learning ecosphere · point of need and in a format that is think about the last time you wanted to...
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LEARNING ECOSPHERE
Take the next step in your learning journey
Our community is rightly excited by the potential of collaborative learning, point-of-need performance support, serious games and even augmented reality.
But, assailed on all sides by the hype, the task of identifying the truly worthwhile from the hot air – and determining how these opportunities fit with the learning strategy for your business – has arguably never been more perplexing.
Yes, we can use sexy new tools to make our learning strategies more effective, better value and even more fun, but the fundamental underlying need for an enterprise to define, manage and report on core competencies remains.
This requires a degree of central control, tracking, reporting, data security and an audit trail, which in turn requires an enterprise standard LMS. Those learning needs are genuine, important, and they
GOVERNANCE RISK & COMPLIANCE
SECURE LMS
TRACKING & REPORTING
FORMAL, ASSESSED
PUSH: You must learn...
JIT MICROLEARNING
MOBILE, BYOD
SELF-DIRECTED, COLLABORATIVE
INFORMAL, GAMIFIED
PULL: I want to learn...
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Introducing the Unicorn
Learning Ecosphere
The explosion in digital and social technologies holds great promise for L&D professionals.
But, how do you identify what is relevant, affordable and good value, in the context of the practical day to day demands on your time, budgets and resources?
In this white paper we explore those questions through the prism of the learning ecosphere. We will argue the case that the new mobile, informal, collaborative world of microlearning is complementary to, not a substitute for, our current proven, embedded learning approaches and processes.
are not going away any time soon. They will continue to absorb the majority of most L&D budgets, even as you cautiously dip your toe into the swirling waters of personalised learning.
The learner-focused world on the right hand side of the ecosphere holds great potential to augment and enhance the personal learning experience, to the ultimate benefit of the enterprise and the economy. But, despite the powerful sense that you should be adopting these approaches right now, in fact, it’s OK to stop and ask yourself ‘why?’
This white paper is not intended to make you plump for one side of the ecosphere or the other; rather to help you recognise what pieces of the learning jigsaw might be missing in your business and how it is possible to make the many different elements on both sides work harmoniously together, enhancing the learning outcomes without breaking the budget.
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ENTERPRISE FOCUSED
GOVERNANCE RISK & COMPLIANCE LEARNER FOCUSED
JIT MICROLEARNING
Mandatory learning is not going away. It will continue to be a core element of L&D strategy, particularly for heavily regulated business sectors, such as life sciences, healthcare, and financial services, that are liable for hefty penalties, sanctions and reputational damage for failures to comply with industry regulation.
Governance, Risk and Compliance is serious, but that doesn’t mean that the learning itself has to be formulaic, dull and uninspiring. The challenge is to teach people in a way that achieves behavioural change and yields lasting benefit. Unfortunately, much of traditional formal learning fails to pass that test.
It may tick the necessary boxes to keep a regulator happy on the surface, but such an approach does not address the potential for nurturing genuine behavioural and cultural change. Achieving a culture of continuous learning relies upon being able to deliver learning experiences not only at designated intervals, but also at the point of need and in a format that is
Think about the last time you wanted to find something out; how to do something; or find somewhere…
I bet you didn’t rush to log in to your company LMS to see if there was a suitable e-learning course in the library. More probably, you Googled it, found a video on YouTube, or maybe looked at a content curation App.
We do not use mobile devices the way we use our work computers. Instead we experience “mobile moments”. According to Apple (Business Insider 2016), iPhone users unlock their phone an average of 80 times per day*.
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* Read more about notable nineteenth-century experimental psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus at: http://www.intelltheory.com/ebbinghaus.shtml
constantly accessible to learners. New mobile technologies can play a big part in achieving this.
You may be familiar with Ebbinghaus*’ ‘forgetting curve’. This shows how learners typically forget 50% of what they learn within an hour if they don’t apply it. The longer we wait to apply newly acquired knowledge, the more likely we are to forget it – that could be on average 90% of what someone has learned within the first month!
“Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.”
Ebbinghaus’ Forgetting Curve Minds-i App
Designing learning interventions that leverage those mobile moments goes beyond simply repurposing your e-learning courses to be “responsive” to mobile device screens.
* http://uk.businessinsider.com/the-average-iphone-is-unlocked-80-times-per-day-2016-4
Overcoming the forgetting curve requires a different approach to learning reinforcement, and mobile technologies bring us that opportunity.
Mobile Moments: App usage throughout the day
A recent Unicorn internal survey of over 100 financial services companies found that even when their e-learning courses were converted to be responsive and mobile compatible, almost 95% of users still studied at their desktops on their work PC! Why? Well it is mandatory, it’s compliance, it’s 30 minutes long and, quite probably, it’s boring.
Mobile is the ideal delivery medium for spaced learning reinforcement which overcomes the forgetting curve, but the learning has to be designed for mobile first and that means short, micro-bites of learning, video, and delivery in an intuitive interface.
