Collaborative Learning - The Take-Aways

One of the most challenging aspects of our company's recent integration was finding ways to transfer knowledge quickly and easily from subject matter experts and super users to new inquiring minds. Collaborative learning tools offer exciting possibilities to meet these needs. However, the primary barriers I face in a corporate environment is finding a tool that is secure enough for the highly confidential information we share within our business environment, yet simple and inexpensive enough for our IT police to allow it on our desktops. Any suggestions on such software would be greatly appreciated.

I think wikis would be extremely functional and easy for collaborating work groups, discussion groups, post-training Q&As, etc. Blogs would be great for ongoing "conversation" with executives on where we're going, updates, etc.

I have learned a lot from this collaborative learning class. It introduced me to quite a few tools I have been interested in getting more familiar with but hadn't taken the time to explore. And Tony's expertise was great in sorting them all out - helping me understand the best and appropriate uses for each, and kindly but firmly setting deadlines to ensure I kept up with exploring and using the new tools.

For future classes, I think it would be helpful to have prework that walked people through the tools one by one and allowed more time and more interaction with the tools before actually plowing into them in course assignments (especially for beginners).

On numerous occasions I found our collaboration tools essential as our team had challenges with time schedules and difficulties coming together. I also found that when we didn't have forced collaboration sessions, we sometimes broke away from the real benefits of the tools and simply created something quickly on our own, rather than leveraging the real benefit of discussion and knowledge-sharing. Perhaps "forced" collaboration sessions between assignment deadlines would encourage that interaction and help people develop more natural collaboration patterns.

Now, after completing this class, I see the benefit of collaborative learning and will look for ways of incorporating it into both instructor-led and online instruction. Thanks, Tony, for allowing me to be part of this class.