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The power of peer-to-peer learning

27 May 2025, 9:35 AM Authored by: Courtney Rose Brown | Marketing Executive at Catalyst

Katherine Rayn, eLearning team lead consultant at Catalyst, shares insights on why peer-to-peer learning is an effective tool for strong learning outcomes.

Peer-to-peer learning is proven to deliver strong learning outcomes.(external link) In a recent global survey(external link), 70% of employees believe better collaboration would improve productivity and time savings. Could peer-to-peer learning be something that your organisation explores to align business needs with increased engagement?

Katherine Rayn, Learning Solutions Lead Consultant at Catalyst, has over 15 years of experience in eLearning and learning management systems (LMSs). For her, peer-to-peer learning is vital in compliance and corporate learning as it can elevate team culture and learning outcomes. Katherine reflects, “Creating a culture that empowers staff to practice and improve processes drives a culture of learning and development.”

“Involve me and I learn”

In peer-to-peer learning, there isn’t one teacher – it opens up the possibility for everyone to learn and share insights with each other. Incorporating peer-to-peer learning into learning and development strategies is a way to boost engagement through collaboration and closely align skill development with business goals.

Empowering staff to teach others is a way to aid their professional development and help cement their understanding.

The opportunity to share their expertise means they learn by teaching and can grow in confidence by sharing knowledge. 

The chance is that peer learning is already happening, but the impact isn’t being captured. Knowledge is likely fragmented, spread across documents, Post-its on desks, and emails. By formalising elements of peer-to-peer learning and using the technology at hand, these efforts are brought to light. Your LMS may have a dedicated place to capture insights like this, such as forums and workspaces, and reporting tools to understand what delivery is working. Review your current platform to see if it can support peer-to-peer learning in the workplace. 

Katherine Ryan has bright pink hair that she brushes off her face as she smiles. She wears glasses and a teal top. Behind her, are a wall of bright polka dots.

What are the benefits of peer-to-peer learning?

There are many benefits of using peer-to-peer learning in compliance and on-the-job training. As an eLearning practitioner, Katherine groups them into three categories:

1. Driving strong learning outcomes

To develop skills that align with business needs, peer-to-peer learning:

  • increases knowledge retention
  • quickly fills experience gaps
  • boosts engagement and collaboration
  • sets up collective learning as a standard
  • can help bridge any potential gaps between online and in-person learning.     

2. Employee growth opportunities

Peer-to-peer learning can bridge any in-person and remote gaps across the team. By having the opportunity to share and learn from each other employees can use collaboration to:

  • support practical on-the-job training
  • improve communication and coaching skills
  • provide opportunities to share and practice giving and receiving feedback
  • identify subject matter experts (SME) that may go unnoticed

3. Boosting team culture

Not only does peer-to-peer learning support desired learning outcomes, it also: 

  • creates safe spaces for employees to connect and contextualise content
  • builds an environment of trust
  • makes employees feel like part of a team
  • provides flexibility to support different ways of working.     

Katherine aims to implement peer-to-peer learning as much as possible internally and with clients. “It just makes sense.” She continues, “Setting up a shared place, with up-to-date content, means my people get to grow their skills as communicators, and help out others when they need it.”

Peer-to-peer learning in Tōtara

Workspaces are digital environments in Tōtara to bring people together and develop a community of practice. It supports blended learning and pulls organic social interaction into a single place to enable knowledge sharing in a structured way.

An over the shoulder view of Katherine looking at her screen that displays the Tōtara catalouge

Employees can maintain and curate pieces of knowledge in a workspace. Workspaces are scalable, so can grow with adoption across the business.

They’re ideal for 'local' knowledge that doesn’t have a formal onboarding process, such as a new piece of information the team needs to be across, a bug, or an update. Plus, workspaces embed into the catalogue, so the relevant information is easy to access when searching.

5 ways to use peer-to-peer learning in Tōtara

  1. Ask learners to reflect and learn about the topic with forums: Forums enable learners to engage more deeply with course content, supporting formalised learning.
  2. Create private or public workspaces in Tōtara v19: Workspaces enable employees to dip in when they see fit and can be used in real-time with asynchronous discussions. Employees can co-create content on Wikis and make glossaries. Plus, if any content is gaining high traffic and has a singular focus, it could signal that it needs to turn into a course.
  3. Share workspaces across agencies: contribute to community of practice workspaces and create micro environments for resource overlaps.
  4. Gain insights through Tōtara reports: Track engagement by seeing when employees have viewed content, how many posts have been made and by whom, and how many thumbs up each post has. Tōtara reports provide a spotlight on invisible labour, identifying talent, and those who are SMEs.
  5. Bring tools close to the point of need: Embed Tōtara into your ecosystem, such as Teams. This enables employees to learn something as they start tackling the problem.

Give peer-to-peer learning a go

Katherine encourages organisations to test and try peer-to-peer learning in their LMS to understand what’s resonating beyond the course. Peer-to-peer learning is a way to embrace technology to capture by the desk conversations, online messages, and break down knowledge silos.

She shares, “It can be difficult for anyone in the learning and development space to let other parts of the business drive learning. It’s natural to have concerns. So, start small with a pilot.”

If you’re unsure where to start, Katherine and our Tōtara team are happy to chat. 

Contact us to get started

Tōtara resources

Additional credits: Katherine Rayn | eLearning Consultant Team Lead at Catalyst Return to Catalyst blog

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