Informal learning is anything but casual

According to the eLearning Guild's The Informal Learning Research Report 2006, 97% of survey respondents strongly agreed or agreed that "Informal learning takes place wherever and whenever people have the need, motivation, and opportunity for learning."

Okay, that's not so startling. In fact, unless we want to get picky in our definitions of informal learning, just about anyone in the training or education field would agree with this statement.

What's really interesting is that more than half of the respondents to the survey (57%, in fact) strongly agreed or agreed with the following statement:

"Informal learning works better than formal learning because it is learner-driven."

As organizational learning culture grows into a full embrace of technology and e-learning becomes more and more common, companies are looking to take best advantage of everything technology can offer. And at some point just about all of us had the lightbulb go on above our heads as we typed a keyword into a search engine, and we realized just how much informal learning was going on around us.

The result is nearly unanimous - 98 % of respondents to the survey strongly agreed or agreed that "Informal learning can be deliberately encouraged by an organization."

Why wouldn't we want to encourage it? What better learning opportunity could we hope for than helping an employee get access to information right when she needs to know it and is able to put that information to immediate use?

The dominKnow Learning Content Management System can help organizations encourage informal learning. One of the chief advantages of our approach to Learning Objects is that it is driven by instructional design principles, not just technology principles. The LCMS creates Learning Objects that are complete instructional units intended to support learning of a specific topic. And this means that courses aren't the only application for these Learning Objects.

The LCMS's Reference Feature gives learners access to learning objects as individual reference items.

Learners can search the Reference by keyword to quickly find the topic they are looking for and access the Learning Object immediately, without having to take or return to a course to find it. They get the information and training they need, right when they need it most. And since the Learning Objects are designed as complete instructional units, they get the full learning they need.