When it comes to finding the right learning management system (LMS), many associations struggle to find the right solution to meet their needs.  But in their new Association Learning Management Systems report, the leaders of Tagoras highlight some of the top LMS’s that can help associations educate and engage with their members. Those of us at Blackboard were proud to be featured in this list, and our own Paul Terry had the opportunity expand upon our work with associations in a recent interview with Tagoras Managing Director Celisa Steele.

In his interview, Paul emphasized the importance of social learning in associations, as this peer-to-peer engagement is critical to fostering strong relationships between association members. By capturing the highly relevant information shared through such social learning, LMS solutions like Blackboard can help associations meet their constituents’ needs while unifying the group towards their common goals.

You can listen to Paul’s entire interview with Tagoras by clicking here, or visit our website to learn how Blackboard can help foster social learning at your association.

The Social Workplace blog, written by HR thought leader Elizabeth Lupfer, recently highlighted a fascinating infographic on the importance of social media to today’s young professionals.   The infographic features data from a Cisco survey that asked college students and recently employed graduates about the ways they value the Internet, social media, and mobile devices, especially as these tools relate to the workplace.

As expressed in the infographic, the overall trend found in Cisco’s study is that “the majority of college students and young professionals value social media access, device freedom and a mobile work style as much [as] or more than money.” When looking at the specific findings of the study, some of the most interesting points include:

· 2/3 of current college students will ask about social media policies during job interviews · 1/3 of students will prioritize social media freedom and device flexibility over salary during their job search.

As we kick off another exciting year at Blackboard and on the Next Level Learning blog, we wanted to take a look back at 2011 to see which posts our readers liked the most.  Here is a list, in no particular order, of our most popular blog posts from the past year:

Capella U – A Case Study on For-Profit College Online Learning: A blog post examining one school’s successes in implementing online and continuous learning for its students.

Through my career in marketing and sales management, I have learned how integral training and knowledge is to success in selling.  Whether your company is launching a new product or service, updated features, a robust B2B or B2C promotional campaign or training your distribution channel partners . . . your sales team should be constantly kept up to date with the knowledge and skills needed to drive sales.

If you are already spending the time and money to leverage online tools such as Salesforce to enhance your sales efforts, whywouldn’t you include an integrated training component to dramatically impact your business results?  Salesforce without this focus on training can be a real train wreck!

That’s why we developed Blackboard Learn for Sales: the first fully-featured sales training platform that is fully integrated with Salesforce.  It has already received a tremendous amount of press and acceptance in the market, and we are looking forward to watching it have a significant impact on sales in 2012.

Our recent blog post on the 5 Myths About Informal Learning generated a thought-provoking discussion on the landscape of informal learning in the workplace.  We want to elaborate upon that discussion here, since it highlighted some key points about the importance of different learning strategies used in today’s professional training environment.

Much of this conversation hinged on a question from a commenter who asked about our definition of informal learning.  He asked, if informal learning is defined as any learning that occurs beyond a classroom setting, then isn’t it just a normal part of our daily interactions, instead of it being a new strategy used by professional educators?  Is it really something that can be directed, quantified, and oriented towards a larger goal?  And can a LMS really aid this informal process?