Basic concepts: social learning as a part of social pedagogy, social learning as a system, social learning as a process, stages of the social learning process, social learning as an activity, object, subject, goal, means of it, learning outcome.
What is social learning?
Social learning is official (organised) or private (spontaneous) familiarisation, consolidation of knowledge, skills and abilities, which are significant for a person’s service behaviour. It is a socio-pedagogical phenomenon observed as a system of acquiring knowledge, skills, and abilities to communicate, to solve the individual’s socialisation problems.
It can be perceived as a process of transferring communication with the experience of each individual or covering people, arising from certain types of qualitative changes in the cognitive sphere of the individual. The social learner can be identified as undertaking a significant type of mental activity, pursuing the goal of acquiring new knowledge, skills and abilities from society and putting them into practice.
Social learning principles are assumed to be one of the effects of social pedagogy. Like any social phenomenon, it can be regarded from a system point of view, a process point of view, and an activity point of view.
How to adopt social learning in the workplace
The first step is to encourage teamwork across the board. Employees should not be shy about asking each other for help – it should become a natural process. When working on projects, please focus on the need to unite in teams, especially regarding employees from different departments.
Make teamwork part of your online courses.
Step two is to embed elements of social learning into the online training of employees, such as course authoring software. Don’t leave them alone with learning content; allow them to discuss it with other participants. Programs that do not allow employees to communicate are ineffective.
How to create a community around the educational program:
- Encourage posting during coach-led training
- Allow participants to leave comments on microlearning courses
- If you use gamification elements, let participants personalise their avatars and ‘compete’ with each other
- Use the ‘learning partner’ tool to give group assignments for long courses
Benefits of social learning in the workplace
- On-the-job training
- Fast; ‘just in time’
- Continuous development
- Heals corporate culture
How to make social learning effective in the workplace
In addition, promote social learning and communication on all trips. Information circulates like air: managers know the opinion of social learning theory in the workplace and are aware of what colleagues think. Sometimes these processes need to be activated using serial feedback tools.
Small, tailor-made weekly brainstorming sessions during staff development activities can be used to find out what needs mentioning or to give feedback on the progress of the project.
Considering it as one of the most important types of social learning, it should be noted that it is implemented at the level of society and with its active participation, during which a learning effect on the individual is carried out according to the principle of ‘learning by the whole world’. But this influence is specific, manifesting itself to a greater extent as an interaction, as a mutually developing process, rather than in the direct sense of the word as a one-sided influence on a person.
Limitations of Social Learning
The result of all learning can be, first of all, the chosen result as a result, as a special purposefulness of education – the formation of knowledge, skills, and abilities to be socially active in actions, deeds, or activity, as an integrative result of the very movement of a person who can independently solve life problems in reaching the moment and on perspective.
Social learning as a first-class tool uses the information potential of authoring content.
The approach to information potential of a society is a combination of information abilities, resources, availability in individual institutions, activities, social relations and the social experience of people, allowing them to formulate knowledge, skills, and developed needs: humanitarian, technical, natural ability, etc.
Bandura’s Principles of Highly Effective Social Learning
From the beginning of his scientific activity, Albert Bandura paid particular attention to the high role of symbolic consumption in the dissemination of new forms of behaviour and social relations. It is likely that communication technologies and extended environments play an ever-increasing role in the circulation of ideas; they also apply a style of behaviour.
From the standpoint of social processes in learning, modelling affects learning mainly through its informative function. If people were guided in everyday life only by trial and error, then learning would be very laborious and risky. But, in most cases, by observing others, we learn from examples, even approximate ones, and therefore avoid many mistakes.
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