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.

Who Are First Media?

First Media are a well-established elearning company based in Lincolnshire UK. Their mission is to deliver high quality elearning, campaign-based training, and micro-learning.

They started in 1999 and now have over 20 years delivering quality training content to a variety of organisations, with a particularly strong showing in the sporting sector.

What Can They Do?

First Media’s focus is to deliver high quality elearning services, and they specialise in taking a concept or objective and turning it into a learning campaign on behalf of their clients to help them deliver a message. In doing so, their aim is always to deliver great looking elearning content with a creative approach that is bespoke to each client.

This creative approach, the bespoke solutions they can engineer for their clients, their flexibility and ability to understand the REAL needs of their clients (rather than the perceived ones) and a reputation for going the extra mile to meet them, means that First Media have developed an impressive range of USPs.

As a creative agency in the eLearning space, they have the unique talent to create brand-aware digital learning solutions using a range of products, Articulate Storyline, Rise, Adapt and their own bespoke HTML5/CSS3 framework, FM Bespoke. Combining this with animation and video, they can provide the full package for eLearning, micro-learning and blended solutions.

Their highly experienced team comprises instructional designers, elearning design specialists, and developers.

On the horizon for their elearning clients is an in-house learning platform to host clients’ courses, which they describe as an “LMS lite”. This will be a welcome solution for those clients who may not already have their own internal LMS.

A creative agency with software development capability is a strong combination – demonstrated by the fact that they also manage some proprietary e-prospectus software that is widely used by local authorities in the UK to support student applications to further education colleges.

What’s Their Ideal Customer / Target Market?

First Media’s top clients tend to be leaders in their field. They don’t have a focus on any particular sector, which is demonstrated by their diverse client base across the likes of sport, aviation, agriculture, education, and healthcare, in addition to a growing and impressive list of corporate clients such as Lloyds, Amazon and the Financial Times.

Whatever sector their client might be in, they naturally find it easier to work with those who are already delivering elearning, because they believe that the communication of concepts and objectives is more fully developed when the client understands what’s involved. This naturally leads to a more creative collaboration.

3-Stage Process for Delivering Bespoke eLearning Solutions

First Media approach their projects with a three-stage process in mind. First is their Explore phase, where they spend time ascertaining exactly what their client needs and how their organisation works.

This naturally involves looking at the target audience, their learning needs, the requirements of the organisation, and assessing the technical aspects of the project – including any LMS that may be used.

The second stage is the Design phase, where they will develop the concept, the brand guidelines, tone of voice and get an idea of the visuals that they’ll mock up in Adobe XD. They have also developed their own fully customised HTML CSS framework using in-house front-end developers.

The final stage is the Production phase, which includes prototyping, full scripting, and continuous testing. Tests are conducted on different devices, as well as tests for usability and tests in the LMS – both for SCORM conformance and reporting. Any branching scenarios are thoroughly tested as well.

Some of the fruits of their approach can be witnessed in the work they delivered for the IOC and the FA. For the IOC, they developed an interactive course covering health and wellbeing, designed to educate female athletes globally.

Their team worked with sport and health experts from around the world to create tailored learning modules on subjects that included Bone Health and Nutrition, Injury Prevention, and Sexual Harassment.

For the FA, they work alongside their safeguarding team to develop equality & diversity elearning content, which was designed to challenge, educate and inspire coaches to change attitudes and behaviours. This elearning included illustrations, video content, and interactive scenarios, and was delivered to over 50,000 learners.

A Truly Holistic Approach

Something that really stands out for us about First Media is that they are a creative agency rather than just an agency that churns out a conveyor belt of elearning. This means that when you look at the campaign-based learning they can create, and the variety and diversity of projects that they have been involved in, it’s very clear that they are able to provide a holistic solution to their clients’ needs, rather than just a piece of elearning.

A great example of this ability to provide a more holistic solution is the work that they did with Breast Cancer UK. Here they delivered a whole campaign-based solution that educated people, and was designed to raise awareness of breast cancer – in particular urging women to check themselves.

It was much more than just a simple piece of elearning for people to learn about the topic. For example, you can sign up, do a quiz, and then it sends you targeted information based on how you answered the quiz.

What First Media can deliver for their clients is very bespoke – they don’t have a rigid set of solutions and then work out how they can shoe-horn the client’s needs into these. Instead, it’s very much a case of understanding exactly what the client wants, and then discovering how they can best provide a very bespoke solution for that client.

All of this is undertaken through their three-stage development process: 1. Explore, 2. Design, 3. Produce, and which combined with their creative agency background, means they possess a whole host of internal skills including learning designers, instructional designers, developers, and a lot of their solutions include more than just elearning content – like micro-sites for example.

They can use a range of tools and existing technologies to create content for clients, such as authoring tools like Adapt Builder and Articulate Rise. The use of these popular products is a huge benefit to clients, as it allows them to manage their ongoing maintenance if they so wish.

They also use H5P, an open-source content collaboration framework which provides a huge array of interactions like drop downs, carousels, hotspots and word games. This can suit every type of learning intervention, and First Media use this to input creativity into content and interactions.

First Media have their own framework, which to our eyes looks a little bit slicker and more professional than perhaps Adapt Builder does. This ability to offer such a wide variety of tools makes them extremely versatile when delivering solutions for their clients.

Not only can First Media use various external tools and technologies to create a solution (whether that’s elearning or micro-sites or campaign-based learning campaigns), they can also work with a client’s current LMS to maximise the learning experience and create inbuilt learning solutions.

A great example of this ability to create content within a client’s LMS is the work they did with the Financial Times. Here they used the tools available to them through the client’s platform to create a more engaging and appropriate learning experience for their audience, and they put in the work to overcome any limitations presented by the platform itself through their development expertise and CSS coding experience.

This level of thought and energy enabled First Media to push the parameters of what was possible to achieve within the learning platform, and by maximising the inbuilt functionality to create the best user experience possible, they provided a great solution to their client’s requirements.

They also offer an “eLearning Assist” package for ongoing support and maintenance, adding further value to their clients.

To learn more about how this create elearning agency can take learning and development to the next level for your organisation, visit the First Media website.

The post First Media Review: The Creative eLearning Agency 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.