L&D Pros have a new BFF in AI-powered Learning Technology

• 4 min read

Embrace a partnership with Artificial Intelligence

Imagine trying to track every activity each of your learners makes while interacting with your learning platform. Then imagine trying to analyze this data to uncover valuable insights and correlations between learning activities and job performance.

The volume of data and analysis required to make sense of it manually would be insurmountable. Indeed, this is where Artificial Intelligence (AI) can be leveraged to inspect and interpret massive amounts of data and also constantly learn from its insights.

And this doesn’t come at the cost of replacing you. In fact, AI is a powerful tool that elevates human decision making because there is no statistical model or algorithm that can substitute the intuition of a human being.

Continuous Improvement with AI

Achieving a company’s vision or objectives requires complete Learning and Development (L&D) alignment – making the connection is key to “closing the learning loop” by tying expected learning outcomes to business objectives.

In the background, AI analyzes all potential learning paths that each learner could take, working to understand the best route from Point A to Point B, and then suggest the most efficient journey to maximize learning outcomes.

Now here’s where AI works with our human intuition. If an admin thinks the suggestion from the platform is incorrect, they can dismiss that suggestion. That feedback is recognized by the algorithm powering the AI suggestions and it learns that the action it took was incorrect. This triggers a new response that serves up a different suggestion, refined by the earlier feedback, and results are continuously improved through each learner and admin interaction.

If you multiply this behavior by the thousands of instances of feedback from both learners and admins, the platform’s suggestions will begin to reflect the objectives of organizational goals, with less training time required to maximize learning return on investment.

Uncovering The Story Behind The Numbers

In a recent webinar with eLearning Guild, we asked: What data do you collect on your organization’s learning activities? Here are the responses:

70% – How many learners completed a course

20% – Hours of training employees in each course/plan completed

8% – Learners’ feedback on course relevancy

2% – Employee or team sales revenue performance before and after training

While the number of learners who completed a course is very important, if taken as a metric alone, it doesn’t tell the full story. There might be some people that were interrupted and left the course in the middle and then came back later or maybe some people took longer to complete it than others.

Artificial Intelligence not only understands when the course is completed, but also each interaction a learner has while completing a course within their learning platform. For example, are they asking a question or rating that particular course? What are they rating it? Did they pause for a while, and then continue?

All of these actions are tracked to supply the database required by machine learning models to understand difficult and complex correlations between courses and learners. From that data, it extracts a better understanding of learner behavior.

For example, if someone is asking a question and someone else is answering, the actions establish a connection in the data that AI uses to understand the most active user and subject matter expert for a particular topic.

By understanding user behavior according to engagement rates, you’re able to make more informed decisions on how effective a certain type of course, with certain characteristics, will be for a specific learner. You might uncover that a video is more suited to one learner, while slide presentations are more effective for another.

While it’s true that the number of course completions is important, it’s also true that there are other factors to consider, such as behavior in the platform, that will give you a 360-degree view of learner progress – and the effectiveness of your learning programs. By using this knowledge to refine your learning activities, you are well on the path to reaching more effective learning outcomes that are tied to business success.

Want to learn more? Download this ebook, written in partnership with Brandon Hall Group, to further understand how AI and human capability will work in tandem in L&D.