COLLABORATIVE LEARNING - A NEW PARADIGM

In a world where continuous learning is the need of the hour, it is not only the content but also the context of learning that becomes important. And it is to achieve this twin objective that collaborative learning becomes essential.
Collaborative learning is when the stakeholders capitalize on one another’s resources and skills to learn or attempt to learn something together. Collaborative learning with focus on taking learning to the workplace is the pathway to effective learning where "Workplace” can be defined as the physical location where learning happens.
The collaboration approach is suited both within and outside organisations. Within an organization, the Corporate Education team is the academic wing while the line people serve as industry practitioners. When compared to a traditional approach where the line representatives get involved only at the start and end of the learning process, today, the impetus is to capitalize on the partnership right through the learning process. The high levels of presence and involvement of line managers in the learning process is a common sight in many leading organisations today.
On the other hand, focusing on collaborative learning outside the organization has an enormous scope. For example, companies work with universities to create a learning curriculum that arises out of industry needs and mapped to competency levels exhibited by students in universities. While this helps the universities raise competency levels of students which in turn help the organisations subsequently when the students apply for jobs. Another common form of collaborative learning is when students from universities are invited to the industry to practice the skills that they have procured so far by applying them on real-life projects. It is a win-win situation with the organisations benefitting from the ideas, viewpoints of students and students getting exposure to real-life assignments. Industry academia partnership on research projects where faculty members work with the corporates on a common theme is also a method that adds a lot of value to both stakeholders.
One of the paradigm shifts that can go a long way in collaborative learning is enabling learning from seemingly unrelated backgrounds – For example, management lessons learnt from a sports team. Another critical aspect vital to engage learners right through the learning process is the learning methodologies used. New methodologies like gaming, social networking and even fairy tales can prove to be effective learning mechanisms in future. The importance of learning that is beyond barriers of time and distance cannot be undermined. Virtual media supported by sophisticated tools and technologies are crucial to make the learning experience interesting, relevant and positive to the changing needs of the learner. Increased use of learning approaches that focus on collaborative learning, for example action learning can also go a long way in making learning effective.
The journey has begun for collaborative learning – The imperative factor is how best we keep pace with the ever-changing world.