This is a platform designed to increase active learning engagement in a workforce, and through that engagement – deliver increased performance.

Active engagement drives higher performance

Fuse’s primary vision is that performance should be the end goal of workplace learning, and that performance drives productivity and helps people in specific roles. They believe that learning technology only really works if people use it, so have designed a platform that makes it easy to capture, curate, and share the knowledge of subject matter experts within a business.

It then enables employees to access it when, where, and how they work.

Fuse empowers learning at the moment of need, and as a vendor they understand that the technology required can be different for learning in the moment of need versus learning to develop your career. For example, they believe that the learning platform functionality required for career development (to enable someone to move from being an individual contributor to a manager) differs from the AI needed to power how to do your current job better.

The latter tends to have the biggest impact on driving performance within an organisation. It’s clear to me that Fuse is focused on empowering learning in the moment of need and driving that performance, enabling people to do their jobs better, faster and more efficiently.

However, it’s also a platform that can be set up with all the usual learning pathways to facilitate career development that you would expect. Albeit slightly less exciting than some of their particular USPs, Fuse also boasts other in-built functionality to facilitate increased employee performance, including scheduling of one-to-ones, creation of goals, and observation checklists.

These are worth mentioning as they are not necessarily core features of every LMS. Key to reporting on your organisational KPIs are the comprehensive analytics powered by Good Data, with an impressive array of data points and a self-serve report builder to cater for any out-of-the-box reporting requirements.

Strong focus on informal and collaborative learning that helps drive performance

Fuse was a market disruptor 10 years ago, being very much focused on the 70/20 components of the 70/20/10 model and informal and collaborative learning. This clear and distinctive move away from traditional SCORM courses was at the time quite radical in some ways – hence the “disruptor” tag.

One of the things that Fuse pride themselves on is that they consider their vision and philosophy to be one that differentiates them from their competitors. They believe that learning should drive performance in the business and this philosophy impacts their product roadmap and the services that they provide.

This philosophy helps drive the high engagement that is needed to ensure that performance increases, and gives them a much more holistic vision for their product development roadmap. Fuse’s recognition that social learning and peer to peer is the most mature learning intervention makes their platform a great choice for organisations that are digitally mature enough to do this already.

It also offers a future-proof option for those want to transition and move to that as part of their ongoing strategy.

Their sweet spot for a typical client tends to be organisations with 5,000 employees and up, and typically with geographically-dispersed workforces who need scalable, flexible, and innovative learning solutions where their multi-lingual functionality (more on that later) is a real draw.

They have a strong showing in the car manufacturing, retail, technology, and hospitality sectors with clients such as Lotus, Mazda, Jaguar Land Rover, Dropbox, Panasonic, IHG, and Avon among many others. Avon, their biggest client so far in terms of active users, has over 1 million users accessing the platform in over 50 languages.

Enabling businesses to create bite-size content and reduce skill gaps

Fuse’s approach to content is very much founded on the philosophy of micro-learning, bite-size learning, and informal learning, rather than your traditional SCORM and elearning content. Having said that, they recognise that more formal and compliance learning is fundamental to many organisations, so the platform is obviously SCORM compatible and facilitates the transferring of SCORM content into it.

However, in terms of authoring capability, it’s much more focused on enabling or facilitating the decentralised creation of user-generated short form content and micro bite-size learning content with in-built surveys, quizzing tools and video creation and editing tools.

Skills is the big topic that everyone in the learning sector is talking about at the moment, so it’s no surprise that Fuse want to draw attention to the great skills functionality that they can offer. Information from existing skills platforms like SkyHive, Gloat, and Fuel50 that might already be in situ – particularly for large corporates – can be used to feed the relevant skill gaps into their engine and provide recommended learning to users based on those particular skill gaps.

To help deliver this content to close skill gaps, they partner with a wide variety of content providers, like LinkedIn Learning, Udemy, and iAM Learning, and they integrate with many others. They also boast their own 25-30 strong in-house content team, including videographers, graphic designers, animators, and learning designers etc.

Although content only represents some 10% of their annual revenue, with their platform their main product, having a content team is just one example of how they help clients drive that performance through learning because they are on hand to help co-design content with clients to help them transition to that bite-size learning world.

Natural language, AI-powered search

Fuse provides a “Google like” search experience that uses a natural language search (it actually uses Google AI to power it), which allows you to search just as you would if you were searching using Google. It trawls through paragraphs within PDF training manuals and all the content in the platform to pull out the snippets or extracts that are relevant to your search, which I thought was really impressive and something that is quite unusual for learning platforms.

They also offer Fuse Flow, a browser extension which can be installed as a button on your browser. Now, let’s say you’re an employee in an organisation and you’re in a particular piece of software – say Salesforce – and you need to search on how to do something in the software.

You could open Fuse Flow and because it recognises the software you’re in, it will supply the relevant predictions as you start typing your search. The Knowledge Intelligence engine that’s being used surfaces relevant dynamic content to learners, providing recommendations of relevant learning content based on either people’s skill gaps or content that will keep them up to date and drive their curiosity.

This links into Fuse’s strategy in that you can use these AI-powered micro-feeds to pull users back into the platform and drive that engagement and activation. A really good stat to highlight this is that for Seasalt who have 87% monthly active engagement with an average of 3 return visits per week per user, which is brilliant and a worthy goal for any ambitious organisation to aspire to.

A new addition to this search tool is generative answers. It uses generative AI to generate answers from multiple sources, process them, and synthesize them. So, you could ask a specific question related to your role and it will consult all the relevant sources that it has access to, then pull those together, using natural language provide you with an answer.

The example of a good use case here would be enabling the reduction of call centre handling times by half, which plays into the productivity ethos that Fuse promotes.

Impressive multi-lingual capabilities

Fuse’s multi-lingual functionality offers 50+ languages (I think it’s also worth pointing out that these are all included as standard and not charged as extras) and provides dynamic content translation, including the transcription both from and to those 50+ languages. This means that you can create a video in English for example, and it will be auto-transcribed and auto-translated into as many of those languages as required.

Users in other countries with a different profile would be able to view those videos with the translated captioning on them. I think this is amazing functionality for organisations that have that need.

It can auto-transcribe a variety of different content, like video, articles, and questions, and enables you to have one learning object but as many different versions of that learning object in those multiple different languages as you want. So, you might have a welcome video as part of staff onboarding and you can have twenty different versions of that in 20 different languages, but it’s still just one object, which is obviously better for reporting.

It also facilitates auto-translations of the comments and social interaction with that content, so if a learner wants to ask a question to the trainer or SME they can do so in their own language. They can write their comment like you’d write a comment on Facebook or other social media, and when the SME sees it they can use a translate button to translate it into their own language. This is a great tool to enable cross-lingual communication and learning.

A great example of this is where content in Fuse School (Fuse’s social enterprise to educate children globally on secondary science and maths curriculum topics, which is used for free by over 10 million children globally) was translated for Ukrainian refugees.

On hand to help you launch your first learning experience with confidence

It’s not just Fuse’s platform that impressed me, but also the services they deliver to clients to complement it. They believe it’s essential to be at the client’s side, helping them to create their learning culture, create their content strategy, and provide consultancy to hold the client’s hand along the way.

This is because they recognise that performance is achieved through more than just the platform itself. Their Lx Accelerator service has been developed specifically to support this by helping clients create their initial MVP content or first learning experience, giving them that important initial boost that they can launch with the confidence that they’ll be offering some real value.

In Summary

If you’re looking for a learning platform that links training to tangible improvements in business performance, then Fuse is one of the best solutions out there.

For large organisations looking to reach a global workforce across multiple languages, Fuse is particularly powerful, making translations and multilingual content extremely easy.

Bite-size learning content can be created and rolled out quickly at scale, and analysed with rich, intuitive dashboards – no wonder so many of the world’s best-known brands already use Fuse.

As the company is embracing and already leveraging the transformational powers of AI and natural language search, it looks set to get even more interesting and useful over the coming months and years.

Learn more on the Fuse website.

The post Fuse Learning Platform Review: Increases Engagement, Ignites Performance appeared first on Learning Light.

It combines learning management, upskilling & career development, employee engagement and performance reviews into one easy to use solution.

Learn Amp is a mid-market “Swiss Army knife” of a platform, which elegantly solves a multitude of problems for employee-focused organisations and supports individuals to learn in the context of their career.

Learn Amp offers Learn, a highly configurable and easy to administrate learning platform with a clean and intuitive UX and Develop to aid skills development and career progression.

To amplify the employee value proposition, they have Connect for sophisticated community and social tools, and Perform to support skills development, objective setting, and performance reviews.

A “people development platform”

Learn Amp like to think of their platform as a “people development platform” – one that will help businesses and organisations to retain great talent. They believe that the four pillars of the employee experience – learning, development, engagement, and performance – are intrinsically linked and should work together to retain that talent.

To help achieve this they have four products on offer, each one designed to develop one of these pillars:

• Learn – their LMS / LXP
• Develop – their skills development and progression tool
• Connect – their suite of social learning tools
• Perform – performance reviews, objective setting, and skills development tools to track skills across your business.

To complement these products, they also offer additional bolt-ons for CPD, multi-accounts, languages, and custom domains.

