As the modern e-learning world becomes fixated on improving the learning experience and applying effective learning programs at scale, new solutions are needed to keep up the pace.
Not only are learners demanding it, but as business leaders realize the positive impact of continuous learning on business performance, the pressure is on to produce results, fast.
So, how can you improve the learning experience while also scaling your efforts? The answer lies in smartly curating content and streamlining learning delivery. Here’s a breakdown of the solutions available now and what we predict will be available in the future.
Advanced Content Curation
When it comes to learning content, there are three key pain points in getting the right (and most relevant) material in front of learners: there’s too much content out there, the quality can’t always be verified, and, “is it up-to-date?”.
Let’s consider compliance training, for example. A learner might go to your Learning Platform and take a course on financial regulations. The course was likely well researched and informative, but it’s now out of date. In fact, it was likely out of date the moment it was made.
If learners are searching for insights on recent regulatory changes, that course won’t help them. They need to know how to discover relevant content quickly and this is increasingly vital for today’s knowledge worker. But the Learning Platform isn’t always their first port of call.
In fact, almost 40% of employees go to Google before asking a co-worker or using their employer’s learning technology. This doesn’t mean that the content isn’t on the Learning Platform, but merely that the platform hasn’t been curated to most effectively and efficiently meet the learner’s needs.
Content curation is being used extensively to address this pain area, especially as it relates to content within a Learning Platform. But innovations in the realm of curation have made it possible to automate the time-consuming selection and filtering process to present only the best and most relevant content to learners.
Solutions Already in the Market
Solutions are now being introduced or integrated by learning technology providers to dynamically aggregate content from millions of sources around the web, for your needs. You simply choose the topics, keywords, and sites you want it to scour and it produces a live stream of all the latest and most relevant content. You can then plug this stream into your Learning Platform to make it easier for your
learners to engage with.
What the Future Holds
A learner’s interactions with the curated content are analyzed by your Learning Platform, which recognizes content deemed most engaging. The platform understands these preferences and uses this information to further refine results, gathering additional insight to automate a continuous approach to curation. The result is to not only make the entire process more engaging, but also autonomous by empowering learners to be more proactive in their learning journey, without admin intervention. The next step would be to make the platform able to understand a learner’s skills gaps, based on their courses and performance, and then tailor the curated content to present information that will help bridge those gaps.
“Organizations have looked at content curation as a massive tagging project. It’s up to learning technology providers to help organizations through this. None of these other learning tools work if you don’t have your content, either curated or mapped, or a taxonomy that makes sense so it can point you in the right direction, whether it’s for subject areas, or for learning audiences.”
David Wentworth, Principal Analyst, Brandon Hall Group
Enhanced Learning delivery
As more learning objects are created and more learners are added to programs, employees and managers have less time than ever to search through a catalog of courses to find what they need. AI plays a role in assisting in delivery down the line in finding the most relevant content snippet inside a longer piece.
In addition, learning departments are realizing that required learning and voluntary learning should and need to be delivered differently. The motivation behind engaging in voluntary learning must be treated as a separate strategy.
As always, engagement rates must also be monitored and improved upon, so the Learning Platform must be able to run accurate evaluations if an organization is to make learning its competitive advantage.
Solutions Already in the Market
Learning Platforms are focusing more and more on delivering learning in a smarter way, augmenting the role of learning professionals rather than replacing them. A powerful solution within Docebo is auto-tagging for course content, which streamlines content categorization and consistency. This makes it easier for learners to find the content that they need, and takes the responsibility of accurately tagging course materials away from learning professionals.
What the Future Holds
With AI-powered auto-tagging, this will evolve to include multiple languages, so that learners can find any content in their preferred language faster than ever before. By letting the platform’s AI listen to the context of the content and tagging it accordingly, learning admins and content contributors can reduce the time it takes to share content while also improving course categorization and searchability.
Virtual coaches will also act as a great enabler for learning professionals. Targeted coaching will push learners towards the right learning at the right time (instead of overloading them with quantity), without the need to dedicate extra time or manpower to the task. We also see that content strategies will begin to be combined with delivery strategies to maximize the potential of the content.
To read more about these and other e-learning trends set to impact elearning in 2020, download our full report!