These are my live-blogged notes from a Learning Skills Group webinar, hosted by Donald Taylor. Forgive any typos or incoherencies.
Nag Chandrashekar, VP Products
Learning Mobile and Assessment, Saba
1. Learning
where you work:
- Embedding learning launch points – in company portals, crm apps (salesforce, support portals (zendesk)
- Access learning at the point of need – through apis/web services
- Capture learning activities of theuser – wherever they may occur (bookmarklets, learning record stores)
- Tie learning access to skill assessment – workflows
“The rule for Learning Management Systems is we shouldn’t
call them Learning Management Systems.” Do it at the point of need. Don’t even
call it learning anymore.
A learning platform used to do – it had the ability to
target a specific group of learners and provide a nice catalog, dividing into
groups of courses and targeting groups of people to push out the right content.
That can be accomplished very well from today’s learning systems.
The “invisible LMS”
– the engine for learning stays, but the way it manifests to the user is key.
If you can decouple the back end engine from the front end interface, then
there’s a lot of benefit.
Learning can be delivered where you work.
Accessing learning at the point of need – for performance
support or general knowledge discovery.
xAPI/Tin Can – takes people away from the notion of
packaging content. Lets the creators of the learning – the catalogs – let them
be where they are. Learners can go there – just make sure you capture that
activity. Activity capture – making sure
as a company you should understand where people are going to find what they need.
Tie learning to skills assessment. Some done formally, some
on the job, some informally. Learning tied very specifically to skills
assessments makes for immediate prescription for the learning need.
Notion of an Invisible LMS (Bersin) going from:
- In your face à stealth
- Creating à enablement
- Programmatic à systematic
- Event-based à infrastructure based
2. Personalization:
The key to the success of many learning initiatives. It’s
not enough to just provide a great content to learners and say “go figure out
what you want…” That won't meet your objectives. With every learner – there’s a
few things your department/manager expects of you, then there’s also the
learner’s own innate curiosity to keep up with what they need to do. Marrying
these two is so important.
The paradox of choice – we use smart or intelligent systems
when choosing movies and shopping. Why not for learning? How can we provide
intelligent recommendations for learning?
You have to USE the system. E.g., the more you watch
Netflix, the more it understands what you like and can provide recommendations.
And they’re not perfect, but they make an attempt. And it’s better than having
nothing at your disposal…at Netflix, we tend to lean a lot on the trends and
recommendations on the home page. And then it suggests things that you might
like based on past choices.
For this to be effective, you have to have usage in your
system. The goal of intelligent recommendations is really personalization. The
more people use it, the smarter it gets. Making systems easy to use and
consumer-grade experiences – that just enough notion – these are key to driving
usage.
This is very much a work in progress. Hopefully we’ll see
solutions getting better and better at this.
Intelligent learning platforms matter: the system works for
you. It’s proactive, dynamic, personalized (no two learners get the same recommendations), engaging. The more you interact, the
better the system works for you.
3. Mobile Learning
It’s not about taking ALL of your content and resources and
shoving them onto a mobile device.
How can mobile learning reinforce? Draw people into the
system? It maybe isn’t always about content consumptions.
Let’s look at mobile NOT JUST for content consumption. Let’s
complement the courses you’re taking elsewhere. Instead let’s go bite-sized.
Mobile devices provide endless learning possibilities:
- Livestreaming for coaching and mentoring
- Push notifications to trigger learning behaviors
- Location based searches for specific classes (built in GPS in our mobile devices)
- QR code scans for document search or attendance tracking
- Allow user to share links, articles, and docs easily
(not a complete list, by any means…)
Google primer: https://www.yourprimer.com/
4. Content Aggregation
& Curation
the job of the learning platform to start providing curation
– these are the systems that know about the employee/the learner.
The consumerisation of education – a slew of different
generations of platforms doing aggregation – democratizing content – making
training available to different orgs (MOOCs, etc.)
Curation, personalization, a rich profile – these are all
related. The more you know about learners and their usage patterns, you can
make that learning more prescriptive and specific to them.
And managers have a role to play here. Who knows better
about the employee than their manager?
5. Actionable
Insights & Benchmarking
Analytics – have
moved from operational reporting to more advanced/predictive analytics.
Predictive analytics = development of predictive models,
scenario planning.
Benchmark –
compare, act, improve. A lot of data
available to managers where they can benchmark many talent management
processes. And they can take action to improve company performance and organizational
objectives.
Many companies do have enough data at a higher level to
compare against other companies in the same space.
Need to start with better reporting and dashboards.
6. The Engagement Gap
Employee feedback and survey tools – and the talent
management platform on the other side. However, the feedback tool has been
disconnected from other systems and processes.
Need to have feedback tools that are tightly connected to
organization and employee performance (according to Brandon Hall).
Collect feedback à
diagnose problems à
take action à
prove impact à (loop back to feedback…)
Most orgs don’t have a lot of time to create content, push
it out, send a survey after six months or a year and then revamp content. We
need quicker creation and authoring. We need smaller loops. Ways to tailor and
calibrate faster.
Employee engagement/pulse systems will get simpler, more
personal – leaders at every level will be able to target this. And then connect
learning back to employee performance.
Make the connection of continuous
learning and development with engaged,
high performance business.
_____________
The recording,
slides, and web chat will be available afterwards at:
www.learningandskillsgroup.com