Learn Amp’s customer base is concentrated in the mid-market (although they have customers with as few as 250 employees and their biggest to date has around 45k, so they can easily manage scale) and internal use cases for employee-focused organisations. An important exception is training and coaching for external learning communities, such as customer or partner communities.

They are very much focused on career management, motivating people through what matters most in their lives, with recognition and progression, and developing in a way that’s aligned to their career aspirations and purpose.

With their focus on helping employees develop their career, Learn Amp is certainly a vendor that should be on your long list if you’re an organisation in their sweet spot of 500 – 5,000 employees and with an L&D strategy to improve performance. They are often best when replacing a previous system, where more educated buyers who have a better understanding of what they need have outgrown their previous solutions and recognise the extra value that Learn Amp can bring.

I would also add that Learn is an excellent LMS / LXP hybrid, combining the ease of everything you would expect from an LMS with the high-end UX and content delivery of an LXP.

Designed to promote motivational career development

A key mission statement for Learn Amp is “learning in the context of your career”, enabling their clients to really support individuals with whatever skills they need. This emphasises their focus on the employee use case.

Perhaps unusually amongst learning solution providers, Learn Amp are not huge fans of gamification. They have previously described it as being all a bit “gimmicky”, and instead would rather focus on designing tools that intrinsically motivate people, which creates more sustainable long-term engagement.

They often talk about the “science and soul of learning”, and by this they mean the idea of developing the tools to motivate individuals through progression and recognition, which are aligned to their own purpose and meaning. Their big question is always, “how do you connect with what actually motivates people to learn?”

They do have leaderboards, which is something that one could argue is a gamification tool. However, their persuasive counterpoint to this is that these are for motivating employees through recognition and enabling learning with peers, rather than tools to shame employees into greater productivity.

Their concept of a “Hierarchy of Engagement” is very interesting, a kind of learning version of Maslow’s “Hierarchy of Needs”, with the LMS as the base layer, and it is really focused on helping organisations to amplify their employee value proposition as they increase their learning culture maturity.

Their Connect suite of social learning tools has a huge amount of different touch points and includes a feature best described as an internal LinkedIn. Individuals can have profile pages, follow and connect with SMEs, mentors, and thought leaders in your organisation, upload user generated content, and engage in communities that can be fully open or controlled based on the use case and need.

A “Swiss Army knife” of a solution

Learn Amp pride themselves on trying to understand a problem and then building very flexible solutions that not only meet that immediate need, but also lots of others, and this can be seen by the fact that their platform is being utilised and used in a wide variety of different sectors.

Clients in a highly regulated space with a focus on compliance and CPD want an LMS, but because they are forward-thinking, they recognise that Learn Amp will provide them with the future proofing that they need. These might include industries like financial services, cybersecurity, construction, architecture, and professional services.

Then you also have their products in businesses where knowledge transfer is essential and compliance is much more of a secondary concern. For example, involving more of a bottom-up knowledge transfer approach utilising all that user generated content, and this might include organisations like management consultancies, advertising agencies and organisations in the engineering, computer software, and gaming sectors etc.

These tend to be attracted by the idea of how Learn Amp can help them create a culture of organic learning, where individuals and communities drive each other’s development instead of it being a more top-down approach.

Learn Amp provide a high degree of configurability and flexibility around widgets. There is a vast number of different widgets on offer that can be pulled into a large number of different dashboards to suit the needs of varied audiences.

Not only is this a versatile solution to meet the needs of different organisations and the varied audiences within them, but also brilliant for change management and allowing organisations to introduce things at a sensible pace, and evolving and scaling whilst also future proofing their needs.

They like to say that you can almost build your system pretty much bespoke to meet your current needs wherever you are in your journey and maturity. You can turn lots of things off to keep it simple to begin with, safe in the knowledge that your needs are future proofed.

Another USP is the consolidation benefit of having an all-in-one solution that might enable organisations to dispose of other systems and not have so many. For example, the Connect module is great for enabling the delivery of internal comms and setting up and sending out surveys on a large scale.

It also enables a lot of different touch points for people to interact with SMEs, comment on content, and to interact with each other and in the community area.

The Pioneers of “Software with a Service”

Learn Amp were the first to coin the term, “Software with a Service” (or SWAS), which means they are not only extremely focused on implementing the best software solution for their clients, but also giving them the guidance and coaching to ensure its implementation and adoption is a success.

So interestingly all their internal roles are in effect “coaches”. For example, Sales Solution Coaches, Customer Success Coaches etc.

This very collaborative partnership approach with their clients is a huge USP for them and has been witnessed by Learn Fox during LMS selection processes. They don’t provide a “managed service” as such, which would mean doing everything for the client or even administrating their system.

Instead, they offer what they describe as a “supported self-serve” model, as they believe ownership must ultimately rest with the customer who has the knowledge of their own business, but they are there to provide very hands-on expert industry advice throughout the journey.

The people employed into the Learn Amp team do all tend to have a background in L&D or education, so this enables them to provide a very supportive consultancy focus. I think a retention rate of around 96% speaks for itself.

Features to aid a “decentralised” learning strategy

Learn Amp’s products enable organisations to deploy a decentralised learning strategy, allowing individual teams to have more ownership over their own content and administrative processes. They believe this is critical for modern organisations trying to best adapt to the major changes that have resulted from hybrid and remote working models.

It is so much harder to train and coach now, as not everyone is in the same space. So, their answer is a more inverted model which is employee and manager led and L&D supported.

This can also save huge amounts of time and admin for L&D so that they can focus on higher value work and deliver more impact with less resource. This is most obviously shown through their admin and authoring experience.

With the admin experience, the first thing that stands out is that there is no separate admin console, or a separate area that administrators have to go into and create and design things before pushing them out and then logging in to see how they look. Instead, it is completely integrated, so that if you have admin rights you can simply open a little admin pop up menu (by clicking the 3 pips on a particular object) that enables you to edit and interact with content and items within the platform on whatever page you are on.

Very little training is needed, meaning that lots of different SMEs, trainers, or other people across the business can undertake admin tasks in the platform. To enable this ease of use, their aim has been to produce tools that are “consumer grade” – the kind of tools that might be familiar to users in their day to day lives, like Spotify for example.

Learn Amp don’t have an inbuilt elearning authoring tool and they don’t pretend to have authoring capability, which is another example of their philosophy of being very focused on the things they do best, rather than spreading themselves too thinly. What they do offer however are in-built micro-authoring capabilities and a huge wealth of functionality that enables the creation of pages, surveys, and modulated learning content very much in the format one would expect from a SCORM file.

They provide an easy page builder as well as video and audio creation tools and the ability to create short form content. All this plays into the decentralised strategy because you’re not limited to a small team using an external authoring tool.

Instead these tools are intuitive and easy to use, which means that in theory anybody in the organisation, like SMEs or trainers, could easily create their own content. They don’t have to be learning designers or have learning development skills.

Focus on what they do best – and partner for the rest

Learn Amp have always been focused on what they do best, and they believe they are a “best in breed” platform, with a “best in breed” learning ecosystem of partners that compliment them and integrate seamlessly. They are not an elearning authoring tool, they are not content producers, not a talent management suite or an ERP, and they don’t try to be.

Instead, what they do have is a suite of tools (Learn, Develop, Connect and Perform) that solve a whole host of problems for many organisations. Additionally, they also have a variety of really good content partners – niche providers like Pluralsight and Udemy for Business, some all-in-one offerings for small to medium businesses like iAM Learning and GoodHabitz, and good consolidated aggregated content providers like Go1 (and coming soon, OpenSesame).

So not only do they provide brilliant solutions via their own software, but they partner where they need to, not just for content but also with other tools and consultants who can help to provide that software with a service approach that they pride themselves on.

The Learn Amp Roadmap

Learn Amp are very transparent and open about what they are trying to develop, and they are always responsive to the requirements and needs of their client base. This is amply demonstrated through them making their product Roadmap available.

Some of the new features highlighted by their Roadmap include 360 feedback, a new addition to their suite of performance tools, while praise and recognition functionality (shout-outs) is being brought into their suite of social tools. They also have a new BI tool enabling the conversion of data sources to provide trends and insights and visualised analytics.

Managers can already create their own dashboards, which is a great USP for the decentralised strategy, but with the BI tool this will enable administrators to create more complex and sophisticated visual analytics for different audiences.

Being a “future focused” vendor means that Learn Amp are also spending time considering how best to harness the power of generative AI. Examples might include the addition of a coaching tool, a search assistant, or a form of content creation.

They are also exploring the idea of generating a live dynamic skills taxonomy that never goes out of date.

In Summary

If you’re looking for an all-in-one solution to deliver all the features you’d expect from LMS, LXP, social learning and performance management software, then in Learn Amp – you’ve found it.

Rather than simply rolling out training materials en masse, Learn Amp is about motivating employees to learn for their own professional development, and encouraging peer to peer knowledge sharing through its social learning tools.

By leveraging the latest training technologies and layering on the potential of generative AI, it provides a future-proof employee engagement and learning platform that can scale up with you as your people and organisation grow.

Learn more about this great solution over on the Learn Amp website.

The post Learn Amp Review: The All-in-One People Development Platform appeared first on Learning Light.

Complete Curation from Anders Pink is an AI-powered learning content curation tool equipped with skills mapping and useful workflows to manage, maintain, and publish targeted and up-to-date learning pathways. Complete Curation provides the ultimate, indispensable tool for any organisation needing to accelerate their processes of curation and building learning pathways.

