are tightening. Organizations want return on investment, and L&D leaders need to show greater results with the same or fewer resources.  

Performance-driven L&Ds know that the secret to delivering impact isn’t endless content libraries, or highly paid guest speakers. The secret to L&D impact is enabling collaborative learning.

Employees want to learn together, from each other, and to gain specific skills that help in their current role and the next. And organizations need to look within for expertise and experience.

Collaborative learning spotlights your subject-matter experts. SMEs are your biggest asset, and can turn a stagnant L&D program into a high-performance engine. Give them the opportunities to share and teach, and you create a collaborative learning culture that lifts the entire enterprise. 

And you foster a true learning culture. When team members learn together, your business becomes a learning community, where every employee can be both student and teacher. Team members are proud of their contributions and the positive impact they have on one another. And they hold each other accountable for continuous improvement. 

This helps you close vital skills gaps faster, and evolve your organization as the business landscape changes. The best programs drive tangible business results, while also upskilling employees and navigating organizations through change. 

When we learn with and from each other, we unlock collective knowledge and skills faster—and maximize our career growth. Just as crucially, we deliver real results for our organizations, from employee engagement, to retention, to revenue.

What is collaborative learning?

Collaborative learning is a training methodology where employees share their knowledge and expertise, teaching and learning from one another at the same time. Organizations are moving away from more hierarchical top-down management styles and toward low-authority, high-accountability models. 

Instead of individual project ownership, we’re relying more and more on group work to achieve outsized results.

A group learning approach enhances the training experience by capitalizing on each employee’s skills, ideas, and institutional knowledge. It leverages social interactions such as discussion forums to maximize learning and engagement.

In other words: We work in teams, so why wouldn’t we learn as a team?

Collaborative vs cooperative learning

Collaborative learning is often confused with cooperative learning, where students work together in small groups to solve a problem or master a concept. Cooperative learning is a useful learning tool but difficult to deploy on an organizational scale. It's most commonly used in high school and higher education settings. 

Like cooperative learning, collaborative learning encourages higher-level thinking, problem-solving, and teamwork but is much easier to scale across teams.

6 benefits of collaborative learning

In contrast with traditional corporate training, collaborative learning is democratized, relevant, fast, iterative, and impact-driven. Here’s what that means in practice:

1. Collaborative learning is democratized

Most traditional corporate training is top-down, meaning management or L&D determines training needs and then creates or buys learning materials to meet those needs. In contrast, in a collaborative learning methodology, anyone on the team can make a request or create a learning need.

This allows everyone in the organization to contribute to the learning process, making them feel more engaged and focused. Employees suggest training needs, and other employees use their unique skill sets to create content to fulfill those needs. 

Then as a facilitator, L&D assists others in completing courses, runs quality control, and makes sure learners have what they need to succeed.

Because employees declare learning needs, they can learn about the things they care about. The result is greater employee buy-in and smoother knowledge-sharing between employees and departments.

2. Collaborative learning is engaging

Self-driven eLearning courses rely on individual motivation. When employees have targets and deadlines looming, it’s no wonder that average course completion rates are as low as 20-30%.

But the social interdependence created through collaborative learning has a major positive impact on learner engagement. Nobody wants to let the team down. By bringing people together in their learning, they get to react and invest in others’ progress. 

Collaborative learning courses are also more tailored to your specific company and employees’ needs. Courses are created by fellow team members, which means the content is more nuanced and specific to your company than generic third-party courses are. 

L&D and employees create and fulfill learning needs together. As a result, employees are more invested in the learning process. They help create quality content that L&D doesn't have to buy or source through expert interviews.

3. Collaborative learning is fast

One of the biggest contributors to the current crisis in learning is the sluggish response to training needs. By the time L&D teams have realized there’s a gap in their resources and responded with the right learning content, the chance to make the biggest positive impact has long passed.

Collaborative learning connects people together, allowing them to declare learning needs, share their skills and expertise, and create learning content quickly to answer urgent questions. This way, organizations can respond to opportunities for growth quickly and more effectively.

For example, world-famous tire manufacturer Michelin built an internal academy to help employees develop their skills and careers. Any subject-matter expert can create a new course in under four hours and with new AI authoring tools, it could take just minutes. 

4. Collaborative learning is iterative

Because course creation has traditionally been slow and expensive, updates and refreshes have been infrequent. Collaborative learning prioritizes making it easy to create and edit course materials, which means it's far easier to update them based on new information or employee feedback.

Now, iteration is more important than ever. Courses frequently become dated due to technological or organizational changes. Static course design hinders flexibility and slows down employee learning.

With collaborative learning, you can disseminate information and iterate it later based on feedback. This way, crucial information gets into the hands of employees exactly when it is needed, empowering them to make better decisions.

