You may be interested in using Yammer as a training tool for your organization, but perhaps you are unsure of where to start. Where should you post training content? What types of content should you post? Should you use a training group in your Yammer network or should you have multiple training groups? Or is there another way? When we started developing our training program internally at Yammer, we had the same questions as you.
Recently, Yammer’s Learning & Development team presented and exhibited at ASTD TechKnowlege, a national conference for learning and development professionals, where we showcased our internal training university, “YammerVersity”. At the event, many L&D professionals expressed interest in hosting their training university on Yammer, thus this blog post was born.
There are a few things to consider when creating your own training environment on Yammer. First, you need to decide whether you will train within your existing network or build another network specifically for the training university. As there are benefits and drawbacks to both options, we’ll take a closer look at each.
Training Group: A training room – everyone is invited
By creating a training group (public or private) in your main Yammer network, you are simplifying the process but sacrificing robustness.
Pros – By conducting training in your main Yammer network where the students already exist, you simplify sign-up and join-in process. That still begs the question – whether to create a public or private training group? By building a public training group, you remove the separation between the training department and everyone else. Within Yammer, anyone can see the content being posted, thus creating visibility for the team and the programs being created. On the other hand, a private training group creates some privacy for users while still keeping them within your main network.
Cons – If you are doing a lightweight training program, building a group may work well. However, if your goal is to build a full training program, a group may not provide enough functionality. If you have multiple courses running concurrently, a group may become overwhelming and confusing for students. Creating exercises that point back to the group — for example, posting answers to questions and looking for specific content — may become difficult as more people join the group and post in it. Furthermore, because this is the ‘real’ network some user may fear posting. Just like in a classroom, you need to gauge the comfort level of your students and provide a private space for them if they need it.
Training Community: A set of training rooms for maximum flexibility and custom privacy levers.
A second option is to build an external network specifically for training, with multiple groups.
Pros – When you build your training network, you do so with the goal of building a safe place where students don’t fear making mistakes. By creating an external network focused solely on training, you provide a safe environment for users to ask questions, connect with trainers and complete their training without distractions. You can then create different groups within this network for each training class or track. This makes it easy for students to post questions and find content based on how far along they are in their training.
Cons – If you do not invite the entire company to the network, your team’s visibility may be impacted. Some employees may not see the content in your external network.
YammerVersity: A case study
As you can see, there are pros and cons for creating a training university internally and externally. At Yammer, we chose to create an external network specifically for training. The internal Yammer network is flooded with around 17 thousand messages a week, which is very challenging for a new hire to navigate. With YammerVersity, we have created a private and secure environment for new hires to begin navigating Yammer, learning the company culture and completing their training. We are able to invite new hires into this separate external network, YammerVersity, prior to their start date so that they could start to casually internalize Yammer culture
When building YammerVersity, we first created groups around class offerings and topical training areas. Most groups are pretty straight-forward: “product knowledge” or “CSM Certification” while others are a bit more creative like our onboarding bootcamp we’ve named “YamCamp.” Next we seeded appropriate content into each group. Yammer allows you to upload files and add links allowing us to use training content we had already created. We were able to add the appropriate training materials to the corresponding group. That way, users have all the material they need to complete the training, right on Yammer.
A question that was asked many times at the ASTD TK12 event was whether we used a special version of Yammer to create YammerVersity. The answer is no. You can set your training university on Yammer today, either as a group within your existing network or as an external network. Yammer makes it easy to switch between your internal Yammer network and your external training university, and you can see notifications no matter what network you are on.
When setting up your training university you don’t need to recreate the wheel! Use it as an interactive portal for the content you already have, then build from there. Once we finished filling YammerVersity with our pre-existing content, we moved on to thinking of new ways to present new content to our employees. The first thing that popped into mind was to create a space for our internal Subject Matter Experts to share information with the company – so we create the SME-gasbord group! This group acts as our internal Youtube channel where we take quick videos (no more than 10 minutes long) of our SME outlining and explaining a topic. These videos then get posted to the SME-gasbord group, where that SME monitors the conversation for any questions that arise. Our employees can then quickly view the content and ask questions directly to the SME, which allows for complete understanding of the content. See here for an example:
You can also create fun groups within your training university! At Yammer, we created a book club. If your work force is geographically dispersed, this is a great way to connect everyone. Use Yammer polls to pick a book the group is going to read. Post questions in the group about the book and use yammer #topics to track each book. There are a lot of great ways to use Yammer to elevate programs you are currently running, like book clubs, and easily create new programs your students will be excited to join!
