10 Ways to Encourage User Generated Content in Your LMS.

Who wants a boring top-down learning management system? You know what I mean, the LMS where people reluctantly log in to click as fast as they can to complete the compliance training and logout without any thought of having to return voluntarily. You can change this all too typical scenario and make some positive impacts on your culture at the same time. Here are some ideas on how to encourage your people to create and share content using your LMS. Collaborative learning builds engagement, captures essential knowledge and skills, and builds other forms of collaboration that foster strong interpersonal relationships.

These are 10 simple ways you can encourage people in your organisation to generate and share content in your LMS.

1. Communicate the organisation’s support and encouragement for people to engage in generating content. You need to create a safe environment for people to feel comfortable sharing ideas and content. One way to kick this off is engaging some leaders and managers to generate some content that is shared across the organisation.
2. To help narrow people’s focus and encourage contribution, set some guidelines. These guidelines can include subjects, internal projects, and identified knowledge/skills gaps. These guidelines may help people to get started and these guidelines can change or be loosened depending on the adoption rate of content generation.
3. You can incentivise people for their contributions of generated content. People are going to spend time generating content and most people appreciate recognition. The incentives can take all sorts of forms including certificates, gift certificates, small rewards, movie passes etc. One word of caution, do not go overboard on the size of incentives.
4. Facilitate collaboration by asking teams of various types like sales, HR, finance, project teams to collaborate on generating content.
5. Integrate social media platforms in your LMS to make it easier for people to share content. Some learning management systems have tools such as forums or external links to platforms such as LinkedIn, Instagram or Facebook that can be used to promote user generated content. Of course, be mindful of intellectual property controls in the sharing of various types of content.
6. Use the LMS, company intranet, newsletters, meetings and conferences to showcase user generated content and recognise those that have contributed.
7. Provide training on content creation skills and tools. This training can be provided in person, online or in blended formats. There is a tremendous amount of this type of information available freely on YouTube and you can create a library to share in your organisation.
8. Peer review could be useful for professionals generating content for colleagues and peers. Peer review can be included anonymously or attributed using face to face interactions or in the LMS with text based or star ratings.
9. You should consider leveraging AI tools for content generation. You can encourage people to explore the wide range of options available to generate ideas, build graphics and ensure standards of quality of content. There are some caveats with using AI or user generated content so I suggest some training and information be available for those seeking to use these tools.
10. Some people love competition so tap into this by running competitions with themes aligned with your culture, strategy and learning objectives.

I am sure there are many other ways people encourage user generated content in their learning management systems. If you have some ideas, please share them with me. One of my professional objectives is helping organisations ‘unleash the genius’ in people and reaping the enormous benefits for both the individuals and the entire organisation.