With our smart devices, we now learn informally all the time and the learning landscape is evolving to mirror this with digestible bite-size micro-learning chunks as relevant reinforcement activities, available at the point of need. Get it right and you might even achieve that magical transformation from “you must learn” to “I want to learn”.
Benjamin Franklin
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SECURE LMS MOBILE / BYOD
It’s not just politicians who suffer from data breaches. In the US last year, over 800 major data breaches were reported, exposing more than 169 million sets of user credentials.
Does all content hosted on your LMS really need to be secure, locked down and require people to login? Isn’t a lower level of confidentiality sufficient for much of your learning materials?
Equally, if you are using mobile learning Apps as reinforcement tools, do you really need to record personal details back to your LMS?
These are important questions if you really want to make mobile learning initiatives work. Why not dip your toe into the water by identifying subject areas that you can deliver in an App without needing to go through all the hoops with your IT department that are needed for elements such as single sign-on, user authentication and network access.
Several Unicorn clients have in the past few months chosen the route of a stand-alone mobile App, such as QuizCom or Knowledge Bank – simple and inexpensive to set up and giving staff an opportunity to experience the benefits of beautifully designed Just-In-Time mobile learning.
It is also possible to build intelligent curation tools into these stand-alone Apps, so as to provide your learners with access to the latest high quality briefings on topics of your choice from across the web.
If you do need more central management and control, safe and secure APIs can enable single sign-on user authentication,
Barely a week goes by without a major cyber security breach hitting the headlines. But even those that don’t make the news are still costing businesses heavily both in financial and reputational terms.
Most LMSs contain sensitive personal and/or commercial information. As the cyber risk has heightened, so LMS security has, and continues to, become increasingly important.
Given these ongoing threats, we recommend that you ensure that your LMS provider at least meets British Standards Institution (BSI) ISO27001 – the highest information security certification. To maintain this certification requires monthly security audits and an annual BSI assessment.
Can this hurd le be overcome?
Unicorn LMS Mobile App
allowing your mobile Apps to communicate with your chosen LMS, with on and offline syncing.
The new xAPI standard enables learning experiences outside an LMS to be recorded, with data passed back in a standard format to an LMS. Unicorn LMS, for example, is xAPI compatible and has free companion Apps for offline CPD and learning reinforcement. Check with your LMS provider. They may have similar off-the-shelf tools.
ENTERPRISE FOCUSED LEARNER FOCUSED
An LMS will remain a core component of a corporate enterprise’s learning and development strategy as it provides that central point for learning to be managed, deployed, tracked, monitored, assessed and reported on. It also enables a blended learning approach to be managed on one platform.
But firewalls and other security controls can restrict the type of content that can be made available through an enterprise LMS. For example, many large corporations don’t allow YouTube to be accessed at the desktop, while Flash which was not so long ago the development tool of choice for e-learning companies is now banished from many corporate servers due to perceived security reasons.
So how does this requirement for increased data security sit with the apparently contradictory demands for informal, collaborative and user–generated content?
While there are mobile data security tools to allow secure mobile access to corporate networks and systems, rigorous cyber security is, fairly obviously, not entirely consistent with a policy of ‘bring your own device’ (BYOD).
Interestingly, given corporate concerns around security and maintaining control of mandatory training and reporting, early adopters are tending to focus on using Apps first for on-boarding and pre-onboarding. But the potential is much wider.
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GOVERNANCE RISK & COMPLIANCE
SECURE LMS
TRACKING & REPORTING
FORMAL, ASSESSED
JIT MICROLEARNING
MOBILE, BYOD
SELF-DIRECTED, COLLABORATIVE
INFORMAL, GAMIFIED
PUSH: YOU MUST LEARN... PULL: I WANT TO LEARN...
ENTERPRISE FOCUSED LEARNER FOCUSED
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TRACKING AND REPORTING SELF-DIRECTED, COLLABORATIVE
Being able to prove compliance and having a robust audit trail in place when the regulator comes knocking is critical – and another vital component of a quality enterprise LMS.
But having an environment where everything is ‘pushed’, watched over and reported on within the boundaries of a secure LMS is not conducive to the more organic type of learning that sticks and leads to behavioural and cultural change in a business.
Many LMS providers now have “social learning” tools, such as group collaboration forums, built into their platforms, but there is precious little evidence that they are used.
Almost by definition, social media is centred on the mobile device. Most if not all your learners use it, probably every day, but they use the established publicly available tools, not your tracked and monitored corporate LMS.
So, your staff want to learn. Make it easy for them. Use mobile tools that help find good learning, notably video.
Whether that is your own content, bought-in third party libraries, or the intelligent web curation referred to earlier, make it easy to find and your learners will look. They will follow related links and explore, just as they do in YouTube, and they will share.
