How Communities of Practice Make Workplace Training More Effective

What’s the secret ingredient to more effective training?

In my experience, the secret ingredient to more effective training is community, or collective learning. I may be biased, because I’ve spent my entire career working at the intersection of community and education. From my time as a high school choir teacher hosting after-school programs for advanced singers, to the decade I’ve spent building communities of practice for educational technology companies like Articulate, creating opportunities for peer-to-peer experiences to enhance learning has been my bread and butter. This approach led me to increase product retention by 10% among community members at one job and to achieve an average course completion rate of 90% at another. In this post, I’ll tell you how I did it, and how you can, too.

Since most of us have had at least some experiences learning in classrooms, we understand innately that community and learning are natural friends. It almost goes without saying that when we get the opportunity to contextualize new information with other people, connecting content to context, we deepen our expertise and capability.

But just because we know that collective learning deepens outcomes doesn’t mean it’s always easy to apply. As we get further away from contexts like live classroom learning and higher education, it may become harder to conceptualize how community best practices would apply to workplace training scenarios.

Luckily, if we break down the elements of community learning that make it so effective, we can apply the same best practices we would naturally understand in a classroom setting to almost any training use case: from compliance training to sales and customer service enablement, to on-the-job manufacturing training. In this post, I’ll break down why communities of practice are so effective for improving learning outcomes, and offer strategies you can borrow to get similar results in workplace training.

How leading cohort-based courses led to the greatest success in my career

Before I share how to replicate a community model’s success in training contexts, I want to first prove my premise: that collective learning leads to better learning outcomes. To get there, I want to share the proudest stat I’ve ever achieved in my career.

I spent two years at a startup building cohort-based courses to teach people how to work as community managers. I ran those courses for hundreds of students, and here’s the thing I’m most proud of: more than 90% of enrolled students graduated. If you create online training for work, you know that driving course completion is a big challenge, especially with online training. So how did I get completion rates that high, especially when the course took twelve weeks to complete and required an extensive capstone project?

There are a number of factors I think contributed to this number. Students applied and paid to participate, so they were highly invested in the material. Instructors worked with small groups and could spot at-risk learners and offer extra support. But I think the most important factor behind these rates was community. Peer accountability was deeply woven into the program’s structure, which meant that leaving core program elements incomplete wasn’t just a failure of self, but a failure to others.

Industry data validates what we observed. Completion rates for Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) typically hover near 25%, according to stats released by Ruzuku. Add a dedicated creator instructor, and those numbers double. But provide active pacing and peer accountability (cohort-based courses), and completion rates jump to 50-90%. The critical component that boosts results in every case is the presence and accountability of other people.

But what if your setting doesn’t allow for a cohort-based course? In the rest of this article, we’ll dig into how to borrow best practices to replicate their success, regardless of setting.

Designing community-led training at scale, borrowing from cohort-based-course best practices

Although we’ve established that combining community best practices with learning best practices produces outstanding results, not every scenario allows for, or even warrants, running a fully fledged cohort-based course.

It’s hard to imagine, for example, running a twelve-week cohort-based course for a required workplace anti-phishing training, or trying to mirror a classroom setting for a software simulation. This may not be practical or even desirable. The good news is, you don’t have to apply all of these techniques to get results. If we break down the elements of cohort-based courses that make them so effective, we can scale them down to apply them authentically to almost any scenario with minor tweaks, boosting learning outcomes.

Let’s take a look at some of the aspects that make cohort-based courses so effective, and how we can break them down to apply them more broadly.

Structured learning schedules reduce mental load

Almost all cohort-based courses rely on a defined learning schedule: class happens on this day, homework is due on this day, etc. These schedules usually rely on repeated patterns that help students build habits, which in turn support their ability to incorporate learning into their actual lives and reduce their odds of dropping out.

Just because a course doesn’t take place over many weeks or have a live component, it doesn’t mean you can’t borrow from this wisdom. Imagine a self-paced, evergreen compliance training that takes four hours to complete. You can provide a suggested schedule for this scenario to get similar results. Suggest that learners break the course into four chunks by blocking one hour on their calendars for Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday.

The magic of scheduling like this is that students reduce their mental load, making them more likely to succeed. Scheduling in chunks like this is something we can provide to learners at almost any scale.