The result is like hiring an additional resource into your L&D team to boost its efficiency.

While large corporate organisations can benefit because they have the volume of learning content and complex skills taxonomies, smaller organisations can benefit too, because they might have limited resource, with curation falling to a small team or even one person.

All-in-all, Complete Curation is a very elegant way to solve a complex problem.

Who are Anders Pink?

The team at Anders Pink have been in learning technology for a long time. They’ve designed and built digital learning courses, blended programmes, learning management systems and grown successful businesses, including Kineo – now a leader in the global learning market.

Since launching Anders Pink in 2017, it’s grown to become a fully integrated feature in the world’s leading learning platforms, tools and apps. Now more than a million people access continuous learning through Anders Pink. With their acquisition by Go1 (the fastest growing elearning company globally) at the start of 2023, the future looks bright for Anders Pink and the many diverse clients who are currently benefiting from their innovative products.

How does Complete Curation work and what problem does it solve?

Complete Curation significantly reduces the time it takes to search, aggregate, and curate content, and then build targeted learning pathways of the most relevant content for learners. It also helps clients get a better return on their content investment because they have full visibility of all the content they own and licence.

It enables them to target meaningful content to address each learner’s upskilling needs and can map and index learning content to skills using any skills framework or taxonomy.

For skills-focused organisations, it enables them to identify the learning content required to plug skills gaps, making it easier and quicker to upskill and reskill their workforce, thereby ensuring they are future-fit.

Complete Curation uses Anders Pink’s Content to Skills Mapper to automatically tag any content using any skills taxonomy (internal or industry standard). It even auto-updates content skills tags when frameworks change – an essential feature in the fast-paced landscape in which we find ourselves keeping our workforces relevantly skilled.

Some of the USPs that we felt really mark Complete Curation out are that it provides a natural language search using a skill, question or phrase (including a learning objective or outcome), so you could use a meaningful query such as ‘moving into leadership’ to get the results you need. It employs filters such as asset types, languages, durations and providers, and there is no limit to the number of skills within a mapped taxonomy, and no restriction on the number of content assets searched.

It also searches freemium content on the web alongside your other content sources, meaning curated learning plans can be kept fresh with the latest online content.

Complete Curation has been built in response to the challenge faced by L&D when it comes to curating learning pathways in their organisations. Many organisations have a vast amount of learning content, either created internally or via external learning subscriptions (e.g. LinkedIn Learning, Udemy, Coursera etc).

Manually searching across all this content is both difficult and hugely time-consuming due to the sheer volume across multiple libraries and platforms. There might be a series of spreadsheets to sift through, skills might not be tagged against content, and there is much room for human error.

Even when content is all organised within one LMS or LXP, the task to search and curate content natively is still hugely time-consuming – a challenge many platform vendors are well aware of, evidenced by Anders Pink’s growing number of market leading platform partners who are utilising Complete Curation to boost their own native content filtering and skills tagging capability.

The benefits of Complete Curation to an organisation as a whole or to any L&D department, is the huge reduction in the time taken to search, aggregate, curate, and build learning pathways. They can receive a better return on investment on the content, because they’ll be able to utilise more of the appropriate content that is mapped to the skills that they are developing within their organisation.

They also have a better view on which subscriptions have more value and which ones they could dispense with, enabling L&D teams to make better content buying decisions.

A powerful tool for any organisation, no matter how big or small

Complete Curation is an incredibly powerful tool for any organisation, big or small. For smaller organisations, those who might only have a single individual in their L&D team or other limited resource, it can increase their capacity and adds value by facilitating intelligent curation of all the different learning content that an organisation might subscribe to. It then makes it a much easier task to create the required learning pathways that can be targeted to what their learners need and what the organisation wants.

For larger organisations who are likely to have huge volumes of learning content, including internal content on SharePoint, content across several learning platforms, and multiple external subscriptions like LinkedIn Learning, Coursera, Udemy etc, it saves a huge amount of time by aggregating content from disparate sources. It maps the content to skills taxonomies, then makes the curation task and the creation of learning pathways much simpler, targeting learners with highly relevant learning content.

So, even though large and small organisations will have very different challenges and will benefit from the tool in slightly different ways, the very real benefits on offer are of equal value.

It doesn’t matter where you are on your skills journey

If an organisation already has an existing skills framework (or taxonomy), which larger corporate organisations probably do, then Complete Curation is of huge benefit.  You can upload your own and then all the curated content will be automatically tagged with the skills from your own taxonomy.

Equally however, an organisation that perhaps is not quite as far along on their skills journey can benefit from the tool’s default skills taxonomy. This is an industry standard called Lightcast, which has 32,000 skills and is a brilliant addition as it allows those organisations that haven’t got to that point in their thinking about skills frameworks to get up and running and in a position to progress to the next level, fast.

With skills undoubtedly already the ‘new currency’ in the career landscape, this is a no-brainer for enabling fluidity amongst workforces and a skills centred L&D agenda.

No LMS or LXP? No Problem

Anders Pink partner with a growing number of leading LMS / LXPs (and are flexible about developing integrations with new partners), but an interesting aspect to the Complete Curation tool is that an organisation doesn’t need to have an existing LMS or an LXP in place to benefit from it, and as such don’t need to be as digitally mature.

Obviously, having an LMS or LXP to create learning pathways and assign them to learners might be considered ideal, but because of the way the curated content can be exported, you don’t need this. You can export a curation as a csv file or as a publicly shareable html link.

This means that an organisation that perhaps is much smaller, or hasn’t yet invested in an LMS, possibly because it hasn’t got the number of users that warrant that investment, can still benefit. They may still have learning content from a variety of content subscriptions in addition to internally hosted content and can still use this tool independently to help deliver the appropriate content (including the curated web content) to their users.

Taking Content Curation to the next level with generative AI

Finally, if Complete Curation is like having an indispensable content curator drafted into your team, the new release from Anders Pink harnessing the power of generative AI is going to accelerate the skills and competency of your new content curator. In addition to everything Complete Curation already does, it will possess additional AI capabilities, reducing human intervention by the curator or learning designer even more.

With generative AI technology, it will be able to respond to a search query by generating a list of sub-skills or competencies that can then be broken down into sub-sections, auto-generating a pre-built learning pathway (or learning plan or playlist, depending on your LMS terminology). This can be edited before publishing.

AI curations will allow the content curator to define both the proficiency levels and desired duration for a particular learning plan. It will then intelligently produce a learning plan divided into weeks, with curated content targeted to the preferred skill level – even auto-generating intro text for those sections and sub-sections. This massively reduces the time required by a learning designer to design and copywrite a learning plan and decide what learning assets might be appropriate.

For example, let’s say you wanted to create a learning pathway for people stepping up into their first management role. You decide that this will be for beginners, and you want it to be a paced programme over a six week period.

You can input those parameters and Complete Curation will generate the appropriate content into the appropriate subsections together with the into text (that now just needs to be edited rather than created from scratch), thereby creating a quite sophisticated learning pathway or plan.

Ordinarily, you’d have someone spending days designing and curating a pathway like this; sourcing the appropriate content, pulling it into the plan, writing the appropriate text to position it correctly to its audience etc. However, Complete Curation’s generative AI features will do all the heavy lifting for you and then simply require the curator or learning designer to review it with a human eye to ensure it is appropriate and edit it accordingly.
This massively reduces the time needed by a learning designer to decide on which assets are appropriate to form part of a defined plan.

We feel that this is a very exciting addition to the Complete Curation toolbox.

 
Visit the Anders Pink website to learn more about this exciting, AI-powered tool for L&D.

The post Complete Curation from Anders Pink: AI-Powered Learning Pathways appeared first on Learning Light.

Thought Industries believe their learning management system is the most flexible and integrated training platform targeting external users on the market – and it’s hard to disagree!

Thought Industries Enterprise Learning Cloud includes Panorama, their full multi-tenancy solution, along with a powerful native content authoring tool. This is allied to an effective range of LMS ecommerce options for monetising your learning to suit a multitude of use cases, and an impressive and truly ‘headless LMS’ platform, in which the front-end user experience can be completely rebuilt by the client.

WHO ARE THOUGHT INDUSTRIES AND WHY ARE THEY MAKING SUCH AN IMPACT?

A US company based in Boston, but with a global presence, Thought Industries have a significant footprint in North America and currently have more than 20 customers in EMEA. They are set to grow significantly in this territory as they increase the size of their UK and Ireland based team.

Thought Industries offer an enterprise training platform catering to organisations with high volumes of learners and highly bespoke, segmented audience needs. However, their clients are not only big corporations – for example, they cater to training companies, membership organisations etc.

From the beginning, Thought Industries have designed a platform specifically for external use cases.  This is not an internally focused LMS that has then evolved from the internal L&D use case to expand its market and use case appeal. It has been purpose built for external training.

This clear mission focus is proving to be one of their strengths, and Craig Weiss recently voted Thought Industries as the #1 “top learning system for 2023”. They have invested a great deal of effort into a very consultative approach, in order to create the right solutions for their clients from the outset.

It would be fair to say that they might have a very specific small corner of the LMS market, but that they are making a big impact within it.

WHAT’S THEIR TARGET MARKET AND WHO IS THEIR “IDEAL” CUSTOMER?