Now that you’ve seen how Yammer created our training university with an external network, we would love to hear your thoughts! Do you see this as a reality for your organization? What would you add to your training university?
Photo source: Leo Reynolds
Thanks for a very interesting and informative post
I’m currently in the process of setting up a couple of pilot groups, one for an upcoming Leadership and Development course and one for a Medical Terminolgy course. This post is great and very timely but I have a question; Can I set up an external network with the free version?
Hi Jeff,
You should be able to create an external network by clicking the “networks” section on the right hand side of the network header (all the way at the top). From there you can go forth and create your network to fit your needs!
Hi Jeff, thanks for your comment and the compliment! Yes, you can set up a free external network, regardless of whether your “home” network is free or paid. External networks can also be premium or free. For example, free external networks don’t have groups, and premium do.
I created a new external network however with the free version seems I do not get the ability to create Groups, that is an upgrade (pay). On our main network we can create groups and that is the free version.
Correct. External networks are a different product so the feature set is going to be different with regards to what is free and premium. In internal networks, groups are included, but admin features and integrations (among other things) are premium. In external networks, groups are not included.
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This is great and also really hard to visualise from a written post. I wonder if you could make a video tour of your YammerVersity so that we can gain inspiration? Maybe then add some top tips to that?
Great case study. Thanks to our CSM, Jake Waage for thinking to share it us. It’s a timely post because we’re actually doing something similar right now inside our company.
I have a question about how you integrate any structured online courses into Yammerversity? For example, let’s say “CSM Certification” is an online sequential series of e-Learning modules. Do you find it more effective to host the e-Learning modules offsite in an LMS? Or, do you use a Yammer Page within the group to maintain the sequence of presentation for the online modules?
Hi Mel! I believe Jake already relayed my response to you but here it is again in case others want to know as well:
I would say it’s easier to let your LMS do the work of keeping everything in sequence (if he already has one), and just have the exercises and conversations take place in the group/community. But also having the pages in the groups as an outline so they know what to expect is a good option in addition to the LMS. There you can have links to everything but if they try to take something out of order the LMS will kick them back into the right order.
On top of this response my colleague Misha also added this:
“one thing to keep in mind is – are they mandatory classes or optional? If they are optional, the external network is a great way to drive additional exposure to training.”
Hope this helps, let me know if you have any other questions!
Thanks for the great post Natalie. You’ve given us some ideas on how to use Yammer in learning. I’m working on a major transformation program in an organization that uses Yammer and I was keen to explore how to use it to create additional learning support from all learners to all learners. Thanks for giving me some ideas to further explore.
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Is there a way to do online testing through Yammer?
Health Science Education (medical, dental, nursing, allied health, pharm, etc) separates education from training. Our struggle is to encourage practitioners to problem-solve and make connections between basic concepts and patient care. I created a weblog in 2000 that we called “Caseblog” for giving small groups of students case-related problems to solve. The students loved it, but there was no method for grading the work done within the discussions.
I have worked with Yammer for over 3 years defining the best ways for the groups to function, and have worked with Qualtrics to make a grading tool for the discussions. We have used the tool to grade more than 60,000 student posts. The social and educational dynamics are fascinating.
The Qualtrics grading tool that we use to assess (1) what the students are discussing and (2) the quality of the posts. The students only get “points” for Content posts. These are defined as posts that “move the ball” or add to the group knowledge. A Logistics post gets no points, but is part of the group dynamic. This is where the students break up tasks or give assignments to each other. An Other post gets no points and is best exemplified as “:-)” or “Way to go Hanna”. We do find that different Yammerers have different personalities – some initiate discussions by posting questions. Some like to fill in content. Other (we call them “closers”) like to summarize the content and end a thread.
We have found that the least efficient groups (those that have lots of logistics and other posts) are also the best point leading groups. Essentially, by grading all posts, we can see educational behaviors of group learning.
We do see a correlation between classroom success and discussion group success. Simply put, the students who explore concepts in our Yammer groups do better on exams and in clinic. We do think there are personality issues that need to be explored. We are comparing personality inventories to different type of Yammer behaviors.
The design of the communities is crucial as is faculty involvement. Everyone, from our dean to local dentists and physicians help our students. BUT, the major success comes from the students helping each other. This is a force multiplier during a time when faculty resources are thin.
In health science we call this Problem-Based Learning and Case-Based Learning. I have said it hundreds of times – Yammer has created the best PBL tool because of the structure and the reporting tools. You have to have both.
For me – our Yammer implementation is an Educational Network with social behaviors, not a Social Network where learning might happen.