In analyzing learning content, a social learning system receives from at least one client system in the social learning system a creation of at least one informal course by a learning content creator. Each informal course comprises learning content and metadata describing the learning content and the learning content creator. The social learning system further receives social data from a plurality of client systems in the social learning system for the at least one informal course. When the social learning system receives a query from a learning content administrator system in the social learning system including query parameters, the social learning system searches at least one of the metadata and the social data for one or more informal courses matching the query parameters and returns a list of one or more informal courses matching the query parameters as a query result.