Thought Industries view their target market as any organisation with an external learning use case, and they believe it’s most suitable for mature organisations that already have a learning platform and are now looking to take their digital learning offer to the next level.

Their product’s typical use case might be delivering training to external organisations (e.g. B2B training companies or charities who train partners or other external agencies), extended enterprise learning (e.g. delivering training to supply chains, customers or partners) or delivering training to external individual users (e.g. B2C training companies or membership organisations).

PANORAMA – A FULL MULTI-TENANT SOLUTION

Thought Industries believe that their platform’s USP is Panorama – their full multi-tenant solution that includes elearning ecommerce to support B2B and B2C. This solution allows for the creation of sub-branded portals for segmenting the user experience and targeting different audiences.

These are really simple to brand and can be easily handled by your learning and development team. It enables full flexibility as a brandable LMS, including custom CSS.

There is no need to stand up multiple instances of the LMS, and indeed there is no limit to the number of Panoramas you can have in one instance. Thought Industries reportedly have one client with 30,000 Panoramas…

There is even the capability for new Panoramas to be automatically spun up on registration. The auto-upload of users and Panoramas can be handled during implementation and then tagging can automate the ongoing content flow into the Panoramas.

CONFIGURABILITY & CUSTOMISATION OF THE USER EXPERIENCE

Thought Industries have produced a platform that offers the versatility of both super flexible configuration for “dummies”, and deep customisation for the more “tech-savvy” using their headless LMS technology powered by Helium.

A common downside for organisations who might otherwise be tempted by the bespoke development and design opportunities of Open Source, is the reliance on the specialist in-house expertise required to achieve this. Thought Industries have cleverly navigated a path around this issue by providing three levels of building blocks:

• Level 1 involves configuring out of the box widgets and can be easily done by a member of your L&D team.
• Level 2 involves tweaking the CSS and is for the slightly more tech-savvy, most likely driven by your IT or marketing team.
• Level 3 uses developers who can develop a fully custom front-end build using the Helium development framework.

We’re tempted to ask the question: Is the sheer power and potential of this the perfect ‘Hybrid’, offering the off the shelf ease of SAAS, combined with the versatility of Open Source?

The platform facilitates two types of learning recommendation:

1. a recommendation engine widget that after a short assessment pulls in content based on the answers given, directing users to content that is most appropriate for their needs
2. a recommendation engine that is AI driven

Adaptive learning tools can be used to route learners through a learning pathway dependent on their needs, which can be identified through a configurable competency assessment that then recalibrates the learning pathway to target what the learner actually needs to do next.

It utilises gamification in the form of awards, gems, points, CPD, and rolling up to achieve badges, and it integrates with Credly for digital badging. There is also a button to click and share certificates to LinkedIn, providing kudos for learners and free marketing for your training products or programmes!

THE ‘HEADLESS LMS’ – THE FUTURE OF LEARNING PLATFORMS?

So what you might ask, if you don’t know already, is a headless LMS? In the simplest terms, a headless LMS is a learning platform that decouples the front-end presentation layer from the back-end services. For Thought Industries, what this means is that it allows their clients to build their own front-end user experience on top of the foundational LMS solution, and then extend it out to different channels and devices.

Their headless LMS software solution delivers powerful back-end functionality while leaving the front-end display layer completely up to the customer. This enables the customer to gain full control over developing a fully bespoke look and feel, and full control over how, where, and when users access and engage with the experience (enabling omnichannel learning options for learners that aren’t in front of a computer), as well as defining data and content pulled from elsewhere in their ecosystem.

Whilst some LMSs promoting themselves as headless just enable you to detach the back end and develop a custom front-end, Helium is Thought Industries’ developer platform, so customers are actually provided with the framework. Developer skills are needed for this, although if you don’t have them in-house then Thought Industries have a number of verified development partners who can step in and help.

A headless solution has been a big thing in the content management and ecommerce industries for years, but there is now a real feeling that it could be the future of learning platforms as well. Thought Industries certainly think so, and believe the unmatched flexibility of their platform makes it the only true headless LMS on the market.

REALLY IMPRESSIVE IN-BUILT AUTHORING TOOL

We found that the platform had a really impressive and intuitive in-built authoring tool, and according to Thought Industries, some 90%+ of their customers leverage this authoring tool in some capacity.

Your SMEs can create content with no instructional design experience needed, as it is a super-easy tool to use with a WYSIWYG interface. You can create different learning paths and content to support live learning events. Your content can be short form / long form / video / blog, some of it can be made publicly available, some you can gate behind a paywall, and you can plug and play what you want monetised.

We also discovered two massive USPs here. The first is SCORM Connect, which allows an organisation to deliver their own content to a customer’s existing platform (if necessary), but importantly the organisation holds onto their intellectual property rights and benefits from retaining all the reporting analytics. A must for many training companies with clients who already have their own LMS.

The second is SCORM Download, which allows all the content developed with the in-built authoring tool to be exported as SCORM content. This helpfully negates the usual downside of an in-built authoring tool, where content is locked into the incumbent platform and difficult to export should there ever be a commercial need to do so.

It also future proofs your learning content should there be a need to switch platform provider, making Thought Industries a more flexible option, while at the same time showing their confidence in their solution.

In addition to this great set of interactions and features, the authoring tool also boasts some other really nifty features. It provides a mechanism for allocating assignments and providing formative and summative feedback, and there’s also an LTI that can cater for externally procured exams.

Its Workbooks feature is a great way to digitise PDF workbooks, still a staple training resource for so many orgs. They could also be used as a learning log or reflective journal for learners to record their own notes throughout a programme.

Finally, Gallery is a neat social learning feature that could be leveraged for peer-to-peer learning, where cohort participants can post and share their learning and documents. This has great potential uses as a tile-based ‘evidence wall’ or ‘lessons learned’ forum.

Throughout the tool there’s a step-by-step wizard that can guide you through the process (we also noticed this flows all the way through the platform in the Panorama Admin view) and which makes for a great user experience for your Admins or subject matter experts.

POWERFUL ECOMMERCE OPTIONS TO SUIT A MULTITUDE OF USE CASES

Thought Industries have supplied a number of powerful elearning ecommerce options to suit a multitude of use cases, which when combined with their Panorama functionality can provide:

• One-time à la carte payments of one-off products or bundles
• Bulk purchases
• B2C subscriptions and purchases
• B2B subscriptions
• Buying on behalf of users and allocating seats
• Coupon codes for discounting

It can even be configured to provide opportunities for upselling by showing additional associated or related products in your cart at the point of sale.

It also contains some great functionality to help organisations market and monetise their training. It has the ability to allow learners to “preview” content, which can then become gated (for example, when they need to get their certificates), or you’re able to make the intro level free and then gate subsequent content behind a paywall.

This ability to provide access to quality, unlicensed sample material can be a big differentiator to help organisations monetise their offering.

ADMIN AND REPORTING

Lastly, let’s take a quick look at the reporting and admin functionality offered by Thought Industries. On the reporting side it’s powered by the Looker BI engine and contains both pre-built reports plus a powerful reports builder. Admins can set up reports and assign them to users and Panoramas.

From an Admin perspective, there are 6 different standard admin roles, and you can also create custom admin roles, e.g. instructor or SME. There is a full academy and help centre with live “office hours” help when technicians are on standby for Q&A with customers.

They also offer virtual platform training.

IN SUMMARY

It’s exciting to see a learning platform provider that’s growing in the industry not through force of marketing, but through genuine innovation and adding great value to L&D and training providers.

If you’re looking for an external training and extended enterprise LMS to deliver learning beyond the four walls of your company – to partners, organisation members, customers etc – then Thought Industries Enterprise Learning Cloud should absolutely be on your shortlist.

Learn more about this powerful, modern learning platform over on the Thought Industries website.

The post Thought Industries – The External Training & Extended Enterprise LMS appeared first on Learning Light.

Learning Light has been interested in adaptive learning for several years and one of the best expositions of Adaptive Learning we have looked at is the Excel course from Filtered, which we reviewed a while back.

You can read our review on that course, but in essence, by investing a little time upfront in taking some short tests, the Filtered solution offers a bespoke – well adaptive actually – learning pathway through the large library of Excel training materials offered.

The benefits are obvious; the course adapts to the learner’s needs, providing materials that enhance the learning experience and neatly sidestepping those that are not required. The results… time saved and a much more engaging learning experience, while the learner stays very much in control.

What is Filtered?

Well, the Filtered algorithm has been further enhanced to work on larger and larger libraries of content, and to my absolute delight it is making an impact in the world of Learning and Development.

In this context, Filtered is one of the leading AI companies in the English-speaking world.

Filtered pulls together a lot of strands that we find very interesting in the world of learning and development as a learning platform.

It is an excellent example of content curation for learning – a topic of real resonance for many L&D teams – as well as a recommendation engine to select what is the most appropriate piece of pre-curated content to an individual L&D professional.

The approach has moved on… no more hard questions about Excel, but a rather neat and characterful driven approach using a magpie avatar to elicit your interests. Extra points for the magpie metaphor as we know these are exceptionally acquisitive birds looking for shiny new things of interest. Many of us acquisitive L&D professionals will identify with this I am sure.