5. Collaborative learning drives performance

In most L&D departments, success is measured by the number of courses shipped and completed by employees. This approach offers very low visibility into how employees are interacting with the courses or what they’re getting out of that experience. It also makes it more difficult to demonstrate training ROI.

In contrast, collaborative learning is impact-driven because it doesn't define success as simply course delivery. With teams active in the learning process, their feedback, skills learned, and performance in their day-to-day roles indicate whether a course is successful.

6. Collaborative learning is effective

Perhaps the biggest benefit of all: a collaborative educational approach helps team members understand complex subjects more effectively than other eLearning tactics. And there’s real science behind this:

• Cognitive load is a learner’s working memory—the information at the forefront of their thoughts. This is limited and easily overwhelmed.
• When information overload happens to a learner, they struggle to learn or retain anything new.
• But collaborative learning actually creates collective memory, sharing the load across the group.
• Each individual has more capacity to process and retain new information.

Group discussion and collaborative activities also lessen the load on instructors and L&Ds, increasing efficiency and alignment even further across the group.

How collaborative learning works

All of that sounds great, but what does collaborative learning actually look like in practice? How can it help employees learn occupational and social skills, and therefore help your company succeed?

Higher-level learning benefits aside, collaborative learning works because it makes learning programs more nimble, peer-driven, and distributed.

Collaborative learning helps companies stay nimble

With a learning platform that leverages collaborative learning, you can keep employees on top of changes by creating courses in minutes, not months. This enables your company to react quickly to accelerating technology, industry disruption, and unpredictable world events.

The problem: L&D can’t keep up with organizational change

Your organization’s priorities, goals, and infrastructure can change seemingly overnight. In an ideal world, L&D would help any transition with content and training courses, but most learning platforms don't allow for quick course production. 

Producing even a single training course can take months of group work, and L&D teams frequently rely on instructional designers to build courses. The entire process is admin-heavy and resource-intensive. Also, it's expensive.

The solution: easy course creation that anyone can master

Collaborative learning makes it easier and more cost-effective to create and share learning materials. Anyone at the company can quickly learn how to create a course, with no outside help required.

Sales Enablement can demo new product features. Customer Success can create a tutorial to help reps deal with a specific recurring issue in a self-managed way. John in management can set up a project centered around a case study to impact a specific leadership skill.

All of these courses can be easily distributed, and educators (course authors) can get quick feedback from relevant stakeholders as they iterate and improve over time.

That accessibility opens the door for a whole new range of training possibilities. You can still create comprehensive onboarding courses and set learning paths. But you can also develop micro-courses that are relevant to only a single department or even a solitary position. You can roll out urgent content quickly and update it later to reflect new developments or real-world changes in the market.

Example in practice: When the company adopts a new billing software, the Customer Ops team can quickly create best practices and a course on how to use the software. Employees can start using the software right away. Customer Ops can then continue to update the course to reflect employees’ questions.

Collaborative learning puts your people first

Employees are a company’s most valuable resource. A collaborative learning platform helps you leverage that competitive advantage by letting teams learn from one another rather than simply prescribing standardized learning content based on their roles.

The problem: irrelevant and unengaging learning programs

Too many organizations think of learning as a one-way street: L&D creates learning materials, and employees consume them. Everything goes in one direction, with no opportunity to discuss back-and-forth or share feedback. Centralized content creation is deliverable-driven, not results-driven. 

In this scenario, L&D wastes time and money creating or purchasing courses that nobody pays attention to. 

LXPs got us halfway to solving the problem. They made it easier to find and consume learning materials than a stodgy LMS did. But the real crisis isn’t in the presentation of content; it’s a critical lack of focus on creating engaging content that also encourages community interaction.

The solution: learning as a conversation, not a directive

Collaborative learning is a bottom-up, peer-driven learning method for creating training materials. Employees identify specific learning needs based on what they view as gaps in their knowledge. In-house experts then meet those needs by creating relevant courses. Everyone is an active participant in learning together.

Not only is this more democratic, it’s also more dynamic. There is room for conversation, feedback, and iteration. You can create more effective learning materials and boost employee engagement at the same time.

Facilitating knowledge transfer and idea-sharing among your employees isn’t just a way to drive better performance; it also enables innovation. Course creators are encouraged to think like educators: employing decision-making and critical-thinking skills to create the best courses. Your teams might not have realized the skills and knowledge present within their teams. Once they’re aware of it, there’s no limit to what you can create.

Example in practice: Instead of a sales enablement manager setting mandatory pitch-assessment modules to be completed by all reps, she could give reps the opportunity to declare where they were running into problems and propose solutions. Then she could create learning paths that offered the support and the guidance needed to improve their performance.

Related: 3 Biggest Challenges of Remote Sales Training and How to Overcome Them

Collaborative learning enables a distributed company culture

In a world where employees are increasingly willing to job-hop, strong company culture matters more than ever. A platform that leverages collaborative learning can help you build that culture–one that’s more flexible, decentralized, and nurturing, and helps employees develop their skills and careers.