Real peer and instructor interaction creates accountability

Another feature of cohort-based courses is that they tend to allow for a lot of interaction between one another and between students and instructors. This is usually the first element to go when we start to shift to asynchronous learning.

However, even if you don’t reach the level of interaction of a cohort- or classroom-based course, you still retain small elements of human-to-human interaction. Aspiring to have your learners interact with at least one other real human during their learning experience is one way to begin to reintroduce accountability into learning.

There are a number of creative ways to do this:

• Use automated networking match tools like Donut to connect learners to one another for networking calls.
• Host a single student kickoff call once a quarter to introduce learners to one another.
• Host office hours to give students the opportunity to meet their instructor in person.

Feedback helps students go beyond knowledge to actual capability

Lastly, most cohort-based courses incorporate some level of feedback from instructors to students or even from student to student. Feedback is a critical component of bridging the path from community to learning to building real capability. Feedback works because it requires students not only to understand what they learned, but to apply those concepts in a variety of new contexts.

Human-driven feedback can feel very difficult to scale, because it requires real time from real people—and that commitment only balloons as more learners engage. However, scaling feedback can actually be relatively easy in a community context if you consider your students a potential vector for scale. While an instructor may not be able to give feedback to 200 students, 200 students can form 100 pairs and provide feedback to one another using the instructor’s feedback model criteria. This is yet another way that leaning into the real people taking your course can unlock surprising opportunities for scale that actually lean away from automation and into relationship building.

Three simple ideas to use community best practices in your training program

We’ve explored a lot of the “why” behind a community’s ability to bolster learning outcomes, and we’ve discussed techniques for creating community-led training. But the reality for many creating workplace training is that you have existing training, and you want to improve its outcomes without a complete overhaul. So, before we wrap up, I want to leave you with three practical ideas you could implement today to add community elements to your existing training.

1. Add discussion questions to the end of each major topic

The simplest way to benefit from community practices is to end each major topic in your training with some kind of discussion question. This habit is beneficial not only because it helps learners connect to one another, but because engaging with questions helps students apply critical thinking to concepts, deepening mastery. This technique works best if you choose open-ended questions whose answers are subjective, and leave room for discussion and individual interpretation, rather than closed questions with a single fixed “correct” answer.

Many LMSs, like our integration partner Thinkific, allow course authors to enable discussion questions at the end of lessons, making this an easy technique to implement.

2. Establish recurring office hours

Another favorite technique of mine for adding community to learning is to establish a recurring office hour. I love this technique because it is so flexible, requires almost no prep, and scales so well in practice—a commitment to one single synchronous hour per week or month for a wide group of students provides students with the opportunity to connect with their instructor and other students in real time.

This is also a great technique because you can apply it to a group of courses, not just a single one—imagine you are responsible for creating sales enablement training for a software company, and you put out multiple courses every month to help reps learn about new product releases. In this scenario, although you may distribute a dozen different courses each quarter, you need not balloon the office hours. A single weekly or monthly open-ended office hour works just as well, if not better than separate office hours per course.

3. Nominate past star students to give current students feedback

Lastly, relying on successful past students to help scale feedback motions (or even office hours!) can be an effective strategy. Once you introduce community elements like discussions or office hours, it will quickly become apparent which students are great candidates for peer leadership positions. This unlocks the potential to scale the magic of 1:1 connection beyond what would be possible for you as the content creator.

With community, the sky’s the limit—but start small.

In this article, you’ve learned why communities of practice are such effective partners for deep learning experiences, and how to break down the magic of the cohort-based course to apply its unique factors to any learning environment. And, you’ve learned some easy techniques to apply community best practices quickly to existing courses you may have already built.

Hopefully, your mind is abuzz with creative ideas. But what’s most important is not that you implement everything in this article, but that you start with something. Choose one technique you learned in this article to apply to a course or program.

Perhaps the best way to learn about communities of practice and get the benefits yourself is to see them in action. Join  Articulate’s own community of practice, E-Learning Heroes, to connect with hundreds of thousands of the best folks in the industry. I recommend you hop into our Exchange Best Practices forum and start a discussion about what you’re working on today. When you share the projects you’re working on in E-Learning Heroes, you’ll receive meaningful responses, feedback, and examples from peers that can help you deepen your work. We can’t wait to see you there!

Read our other posts in this series on building a community of practice: What Is a Community of Practice, and 6 Steps to Follow to Build a Thriving Community of Practice.