So after some well managed and quite engaging discourse with the said magpie, your interests in L&D are assessed quite accurately at the first pass in my experience (this includes job roles, L&D interests and more), and given that the magpie is only a few weeks old, the accuracy is surprising. Remember – in reality, this is a machine learning magpie on a mission.

Indeed, the accuracy can only get better as more and more people use the globalfilter platform to read and select their favourite articles, as well as enter and manage their profile (more about that in a minute).

The interface is a Netflix contemporary – content is ranked with subtitle headings across the L&D domain and users are asked to select favourites. It works well.

It helps to read a few articles first. The titles are clearly displayed and in certain cases the author is named. The genre, video or article of each piece is shown and the likely duration time of the piece is also highlighted.

This is a simple and effective interface.

Your reading habits are obviously important to the algorithm, but so is your profile and here you have control.

While you set your profile at the beginning, it is within your power as a user to update and change your profile or interests if globalfilter is not accurately identifying your needs or interests – or if your job role changes. This (along with a growing user base) will ensure all users are served up with content that is going to help their day.

The benefits are obvious and multi-fold. Saving time and effort finding what you wish to read in a world gone content marketing crazy is of great use to the busy L&D professional.

However, the evolving Filtered platform will get better and better at reflecting your interests by dynamically leveraging the patterns of you and your peers in using the platform, therefore effectively sharing collective expertise and interests, and highlighting where the real quality and relevance lies for you in a morass of well-meant but not always appropriate material addressing L&D.

Your interactions, reading interests and any profile change will ensure the Filtered learning content intelligence platform will adapt to your requirements. Add to this the growing number of your peers using this adaptive learning platform, and the machine learning Magpie will get smarter and smarter.

You can learn more about Filtered here for learning content intelligence across key L&D areas.

So, AI-driven adaptive learning for the L&D world!

The post Filtered Review: AI Driven Adaptive Learning for the L&D World appeared first on Learning Light.

There has been a lot of interesting news coming out from Totara in recent weeks, a Talent Experience Platform and Totara Learn. So I was delighted to get the chance to have a demo of the latest iteration and additions to Totara.

Here at Learning Light, we have long tracked Totara, and have always been impressed with the capabilities of this LMS as it evolved and found its own identity in the market. Totara has proved extremely popular – I am reliably informed there are over 1800 installations and 19 million users, and Totara has always offered a solid solution to organisations looking for an LMS that is configurable and accessible.

The Totara Learn LMS is a core part of the Talent Experience Platform but of course it is still available as a standalone LMS or it can be part of the wider Talent Experience Platform that seamlessly co-opts three components – Totara Learn, Totara Engage (an LXP) and Totara Perform (a performance management system) into one.

Let’s start by taking a look at what is new in Totara Learn 13…

Totara Learn – the LMS

The latest iteration of the Totara Learn LMS has been refined over the years to be highly adaptive and configurable. It is of course an open LMS, following the principles of Open Source software.

Multi-tenancy

Totara Learn has a number of very exciting new developments that alone significantly add to the capability of the Totara LMS. Learn is now able to offer a very sophisticated multi-tenancy capability, where earlier iterations of Totara had some limitations.

The Totara team have worked up a very capable multi-tenancy capability that will allow sophisticated extended enterprise solutions to be offered by users to support and train their channel partners.

This solution is not just a simple clone SCORM pusher but a fully loaded Totara instance with a full suite of capabilities for the tenant user, including full branding, the creation of tailored workflows and the new Totara Learn reporting suite, which is very impressive for its capability and new UI.

Reporting

The Totara Learn reporting suite is simply superb. Too often the back end of LMS are not given the same UI and UX treatment as the front. Here Totara has set a new standard.

Make no mistake – the level of design detail here makes reporting a pleasure, not a chore. A tiled layout of the reporting options with a graphical display of the type of report offered is easy and intuitive to use.

A quick click and a summary option allows for the next level of visibility before you run a report. The reporting presentations are top notch and interactive. In a world now full of data, this dynamic reporting really does work in delivering insight effectively to learning activity.

That is not all. Reports can be run but differing users see only certain slices of the information in the report. This eliminates the need to create multiple reports and reflects the capability of Totara at configuration and set up with the “audience” approach to model the organisational users experience according to their role effectively.

I like this a lot (and to my shame this is not new to Learn) but it allows for a commonality of understanding to be achieved across an organisation… a line manager sees his team’s data, his boss all has the manager’s data and so it flows upwards with common and shared reporting metrics, just neatly sliced.

Enhanced ILT (Instructor Led Training)

The commitment to creating and then automating administrative tasks in Totara has long been a core capability, but now there have been a number of enhancements, including a significant capability in managing ILT and VILT (virtual instructor led training) with an open (agnostic) integration capability with pretty much any webinar platform – just paste the link in.

There is solid TMS (Training Management System) functionality in here and it is very easy to capture external learning events. Workflows for enrolment management as well as waitlists are all there and will meet most organisations use cases.

A very strong VILT (Virtual Instructor Led Training) suite

Those familiar with Totara will know of the “seminar” capability (this is all about ILT). A tutor or an instructor will just love this new capability in Totara Learn to really make the learning into virtual ILT and add some top-notch gamification features as well to drive engagement.

An integration with Open Badges is now included and is a neat feature, as endorsements are allowed for in the system.

Attendance management is well catered and can be quite granular in detail of reporting, and the ability for the tutor or instructor to rate a learner’s contribution is simple but very nice as well.

Totara Mobile App

Totara is now fully mobile with an app allowing for offline learning. The app works like a dream and will be a delight for non-desk workers who can now really be part of the organisation’s learning.

A focus on the learner experience

Totara Learn 13 has designed-in efficiency options for organisations that will have a real impact upon the LMS administration team, allowing them to focus much more on the learner experience than the learner management.

What do we mean by this? Well there are a number of things going on that Learn 13 offers as core capability that really will enhance the learner experience.

The content management capability gives the organisation the ability to create sophisticated adaptive learning pathways and to provide course bundles.

Alerts and tasks can also be created easily, and communications to manage learners are powerful and purposeful in their execution. The learning catalogue function is also very capable and content can be tailored to very specific audiences by groups or roles.

Tagging of content for discoverability is also allowed for in Totara Learn – since V12 to be completely accurate.

So, as you can see, with much of the basic administration automated as much as possible, the team can focus on creating the optimal learning experiences in Totara using this really powerful but intuitive capability. I am especially taken with the conditional access feature that allows this automation to happen.

One very useful feature I noted in Totara V12 and have always liked since is the ability to create and manage organisational permissions and hierarchies in a rather nice mixing desk style, so I had to take another look and it is still very cool and very useful.

Totara Engage – LXP (Learning Experience Platform)

It has been interesting to watch the emergence of the LXP sector in the market, with many LMS vendors looking to bend their product towards an LXP (and many in fairness do this quite well, others just re-brand and change their messaging).

Conversely, we see LXP vendors adding LMS functionality to their platforms. Some may do this well, while others will fall into the trap of creating a corpulent and confusing product.

However, I “take my hat off” to the Totara team who have invested in creating an LXP that is both pure-play and also seamlessly encompassed within Totara Learn 13.

This is no mean feat and is much more than just an integration. I could not find a blemish on the UI or UX when using these products as one – the coherence of the learning experience is compelling.

Totara Engage can be acquired as a standalone product or as part of the Talent Experience Platform. It would be very unfair to describe Engage as a bolt on, or even as a totally integrated enhancement to Totara Learn. In reality, Engage just becomes part of Totara Learn without issue or angst. It just works.

The Totara Engage LXP offers a rich and powerful solution for learners to learn informally. I recently listened to a webinar with Craig Weiss and Charles Jennings talking around learning, and Charles highlighted the work of the much missed Jay Cross around informal learning.

I noted that Totara Engage has the interesting concept of individuals having their own “Workspaces” to curate, share and collaborate ideas and information (as well as learning), and Jay’s concept of the organisational “learnscape” is in many ways realised with Totara Engage.

The engagement quotient

There is a lot going on in this LXP as you would expect. Curation is both very capable and very easy. I was particularly taken with how easy tagging is made on this platform.

Pulse surveys can be created, Peer to Peer working facilitated, and there is a powerful marking and assessment rubric available to provide the magic (and too often missing in many corporate LMS) ingredients of feedback and recognition of employees who learn and share and engage.

Not content with adaptive learning in Totara Learn 13, the Totara Engage LXP uses machine learning to drive a recommendation engine that will only get better and better: a really solid statement of intent from Totara.

However, it is the commitment to “learning in the flow of work” that is core to Totara Engage, with links to a content library and the ability to leverage MS Teams to share links and notifications quickly and easily across the organisation.

Totara engages with content repositories such as Go1, and they can plug in quickly and easily (naturally a subscription is required).

I like the strap line that Totara Engage helps engage, unite and upskill a workforce.

Performance Management System – Totara Perform

Here we see a bit of a fork in the road, Totara Learn 12 had many of the features already that now make up Perform. Going forward updates will be in Perform only.

I had a long hard think about this approach and the concept of a Talent Experience Platform, which is a term first coined, I think, by Josh Bersin. As I see it, the Talent Experience Platform will come to play a key part in the organisation’s HR and learning technology stack as it is a coherent approach for larger organisations.

Having a defined performance management system, this clearly becomes the glue that holds together HRIS (including pure play talent management systems) and the LMS/LXP in a modern organisation’s tech stack.

