Social learning: why we learn better together

Corporate training almost always pictures learning as a solitary act. One person, one screen, a course to get through on your own, maybe with the door shut so as not to be disturbed. It is a convenient picture to manage, because it is easy to plan and easy to measure, and yet it captures only a small part of how people actually learn. Most of what we know how to do at work we picked up from other people, by watching them, asking them, making mistakes alongside them. Leaving that dimension out means giving up the richest part of learning.

Most learning happens between people

A widely cited model in the training world, the so-called 70-20-10, has tried for decades to put numbers on this idea: roughly 70% of what we learn at work is said to come from direct experience, 20% from other people and only 10% from formal courses. The exact proportions come from interviews in which a group of executives described how they believed they had learned, so they are best taken as an estimate rather than a precise measurement, and the criticism on that point is fair. The order of magnitude, though, says something worth hearing, because classroom training is a small slice of the total and most of the rest runs through experience and through people.

For anyone designing training, the consequence is direct. A strategy built only on formal courses covers the 10% and leaves almost everything else uncovered. Social learning, the learning that grows out of exchange with others, is the way to recover that usually neglected part, and it works as a central component of how human learning happens rather than a pleasant add-on.

Learning is a social act: what the research says

The idea has roots that go a long way back. The psychologist Albert Bandura showed as early as the 1960s, with his social learning theory, that a good deal of what we know we acquired by watching others and imitating them, with no need for explicit instruction. Watching someone do a thing, and seeing what works and what does not, is one of the oldest and most effective ways we learn.

Earlier still, Lev Vygotsky had described learning as a social process by its very nature, in which the guidance of someone more experienced takes you further than you would get on your own, along what he called the zone of proximal development. In both views the presence of others is the very ground on which learning takes place. Training that isolates a person in front of a screen gives up precisely that ground.

Together people learn more and stay the course

Bandura's and Vygotsky's insights have been borne out by decades of research on collaborative learning. Springer, Stanne and Donovan, in a 1999 meta-analysis in the Review of Educational Research, gathered the studies on small-group learning and found that it produces better results, more favourable attitudes toward study and a higher likelihood of finishing the course. A still larger meta-analysis by Johnson, Johnson and Stanne, built on more than a hundred and sixty studies, reached the same conclusions, with a consistent advantage for cooperative methods over competitive or individual ones.

That third element, persistence, deserves particular attention in a company. One of the most keenly felt problems in training is that people abandon it halfway, and the social dimension is one of the levers that keep the odds of reaching the end high. Feeling part of a group going through the same path, seeing others make progress, having someone to compare notes with makes it harder to give up, and turns a solitary obligation into something you do together.

Explaining to others is one of the best ways to learn

There is also a mechanism that overturns the idea that in a group only the listener learns. In 2014 Nestojko and colleagues asked people to study a text, telling one group they would be tested and another that they would have to teach it to someone. In reality nobody actually taught, and everyone was simply tested, and yet those who had prepared to teach remembered more, organised the information better and caught the main points more precisely. The mere prospect of having to explain to another person changes the way you study, because it pushes you to look for structure and meaning instead of piling up details.

This is the so-called protégé effect, and it carries an important practical upshot for social learning: when someone explains a concept to a colleague, the first to benefit is the one doing the explaining. Building occasions in which people teach one another therefore produces learning twice over, on both sides of the exchange.

How Evolve puts social learning to work

Evolve, AWorld's Learning Experience Platform, keeps social learning among its pillars, alongside microlearning and gamification, and it weaves it together with the other two rather than treating it as a separate module.

Leaderboards introduce a measured form of social comparison, which gives people a sense of how others are getting on and one more reason to stay with the path. Group challenges and missions move learning from the individual level to the collective one, because a shared goal ties each person's progress to that of their team. The community dimension, finally, gives learners the feeling of belonging to a group that is growing together, and that sense of belonging is one of the reasons a path gets finished. All of it stays anchored to the logic of microlearning <!-- internal link: EN microlearning article -->, which spreads content into short units, so that the exchange between people accompanies learning day after day.

Social learning has to be designed, not just switched on

One clarification keeps a common misunderstanding at bay. Adding a leaderboard or a comment space does not create social learning by itself, and in some cases it risks producing only noise or competition for its own sake. Exchange works when it has a structure and a shared goal, when leaderboards stay a reference point rather than a source of pressure, and when the occasions for comparison are tied to content that matters. It is the same principle behind the point that badges and leaderboards on their own are not enough <!-- internal link: EN narrative gamification article -->: the social dimension adds value when it is carefully designed, and turns into an empty frame when it is merely placed next to the content.

Frequently asked questions

What is social learning? It is the learning that grows out of exchange with others, through observation, comparison, collaboration and mutual teaching. It rests on well-established theories, such as Bandura's social learning and Vygotsky's view, which hold that learning is social by its very nature.

Why does social learning matter in a company? Because most of what people learn at work comes from experience and from others, while formal courses cover a limited slice. Bringing in the social dimension recovers that part and, according to research on collaborative learning, improves results, attitudes and the odds of completing a path.

Does teaching others really help the one teaching? Yes. Studies on the protégé effect show that preparing to explain a topic, or explaining it for real, improves the understanding and memory of the person teaching, because it leads them to look for the structure and the key points of the content.

How does Evolve deliver social learning? Evolve combines leaderboards, group challenges and missions and a community dimension with microlearning content, so that learning becomes a shared activity rather than a solitary one, with comparison among colleagues sustaining motivation along the way.

Learning the way we always have

For most of our history we have learned from one another, by watching, imitating and explaining. Corporate training, by focusing on individual courses, has partly forgotten that route, and social learning is a way to find it again with today's tools. A platform that connects people while they learn does more than add a social element to a course, because it brings learning back to the form that comes most naturally to it, the shared one, where the person learning and the person explaining grow together.

If you want to see how to turn training into a shared experience people genuinely complete, discover Evolve and talk to our team.

Sources

• Bandura, A. (1977). Social Learning Theory. Prentice Hall.
• Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Harvard University Press.
• Springer, L., Stanne, M. E., & Donovan, S. S. (1999). Effects of Small-Group Learning on Undergraduates in Science, Mathematics, Engineering, and Technology: A Meta-Analysis. Review of Educational Research, 69(1), 21-51.
• Johnson, D. W., Johnson, R. T., & Stanne, M. B. (2000). Cooperative Learning Methods: A Meta-Analysis. University of Minnesota.
• Nestojko, J. F., Bui, D. C., Kornell, N., & Bjork, E. L. (2014). Expecting to teach enhances learning and organization of knowledge in free recall of text passages. Memory & Cognition, 42, 1038-1048.
• McCall, M. W., Lombardo, M. M., & Eichinger, R. W. The 70-20-10 model, Center for Creative Leadership (an estimate based on self-reports, to be read as a heuristic).