The problem: corporate learning makes employees feel like automatons

Building a company culture that empowers employees is a tall order. Unfortunately, it’s an area where organizations have frequently failed in the past, especially during moments of crisis. A rigid, top-down corporate culture will inevitably be less flexible and out of touch with employees’ needs.

Centralized learning programs only contribute to the problem. They are more likely to be focused on specific deliverables, with little concern for individual growth opportunities. To do this, they turn to one-size-fits-all solutions, like mass reskilling programs or in-person training seminars.

These solutions are usually expensive, ineffective, and hard to scale. Generic learning programs make employees feel like a number, not like valued team members. This lack of personalization is a major contributing factor to the current crisis of employee engagement and retention.

The solution: a culture of learning that empowers workers

Collaborative learning techniques such as think-pair-share keep employees happy, present, and focused. In a collaborative learning environment, each person’s skills and ideas are genuinely valued.

A collaborative learning culture should focus on training impact. No more pointless videos or interminable webinars. If an activity isn’t helping people learn, it’s not worth their time.

A democratized learning pedagogy empowers all people while helping them move forward in their learning journey. Most importantly, democratized learning is useful in a company of 10 or 10,000. It works whether you’re all in the same building or spread out across the world. It scales as the company grows and is elastic enough to change with the organization’s priorities.

Example in practice: Instead of instituting a corporate reskilling initiative for 1,000 engineers, a company could encourage each employee to set their own learning goals based on their specific aspirations and priorities for development.

Related: Why Collaboration Skills Offer a Major Competitive Advantage (Plus 10 Ways to Unleash Them)

3 practical applications of collaborative learning

Adopting collaborative learning can have positive real-life effects that extend far beyond the L&D department.

1. Build a more flexible and adaptable workforce

Collaborative learning allows people to learn new concepts, products, and processes quickly. It’s significantly easier to create learning programs. This in turn makes it easier for specific departments, or even entire companies, to adapt to new products or processes.

This flexibility is a huge competitive advantage in a world in constant flux. A learning platform focused on quick and nimble responses to training opportunities could have a profound impact across your entire business. 

With an elastic learning platform, you’ll be able to pivot quickly to meet changing market dynamics or counteract world events. In practice, this means smoother transitions for workplace developments, such as the switch to remote working.

Most importantly, next time a crisis hits, you may be able to rapidly reskill employees and avoid layoffs. 

Related: 5 Collaborative Learning Strategies to Incorporate Into Your Training Programs

2. Encourage robust learning and engagement

Studies show that active learning increases knowledge retention. And effective collaboration encourages active learning. Employees have a more involved learning experience when they create and take peer-generated courses instead of watching training videos or listening to lectures. They have the opportunity to interact with the learning materials and can ask questions and suggest feedback.

Collaborative learning is also linked to greater employee engagement. Employees are more motivated to complete courses when they know their peers are counting on them. For example, 360Learning strengthens this motivation by encouraging group members to become learning champions who share their skills with others.

Educational researchers have also linked collaborative learning activities to enhanced communication and team building. That’s because the act of teaching requires employees to flex their communication and critical-thinking skills. 

Helping colleagues learn builds a layer of responsibility and camaraderie as colleagues work together to conquer business challenges.

Related: 4 Benefits of Collaborative Learning Backed By Science & Psychology

3. Foster a learning culture

Effective collaboration builds a shared learning culture through an atmosphere where team members are continually learning with and from one another. Employees are always sharing expertise and building new skills.

Companies frequently make the mistake of waiting until an immense and obvious skill gap appears before they invest in new training solutions for their workers. Unfortunately, by then, the gap is usually too big to be easily overcome. 

Instead, you need to foster an atmosphere of constant learning and growth before you end up with a massive skill gap to traverse.

Related: How We Use Peer Learning to Keep Our Company’s Competitive Edge

Collaborative learning is the key to high-performance L&D

L&D programs are competing for the attention of busy, stretched teams. To have any real impact, you need to bring people together and deliver more tailored, real-world courses built by people who’ve actually excelled in these roles. 

To do this, you’ll need the right tools. A traditional LMS or LXP will take you only so far. You need an integrated learning platform that’s nimble, people-centric, and distributed.

Our learning platform can be used standalone to train internal employees and external audiences, or integrated with an HCM suite to bring collaborative learning to all of your learners. It lets everyone play a part in your company's learning culture and encourages every employee to actively build their skills and share with others.

For years, we’ve been advocating collaborative learning as a way to transform organizational culture. Now, we believe that we are on the cusp of a collaborative learning revolution. The way we work, communicate, and learn is changing fast, and it’s changing for good. If you fall behind now, you risk being disrupted by your competition.

Are you interested in joining the movement and finding a solution? Reach out for a demo today.