So, yes, I feel Totara has made the right decision to build Perform out as a separate entity, though as we discussed, like Engage, it can assimilate seamlessly into the full Talent Experience Platform.

Totara Perform is about continuous performance improvement and let’s take a look…

Firstly, in my view performance management sounds a little ominous and too often gets over complicated. In essence it should be quite simple (but too often these types of platforms are overwhelmingly clunky and confusing) – Totara Perform is at the other end of that spectrum.

It makes performance improvement approachable and accessible, since it provides the very framework to make it an easy and everyday thing for all involved. To me this is the crucial approach if productivity is going to be improved.

Totara Perform will very easily allow for the creation of competencies and/or goals and there is a lot of flexibility in there in defining what needs to be achieved – be it skills, behaviours or knowledge.

The evidencing mechanisms range from assigning courses through to collating of evidence such as colleague of manager feedback, through to more formal performance activities such as weekly one to ones or more structured appraisals.

The beauty of Perform is its flexibility and capability to create achievement paths (which is a much nicer term) with custom scales and custom paths with strong, underpinning learning logic to help learners achieve higher and more rewarding levels of performance.

In Summary

By itself, Totara Learn 13 is a compelling learning management system ideal for larger corporates and other organisations who require a feature-rich LMS that delivers learner engagement and learner achievement aligned to organisational requirements.

The Totara Talent Experience Platform produces another dimension to organisational learning with the addition of an excellent LXP and a performance management platform as well.

Most organisations need the underpinning capability of an LMS (in my view) along with the compelling content curation and content surfacing capability of an LXP. The addition of performance management capability effectively closes the circle in allowing for the creation of a true learning organisation to now become a digital learning-led reality.

Learn more about the excellent Totara Talent Experience Platform on their website.

The post Totara Review: the Integrated LMS, LXP & Performance Management System appeared first on Learning Light.

Update: as of 2023, imc Express now leverages AI for elearning content creation to make peer to peer knowledge sharing and empowering your subject matter experts even easier.

In fact, new users can get up to speed and create their first elearning modules in just 10 minutes!

Watch Alison West of imc Learning present this major improvement to the already-great imc Express authoring tool at Learning Technologies 2023:

 
imc’s Express super rapid elearning authoring tool is a new kid on the block, and I was lucky enough to book some time with the driving force behind this innovative product, Oliver Nussbaum, who has been developing authoring tools and environments since 1998. So there has been a lot of thought and expertise put into the development of imc Express.

imc engaged a usability consultancy to understand how companies are developing elearning and what are the barriers that need to be overcome in the organisation to really deliver the collaborative learning content development and user generated learning content so greatly desired by L&D departments across the world.

The barriers were actually not that surprising, the research discovered that many of the tools in use are poor technically or the effort required learn how to use them is just too great. Furthermore, there is a lack of design skills to produce self-standing elearning.

Too often, Word documents or PowerPoints are the default solution for capturing and sharing an organisation’s knowledge, procedures and processes. Word and PowerPoint have considerable limitations when it comes to knowledge transfer even though, ironically, most of us only use a small percentage of their capabilities.

Finally, there is a lack of actual learning design skills.

For the modern employee who needs to know and understand something in minutes, reading a Word document or working through a sterile PowerPoint is not great. For an organisation seeking to stimulate a collaborative learning and knowledge sharing eco-system the time it takes to build out elearning just does not work for a huge percentage of the organisation’s knowledge base.

The imc team realised something had to change and this has resulted in Express, a super rapid content creation tool that is exceptionally easy to use, that supports collaborative content development and sharing, and that has the principles of learning design designed in.

Express can be looked at from a number of different perspectives. Ostensibly it is a super rapid elearning authoring tool and I mean super rapid. It is super rapid to learn how to use – in 15 minutes you can be producing good looking and effective content. Express passes the 15 minutes test for novice users – get productive in 15 minutes or give up.

In tests against its peers, (you know the ones), in the hands of expert elearning developers imc express was 3 to 4 times faster than its peer authoring products in producing elearning. That too is super rapid.

20 20 capability

Let’s just start with one option of Express, turning a word document into a learning resource:

Step 1 – Simply drag your Word document into Express

Step 2 – Express will optimize the document to ensure its readability on 20 different screen sizes. No back and forward checking readability on devices…Express has done this for you

Step 3 – Express can create an audio file of the document automatically, (using Alexa’s sister). Of course, you can choose the desired voice and language options for the audio and text – there are 60 to choose from. That is pretty easy.

Step 4 – You can dictate additional sentences or paragraphs to the learning resource if you want. That’s very cool and very quick 

Step 5 – Express gives the learning resource its structure for you by analysing the document and the language used. No need to do much here….Express has done it for you. 

Step 6 – Add a video if you wish to. Express makes it easy to import videos into the platform, eliminating adverts and broken link issues….and the AI will generate sub titles and translate them if required (you can edit if you wish). The AI is programmed to make sentences from the subtitles. Very neat.  

Step 7 – You can easily add assessments through the document

Step 8 – You can share this with a colleague to check or contribute in real time. Collaboration is a real learning requirement for almost all organisations.

Step 9 – Publish: SCORM 1.2 or 2004 or as an e-book or a Word document or distribute as a link (the link is programmed to expire). Usefully the PENS standard is supported to make uploading to an LMS very easy.

Express is not surprisingly tightly integrated to the ever excellent imc Learning Suite.

The Express team tell me that a document that takes 20 minutes to read can become a learning resource in 20 minutes using Express. That is super rapid. 

Creating learning resources

So, our use case above shows how Express can be used to create learning resources quickly. Express can take a document or a video and imbue it with the requisite properties to produce a learning resource.

This means Express opens up the opportunity to digitise volatile content cost effectively. Traditionally elearning has been produced for stable content as the design and build effort is measured in hours not minutes.

30 hours or more to build one hour of bronze level content has been an industry norm, Express has re-written the rules. Volatile content that is likely to change can now be created in Express and either discarded and replaced or regularly updated quickly and easily.

Prescriptive efficacy

Express produces efficacious content with the rules of effective learning design enforced. Skilled elearning developers will find Express at first limited, it is in my view prescriptive, in that Express is enforcing good learning design and actively preventing over exuberant elearning.

However, there is absolutely no doubt that this approach delivers very good learning efficacy without the need for learning designers or programmers.

Express is not going to be used to create very high-fidelity content – gold and silver elearning course development, which as we all know is very expensive. Express may well change the view of bronze quality learning though.

The opportunity for using Express is for the organisation to create learning resources at the “copper level” very quickly. Copper is the 85% of useful assets that an organisation has that never make it into digitised knowledge or learning at bronze level quality.

Highly conductive learning

Copper quality learning means highly conductive learning that is transmittable through an entire organisation like electricity over copper wire…..everywhere at speed. Copper is perhaps coming in as a little under bronze level elearning in some aspects but a lot under bronze elearning in terms of cost and time taken to develop.

As we have seen, Express-built elearning can be transmitted in multiple languages: handling text, audio and video to easily and effectively connect an organisation’s people and knowledge together through learning. Express only transmits good learning as it automatically implements good learning design.

The options for using imc Express are not limited to just converting Word documents. Express is capable of building learning or creating knowledge from scratch, and the really amazing thing is pretty much anyone in the organisation can do it.

If you are a health and safety or risk manager, using Express to build courses or bring to life your existing resources couldn’t be easier or quicker. With 15 minutes of training, you are ready to build and Express will not let you go wrong.

The learning will be absolutely fit for purpose. You can publish the learning online by a link in an email or as an e-book and a presentation mode is not far away from being launched.

User generated content at scale

Express is capable of unlocking user generated learning at scale, and as organisations are increasingly adopting a hybrid working model, the need to digitise knowledge to ensure efficient knowledge sharing is a rapidly growing requirement because the casual water cooler moment of Q and A’s comes rarer and rarer.

The ability of Express to create interactive FAQs with added knowledge checks rapidly to support a new product or process (or problem) is very real and very useful.

Artificial Intelligence and didactics

Part of the capability of Express comes from an effective use of artificial intelligence for translation and content tagging in particular, as well as reading the content and applying a learning layout if a Word document has been imported. However, a considerable part of Express’s capability comes from a deliberate decision to enforce a defined didactic approach (learning design approach) and thereby ensure that the output is good learning, to put it simply.

Initially, Express may come as the shock to the system, but evidence of usage gathered by some early deployments by imc strongly indicate that the approach works and the benefits are very real.

Express on time and trend

Express is not alone in seeking to simplify the creation of elearning courses and resources by enforcing the principles of good learning design in a way that makes the creation of digital learning content easier. Where Express excels is in its application of AI on several levels and its commitment to allowing user generated content creation to flourish.

With a number of exciting releases due (innovation packs in imc speak), Express will emerge as a go-to tool for delivering learning resources and unlocking the potential for user generated collaborative digital content creation at scale.

Learn more about the excellent imc Express authoring tool over on their website.

The post imc Express Review: Super Rapid eLearning Authoring Tool for Digital Learning at Scale appeared first on Learning Light.

Create LMS is one of the most thought through of LMS I have been lucky enough to review in recent weeks and months. This LMS comes from a mindset of a design team that desires an LMS that combines speed and simplicity of set up……you can create your own iteration of this LMS in about 90 minutes with very considerable learning delivery capability.

