🪷 This week 9-15th May is Mental Health Awareness Week which, this year, has a focus on loneliness as the official theme. 

When you're studying and you have Summer exams approaching you might feel isolated when learning and revising for long hours in the library or at home and with many lectures now delivered remotely we can miss that face-to-face time you get from being in a class or lecture theatre surrounded by friends.

Social learning is a vital part of how to make what we are studying stick and to avoid feeling lonely or isolated when studying.

Benefits of Social Learning

By learning together we can reduce isolation and feelings of loneliness as well as improve

• Holds you accountable when studying with friends to stay motivated
• By teaching others you are putting into practice what you have learned which helps you to more deeply understand the topic
• It focuses your attention on what you are learning rather than passively learning alone
• Leaderboards and games make learning feel more fun and make you more likely to engage

Social Learning At Work

It's not just studying for exams where social learning has benefits. Social learning has benefits for work and business too:

1. A chain of automobile repair shops in Spain, say their overall floor productivity increased by more than 30% with social learning and will result in a 20% increase in revenue. (Accenture).
2. 61% of high performers reveal they are going to increase social learning spending with 8% saying it will increase significantly (TrainingMag).
3. AMD - a semiconductor manufacturing company, says their shift to social learning strategy saves more than USD 250,000 per year in web based training production costs (Kenexa).
4. 64% of employees at Intercontinental Hotels Group said their motivation for playing a mobile game powered by social learning was to increase their knowledge and skill of brand standards. (mLevel)
5. HBX - Harvard Business School's new online education initiative, experienced over 85% course completion rates using social learning than online-only MOOCs which are in the single digits. (Harvard Business Review).
6. 40% of organizations have mentoring programs for social learning in place to help prevent losing knowledge-hungry Millennials to other companies. (LearnDash)
7. More than USD 18 Million is being invested by The Open University in the UK for their social learning platform that sees over 40% of their learners taking courses on mobile. (The Open University)
8. McKinsey say that productivity gains enabled through using a social learning platform can be as high as 35% by being able to connect with others using social tech. (DigitalistMag)
9. Villeroy & Boch - a large manufacturer of ceramics, deployed a social learning framework for their training courses resulting in a 32% increase on Average Transaction Value with +19% sales in Japan. (Curatr)
10. Cisco turned to social learning to support its transition to a global services organization and saw a 98% employee adoption rate in the first year with 80% of learning content socially generated. (ChiefLearningOfficer)
11. Two years ago, 73% of surveyed companies expected to increase their focus on social learning and more than 60% wanted their employees to interact with learning resources on a daily basis. (Brandon Hall Group)
12. Research at Stanford found that 45% of their physicians benefited from social learning in a medical photo-sharing app for doctors as a patient care related study aid. (Stanford Medicine)
13. Comcast achieved a 40% increase in productivity with social learning on guided sales training for their retail store-based connection specialists and accomplished a 60% year-over-year increase in sales. (UnboxedTechnology)
14. 85% of Marriott International's management team use social learning for their decision-making needs and 20% of their classes continue as ongoing workforce collaboration. (Diginomica)

So this week why not remember to catch up with friends, give that person you haven't spoken with in a while a call and and take your team and people out for lunch and just take time to find out how they are doing.

We're never really alone but making connections can be tough so let's try and make things a little easier this week and invite a friend to a Shiken Trivia game or set your group of friends a challenge.