Using the right App, you can enable users to upload and share their own content. It is probably a good idea to curate user-generated content, if only to avoid your learning App being clogged up with cat videos, so make sure your App has a good, easy to use content management back end (CMS).
The CMS will collect detailed statistics about usage rates, content rating and more, and can include gamification elements such as “achievement” badges and leaderboards. Don’t treat the CMS as a spy in the cab though. This is primarily about encouraging an individual who wants to learn.
But, and here is the really key point, it is not just a case of taking learning and making it deliverable on mobile - the content must be designed for mobile itself.
Diagnostic tools within an LMS can be really useful in identifying knowledge gaps during the tracking and reporting process, but do the suggested learning interventions also need to be scrutinised and tracked? Or are there occasions when much more effective learning will take place outside the confines of a firewall?
Rather than looking to deploy full learning content to mobile, Apps can and should be focused on reinforcement. This is achieved using short microbites of engaging content – videos, polls, quizzes, check-lists – and simple gamification elements, nudges and prompts, to encourage regular revisits and improved learning retention.
Extra layers can now be added to the learning experience through the intelligent use of mobile. This way the two sides of the ecosphere complement and enhance each other.
Graphical reporting from Unicorn LMS
Unicorn’s My Learning Lounge video App
ENTERPRISE FOCUSED LEARNER FOCUSED
While staff don’t collaborate much on an LMS, they do use social tools and Apps (Facebook, LinkedIn, Snapchat etc). And they do it because they want to.
Apply this to learning. A recent PWC report* on Millennials at Work established that “training and development” was the most highly rated “desirable benefit” at work. Higher than cash bonuses, company car, or even more holiday.
* https://www.pwc.com/m1/en/services/consulting/documents/millennials-at-work.pdf
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FORMAL, ASSESSED INFORMAL, GAMIFIED
On the enterprise focused side of the ecosphere, you will find traditional structured learning (ILT and digital) and assessment.
There is an expectation from employees of what this type of learning entails. Frequently, the learning is mandatory, the learner’s manager is responsible for deciding on the key elements of their learning journey, and the mindset of the learner is predictable. They do not expect the learning to be fun, (and they are rarely disappointed in this expectation), and their focus is on completing the course, passing the test and getting back to work.
In this environment, many of the ideas on the right hand side of the ecosphere can be ineffective and even counter-productive. We have recent experience of this with a project for a financial services client that wrapped their compliance assessments into a fun car racing game. It was a good game, well designed and presented, but it didn’t work. The learners
Because of the impact of mobile technology, informal learning is happening all the time, but with an entirely different mindset from mandatory learning and assessment.
To be effective, informal learning should be personal, propelled by curiosity and a thirst to learn. As learning professionals, we can use intelligent curation to guide that exploration and to encourage collaboration, but shouldn’t make the mistake of mandating it, or obsessively tracking individual progress.
In this informal, mobile first environment, there is no questioning the power of games and gamified environments to engage the learner, and encourage revisits in mobile moments.
By 2018, over half the UK working population will be part of Generation Y, the ‘Millennials’ born between 1980 and the early 1990s.
Millennials are the first generation brought up immersed in a world of video games and social media; they are tech-savvy, constantly connected and accustomed to instant information being at their fingertips. Games are simply part of their lives and even the most basic game principles can heighten engagement and lead to more enduring outcomes.
saw it as a distraction that slowed down a serious and tough assessment process. The same game, in a different context – induction training – by contrast was very effective.
So, context is important. It explains why social forums rarely work inside an LMS.
Serious games encourage the persistence required for effective learning. This may be through being immersed in practical situations, focusing on behaviour not just factual knowledge, or through simply making a learner’s journey more enjoyable.
As Gen Y, and the generation behind them and the generation behind them, become the employees not just of today but the employers and recruiters of the future, creating a meaningful, informal connection with this core audience is essential.
This is perhaps the great opportunity and challenge of the new learning ecosphere. How do we, as L&D professionals, make learning a natural, automatic part of the everyday lives of our learners – not just Gen Y but all of us?
ENTERPRISE FOCUSED LEARNER FOCUSED
Traditional Assessed eLearning
QuizCom App
An LMS’s diagnostic features can be a real asset in helping to identify competence gaps and improve the efficiency with which someone can pass an assessment. But when that box needs ticking, people don’t want their learning ‘messed’ with.
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CONCLUSION
In this white paper we have tried to address the challenge of balancing traditional, established learning methods with the opportunities presented to us by new technologies. This is the challenge we all face if we are to deliver learning strategies that really work, and throughout this paper we have sought to provide some signposts for how you may be able to begin to grasp the opportunities of a learner focused world, while still meeting the core needs of the enterprise .
The learning ecosphere is a single whole, the two sides provide balance and complement each other. The future is exciting, but it remains rooted in the realities of today.
Take the next step in your
learning journey
LEARNING ECOSPHERE14
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