Let’s start with set up and configuration, and yes, it is possible to set this LMS up with a robust configuration, some courses imported and learners imported in 90 minutes. This is reflected in the totally open approach from Create…. here is the demo, here is your demo instance, have a go and if it works for you… off you go.

Pricing is clear and transparent. I really like this get-go from the demo model.

The approach works because Create LMS is clear and concise to use with a consistently clear approach to all tasks that need to be undertaken in setting up and managing the LMS. This is designed around 4 key actions that “drive” the LMS and a series of logical workflows that go to creating all the different LMS experiences required.

The logical workflows allow the user to benefit from the common and shared approach used by Create LMS to drive all the processes. Once the four key concepts are understood it is possible to build out sophisticated learning experiences in a short amount of time.

In our review call, Mark configured our platform – this is the admin panel:

Branding, departments, content and custom fields to track retention, reasons for leaving, skills competencies and future leaders and a news feed were all added in under 60 minutes. It was pretty quick.

Above is the Learner Panel with optional widgets activated to form a dashboard. The news feed is showing with our first course assigned to learners. All executed on the 60 minute call. It really is “get go” from the demo…

So, with a demo, in about 10 minutes of practice an L&D professional can be on their way to creating learner groups, assigning courses they have imported, and deciding on reporting metrics. It takes minutes not days for the LMS to be good to go with learners ready to be enrolled.

However, there is a lot more to this LMS than speed and simplicity in setting up its capabilities. Behind every feature in the Create LMS there is a custom API, that is fully documented.

Create LMS can now build out its UI (user interface)  to be presented in other platforms quite quickly and easily.  There is no need to code, just understand what you are seeking to achieve – a digital business architect is the ideal individual to do this.

In short, Create is a pure-play headless LMS, and that is really neat – headless applications are going to become so important for the modern organisation.

Headless LMS are in Learning Light’s view one of the most interesting and exciting evolutions in the marketplace at present. With API mediating and connecting loosely coupled software applications such as CRM, HRIS, ERP and LMS all being able to share data and their UIs (user interfaces) the transformation of the role of the LMS to seamlessly present learning in the flow of work has arrived. Create LMS is delivering this role in call centres across the world as we write.

Multitenancy, SSO & Real-Time Reporting

In fact, Create LMS is a supremely capable LMS where it needs to be – multitenancy is very well served and they are quick and easy to set up. SSO is allowed for. Real time reporting is hugely powerful and reported learning activity is presented succinctly and effectively.

For learning analytics, the focus is on simplicity with a view taken by the Create LMS team that in a modern organisation the learning data is going to be exported to other systems by API. The Create LMS will tell you what you need to know almost instantly and deeper insight can be gained pulling data from multiple sources into an analytics platform.

Above is a screenshot of a multi-tenancy platform that has been cross linked. Notice:

1. This is a custom domain name hosted in their cloud.
2. We are in the “Products Training” team instance. This team curates product-centric content that then appears automatically in other portals that would like it. In this instance – Tech, Sales and Customer Care teams are all subscribed to this content channel.

Offline and On Premise LMS Capabilities

Another interesting feature of Create LMS is the ability of the platform to be installed on local devices, laptops, Macs or servers. These devices can drop offline from time to time and then update as required back to a central instance.

There are quite a number of use cases where this feature is very useful. For retail businesses where bandwidth is limited and the need to maintain connectivity to process transactions is paramount, a solution like this is very useful indeed.  For temporary set ups (think construction sites or festivals) where broadband connectivity is again limited, this option is very useful.

To get started with offline or LAN playback for content it is amazingly easy – just select New NAS and the configurator starts. Follow the prompts. For true offline and on premise LMS configurations the Create remote team will work with your IT team to ensure setup is smooth and reliable.

The Create team will then run automated validation checks. They can also present a full validation document pack that includes screen recordings of every test and each outcome.

This flexibility allows for the Create team to customise the LMS if a client requires that. Fewer and fewer LMS allow for customisation. It is increasingly becoming too complicated and too expensive for custom LMS developments to take place.

However, with its well thought through architecture Create LMS is cost effectively customisable and the customisation, courtesy of Create LMS’s architecture is quite quick to achieve. Indeed, Create have been customising their LMS for some very demanding organisations very successfully.

Validated LMS

Another powerful feature of the Create LMS is that it is a validated LMS.

The world of validated LMS is particularly interesting to highly regulated organisations where evidenced exactitude of a systems performance must be presented to a regulator.

LMS operated in the pharmaceuticals industry need to be validated to meet an FDA (Federal Drug Administration) requirement) 21 CFR Part 11. Given that the founder of Create LMS comes from a pharmaceuticals background, the notion of a validated system is not new to the company. Validation is available as standard on request.

From a learner’s perspective the Create LMS offers a clear and engaging learning experience. The UI and UX (user experience) is as well thought through as the rest of the platform.

Indeed, the platform performs a neat trick of stepping back from being the centre of attention to one of being all about the content and of course all about the learning. SCORM is handled well, curated resources are handled well and nice integrated learning pathways are presented.

Onboarding and Supporting Learners

The Create concept for a learning is summed up as Hire, Train and Retain.

So, the Create LMS lets organisations put huge focus on onboarding learners and supporting learners from the get go. The very essence of Create LMS is that it is set up (dare I say, created) by the organisation to be part of their organisation.

It is very easy to create groups of learners and assign line managers and others to groups with responsibilities that are easy for them to deliver as the LMS manages things quite proactively for them. With the real time analytics as we discussed earlier, the progress of the new hires is measured and managed effectively, and accountability is designed in.

In this image of our trial and test Create LMS set up at the demo stage for Learning Light, we can see how easy it is to add new roles and to adjust responsibilities.

The fact that the Create LMS can be dropped into other systems’ UI makes the ability of Create to train and support employees in the flow of work a reality – enhancing the training experience in such a way will have an impact upon the retention levels of the organisation. Create LMS have been perfecting this approach for some years with a major global telecommunications company with multiple call centres in many different countries.

In this example – Mirra Tech adopted the Create LMS platform for WorldLMS.com and have many subdomains in their own cloud. Their Doctors use highly customised iPads rather like a mobile enabled Intranet enabling clinical staff to remain in one secure environment.

By Using the APIs Create LMS is built on, they added in Doctors training and CPD into this ecosystem and use the back end for of the LMS for content production, assignment and compliance reporting etc.

AR Creation Platform

Create LMS has one other very nice feature that sets it apart, a deep integration with its sister augmented reality platform, NS Flow. This is a very capable AR creation platform developed to solve training problems in industrial and manufacturing environments, which seamlessly integrates.

These can combine heads up display glasses to playback AR content and instructions. This system can be coupled with AI and vision systems that then track progress and the learners journey to becoming competent and compliant.

The applications shown are very interesting and being deployed at scale. This topic is significant and one for another day.

Create LMS also comes with two learning libraries ready for easy integration as well.

In Summary

So, Create LMS is an amazing combination of an LMS that is easy and effective to set up, but also one that is capable of being integrated into other systems to a very high level of sophistication by an organisation, typically by a business architect with an understanding of APIs.

The approach taken to APIs by Create LMS makes this LMS one of the most modern headless LMS presently on the market.

We can see from our Create LMS review that this is one that has really been thought through on all levels: from speed and ease of set up, ease of use in creating and managing learning experiences, the learner experience itself and to meet the technical demands for the modern digital organisation.

Learn more about this fantastic platform on the Create LMS website.

 
This well-established company is also on the list of the best LMS for training providers here on our website.

The post Create LMS: Speed & Ease of Use, Yet Meeting the Needs of Modern Learning appeared first on Learning Light.

I’m always intrigued to learn the history behind a new piece of learning technology, and the story behind the People Development Platform we now know as Learn Amp is one of the more interesting ones I’ve heard.

The vision for the platform came from the founder, Duncan Cheatle, who was researching into if learning was meeting the expectations of digital learners and if their career goals were being met in the modern workplace.

After discovering that learners – who were largely being instructed to direct their own learning – were feeling unsatisfied, Duncan realised something. Self-directed learning is extremely valuable, but it’s only one side of the coin. The other side is understanding that learners need the context of a career pathway to stimulate and give value to the self-directed learning.

Learn Amp does this extremely well, successfully balancing the needs of the individual and the organisation, and giving value to both.

The way Learn Amp does this is by being a hybrid of both an LMS and an LXP. We can debate the functionalities that go into making both of these systems different, but it’s important to acknowledge that the fusion of these two learning technologies is what makes Learn Amp a market leading platform.

So, let’s dive in and see what it is that makes Learn Amp so popular.

First and foremost, Learn Amp is an exceptionally affordable platform and is very easy to use, which makes it the ideal choice for smaller, mid-sized, and rapidly growing organisations. Learn Amp is ideally suited for organisations with 500 – 5000 employees, which I think is great.

A philosophy of learning for the modern workplace

We often talk about pathways, and Learn Amp brings this to life in a manner not seen before. The mapping function allows learners to feel like they’re in control of their own development.

It’s also simple to create the organisational structure and multiple hierarchies during the set-up of the platform. Teams and task groups are particularly effective, with batching and bulk upload features to make life easy for administrators.

In the spirit of making the workload lighter for administrators, Learn Amp allows admins to do their job without the fuss of having to go through the ‘back end’ – everything can be done from wherever you are within the platform. There’s also an extremely impressive audit log that admins can access.

When it comes to the learners themselves, individuals can create their own profiles – complete with job descriptions, images, introductory videos, and more – which gives organisations the foundation they need to build out their expertise networks.

Now, let’s take a deeper look at the learner perspective and discover how Learn Amp delivers on its mission to enhance performance.

Resonating with learners

The UI and UX, as expected, is very modern and incorporates many of the features we’ve come to associate with LXPs. A Netflix or Spotify interface style has been developed. The platform can be woven into the day-to-day thanks to its impressive integrations – Slack, Zoom and Teams to name a few. It also boasts an AI assistant that recommends documents, videos, elearning courses, and other materials to learners at the point of need.

Learn Amp really thrives in the digital workplace, not as a disparate adjunct to the day-to-day, but by truly working to complement the systems and processes already put in place. Learn Amp supports 1-to-1 meetings, surveys and other assessments, digital coaching, action planning, and even has an Eventbrite style ILT feature – particularly handy in an increasingly remote and flexible workplace.

Naturally, an organisation only gets out of a solution what they’re prepared to put in, but Learn Amp makes achieving quality results possible thanks to its ease of use and interconnectivity with the day-to-day running of the organisation.

However, that isn’t all Learn Amp does. It boasts many LMS features as well, seamlessly integrated into the LXP features we’ve discussed above.

Feature-rich where it makes a difference

Curation on Learn Amp is very powerful indeed – particularly when it comes to video, with over 9000 videos curated and tagged in a system with multiple libraries and categories making it easy to search.

Content management is good, and the assessment tools are flexible and powerful.

We’ve already made note of the AI recommendations, but the search function within the platform is impressive too. There are plenty of options around how to search.

Reporting is open and very flexible, with lots of drill downs and video feedback options allowed. The platform also caters to the Net Promoter Score, which is a nice addition.

Social learning

This is one of the areas where Learn Amp truly shines. It’s well provisioned for and follows through on the core principles of Learn Amp.

I particularly like the focus on collaboration, the ability to leverage the subject matter experts in the organisation, the Q&A function that can be initiated amongst learners, and the peer-to-peer assessment options.

Learn Amp have really thought about how their platform can assist in changing how an organisation learns and performs.

Content curation

Learn Amp’s Google Chrome Plugin alongside its open API allow for quick and easy importing of content from around the web.

The curated content can then be managed extremely effectively by the admins or subject matter experts – those with the right permissions can go through a quality assurance process before releasing the content, and also review or withdraw the content as and when needed.

Content creation

The open API to Google Images and Docs serves as a useful starting point to allow for the building of learning content in the platform. Any content created can be quickly added to the library and, like with content curation, can be reviewed by those with the appropriate permissions. This approach is particularly well suited for microlearning.

There’s also an option to create and share video and audio from within the platform.

Search

In my opinion, the ability to search for content is more important than ever. Learn Amp searches the whole module – not just the tag – and also comes with a Wiki as standard.

Assessment and feedback

Learn Amp have taken a good look at other education LMS vendors in the market and have incorporated common LMS marking rubrics on the platform. This is a smart move, as I’m seeing many more corporations wanting increasingly detailed assessments and feedback as part of their management development programmes that go well beyond traditional MCQs.

The sheer granularity of the assessment function in Learn Amp is one of the most impressive features of the platform. It really delivers on the promise of aligning learning to organisational goals.

I’m also very taken with the powerful observational surveys Learn Amp delivers.

Face-to-face

Face-to-face learning is well catered for with a powerful event management to allow for the facilitation of face-to-face sessions. The tools allow for event creation, invitation management, reminders, notifications and post-event surveys.

Summary

To be quite honest, Learn Amp boasts such a rich set of features, I’m struggling to sum the platform up.

I’m a fan of simplicity and ease of use, and Learn Amp does not sacrifice this for its many features. It’s not just a platform with a lot of clunky extras built on, but a hugely compelling construct of learning technology.

When it comes to the learner and the organisation, Learn Amp delivers on its mission to deliver self-directed learning within the context of the organisation’s goals and values. Truly a super learning platform!

Visit the Learn Amp website to learn more about the all-in-one people development platform that will grow with your organisation.

The post Learn Amp Review: The Modern People Development Platform appeared first on Learning Light.

We last reviewed Walkgrove’s Svelte LMS three years ago, when it was not well known. Today it is a widely used LMS, delivering some fantastic learning projects (including Transport for London’s cycle skills training and modules for the mental health charity, Mind).

So, we thought it would be good to understand what has been happening with Svelte and to let a few more people into the secret of this super LMS.

Feature-Rich and Secure, Yet Streamlined

Firstly, Svelte remains true to its nomenclature. It has lost nothing of its elegance or slenderness; it is still following the same design principles that set it apart from other LMS solutions and it is delivering exceptional results.

Yes, Svelte has incorporated some nice new features and enhanced the security of the site as a result of its amazing successes with public facing learning projects. However, Svelte continues to offer amazing value for money – so no change there!

The Svelte team (working at Walkgrove which, just so you know, is a leading elearning content developer) has listened closely to Svelte’s users and added a very nice and comprehensive Learning Journey function.

Learning objects (SCORM 1.2 modules) and other learning resources (pretty much any file format) can be ordered in conjunction with quizzes (created in Svelte very quickly and easily) to form the learning journey. There are options for either linear completion or self -directed learning.

The assignment of the learning journey is nicely catered for with a simple but effective interface allowing for the role, the learner profile and the journey to be presented in a triangular model. The setting up (assigning) of the learner’s profile is very neat and opens up many more possibilities for personalised learning journeys, as we shall see.

Svelte’s evolution has continued into handling and managing learning content. This is again triangulated on learner profile, course and learning module. While these two triangles sound simple, the effect is to produce a multi-dimensional means of managing the learner and their personalised learning experience. Very simple, very smart, very Svelte.

The learning journey is nicely visualised as ever; Svelte’s UI and UX is excellent. The new learner dashboard really works as well.

Gamification Tools – Assessment Quizzes & Rewards

Some simple gamification can be added and participants can, of course, be anonymised. The Gamification Leader Board is driven by assessment quizzes or by the reward point option built into Svelte. Workflow reminders are also very good indeed and are both quick and easy to create.

Integrations & SSO

Svelte now comes with a full Microsoft Teams integration as well as a very good e-commerce option handling PayPal, Stripe and allowing for invoice creation. SSO is also possible.

Naturally the content can be held once and used multiple times in different learning pathways, or in different tenancies as part of Svelte’s multi-tenancy deployment, which are becoming a work of art.

Svelte has become much more sophisticated in its handling of multi-tenancy. I was always impressed with Svelte’s earlier iteration of multi-tenancy, but now Svelte can offer multi-layered, multi-tenancy solutions with multiple languages all managed from the master instance. Forty tenancies with sub-tenancies are not a problem to Svelte, together with custom domain URLs for each different country, if required.

LMS Security & GDPR Compliance

Walkgrove has invested heavily in Svelte’s security, given demands around data security and uninterrupted service: all site user cookies can be killed at the end of each session if required.

Multi-factor authentication at sign on is used to prevent machine penetration and databases are encrypted to a very high level. Naturally, Svelte is fully GDPR complaint and all data is held on dedicated UK servers, although clients can have their own solo use server if required. Svelte backs up to AWS.

The reporting interface is well designed, with lots of options available which really are driven by client requirement. The learner interface for Svelte can be translated into multiple languages including right to left. However, for users with administrative privileges the admin interface is only available in the English language.

Given that Svelte supports multiple levels of administrative privileges, access to learner records can be rigorously controlled and a rather clever “masked data” option is available to restrict unauthorised access to learner records.

So, what is the secret of Svelte? Why can it do some really rather clever things that set it apart? Well, first off Svelte is not a public cloud or SaaS LMS. Each Svelte instance is set up and configured to meet clients’ requirements and future requirements.

An in-depth, consultancy-led set-up ensures that Svelte is configured to meet each client’s requirements, embodying integrations, learner communications, reporting and more.

The second secret of Svelte is the pricing model. There is a one off set up and configuration fee, which is slightly more expensive if a multi-tenancy solution is required, then a very low-cost price point agreed for learner usage, which is reviewed annually up or down accordingly.

Svelte certainly is not an LMS that will penalise you for success. In fact, Svelte is proving hugely popular for customer-facing, open access learning delivery because of this approach to pricing.

Svelte is no longer a top secret LMS known to a chosen few. Indeed, Svelte is growing in usage numbers and popularity with organisations across the world because of its consultancy-led approach to set up and configuration, its undoubted capability to deliver excellent learning experiences, and its multitenancy and multilingual architectures that absolutely meet organisational requirements.

Whilst Svelte is no longer a secret, it could be the secret to your learning success.

So here with Svelte LMS, we have a real leader in learner data security, great UI / UX, all the latest elearning features (such as multilingual, multitenancy and gamification tools), yet great-value pricing models to suit most budgets.

Learn more about the excellent Svelte LMS over on the Walkgrove website.

The post Svelte LMS Review: a Leader in Security, Value and Modern Features appeared first on Learning Light.