Tag: innovation

Coorpacademy promotes innovation and skills development within Swiss Life France

 

Our clients have training needs and our mission is to meet them. At SwissLife, the challenge of training is to give employees the opportunity to be more than ever a player in their professional lives and to encourage innovation by developing their skills, according to their choices, their needs and at their pace.

In order to achieve these objectives, Swiss Life and the company’s Training and Skills Development Department regularly enrich their catalog of learning offers with differentiating digital training. Today, the Training Department is integrating the Coorpacademy platform, in order to stimulate the curiosity of employees and their desire to learn!

We are very proud to be able to support the strategic objectives of the SwissLife group through 4 training courses on innovation and digital transformation, selected for the launch of the platform in mid-June 2021: “Entrepreneurial culture”, “Digital culture”, “Creativity and agility”, and “Anticipating change”.

Through our catalog of premium content, SwissLife employees will have the opportunity to develop their skills on strategic topics for the company such as cultural, digital, or sustainable transformation and to further develop a culture of innovation in line with the company’s purpose.

“The challenge is to allow everyone to live according to their own choices and our strategic objectives. To achieve this, we need to combine creativity, method and rigor. A combination of behaviors that we must adopt collectively.”
Eddie Abecassis, Director of Innovation at Swiss Life France

To know more about the role of Coorpacademy in innovation at SwissLife.

 

Coorpacademy announces a partnership with 7-Shapes to learn the main principles of Lean Management

 

7-Shapes, through its 7-Shapes School offer, the 1st interactive training offer in Lean Management, 100% online and accessible to all, and Coorpacademy, an EdTech start-up offering intelligent learning experience platforms to more than one million learners, announce a partnership to train employees in Lean Management.

Lean Management is a work organization philosophy based on collective intelligence and aimed at improving a company’s performance. Invented by Toyota in the 1970s, this philosophy has led to the creation of numerous methods and tools that offer many advantages: elimination of non-value added, reduction of excessive inventories, improvement of deadlines, quality, and greater agility thanks to the involvement of all employees.

While most of the world’s large corporations have a Lean approach (also called Continuous Improvement or Operational Excellence), the training and application of Lean Management remain complex to organize. Indeed, traditional Lean training courses are often face-to-face, time-consuming and costly, and most of the time they are only aimed at managers and engineers. However, one of the foundations for the success of an operational excellence approach is that it be carried by all employees. 7-Shapes takes up this challenge by making Lean Management training available to everyone!

7-Shapes School offers a practical, fun and engaging solution to Lean Management training, whatever the learners’ level. The learning paths are composed of modules that are unlocked as the learner progresses. For the theory part of Lean, the 7-Shapes School includes motion design videos, interactive lessons and quizzes. But the specificity of the 7-Shapes School lies in its challenges and mini-games, exercises based on an interactive business simulation. These exercises allow the learner to put his knowledge into practice and encourage him to take action in the field, on a daily basis.

In order to train all employees in Lean in a fun and efficient way, Coorpacademy offers with 7-Shapes to integrate these interactive training simulations on Lean Management, directly on the learning platforms of its customers. This new option, in the form of an add-on, enriches the “Premium Content Hub” offer with high added value for the increase in competence of all the employees and the development of their employability.

In addition to this, Coorpacademy will enrich its content catalog by proposing two courses co-edited with 7-Shapes to understand the history of Lean Management and to learn the basic concepts of operational excellence.

About Coorpacademy

Founded in 2013, Coorpacademy is a European startup member of the EdTech France association, specialized in innovative and scalable digital learning solutions. Based in Paris and in Lausanne at the Swiss EdTech Collider of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), Coorpacademy is at the heart of research on new learning methods. With its platform, Coorpacademy accompanies the transformation of companies by engaging their collaborators, partners and customers in their rise in skills. To unleash this desire and desire to learn, Coorpacademy has developed a proprietary Saas platform based on innovative pedagogical engineering supported by the EPFL innovation laboratories and exclusive content focused on soft skills. The result: a more fun, flexible and collaborative learning experience, focused on the learner.

About 7-Shapes 

7-Shapes is a training start-up founded in 2017 that creates and publishes 7-Shapes School, a performance training course offering based on a business simulation, a fun and operational way to effectively learn the principles and tools of Lean Management, Agility and Supply Chain.

7-Shapes offers its courses in the form of licenses that can be used by consultants, trainers or Lean managers to train all company employees.  Many schools also use the 7-Shapes School to train their students. Most of the 7-Shapes courses also lead to hybrid training courses that can be certified and are eligible for CPF, OPCO, FNE, regional funding, etc. More than 5000 people have already trained with 7-Shapes School and the satisfaction rate of the solution on the CPF is 4.86/5.

Learn and work at the same time or when training is just a click away

 

If like 91% of French and European HR managers, you consider skills development to be a strategic lever for the company, then this article should interest you. This figure is one of the four basic trends identified in the CEGOS 2020 European barometer “Transformation, skills and learning“, which questioned 1783 employees and 254 Human Resources Directors or Managers / Training Directors or Managers (HRD/HRM/HRM) all working in private sector companies with 50 employees or more. 

Businesses are facing new challenges, transformations of all kinds, tensions, uncertain futures, and to face this evolving context, the competencies’ development is a key subject that allows the growth of organizational and individual resilience within the company. In the same study, 88% of the companies surveyed adapted their training offer during the health crisis, and 75% of the levers activated by HRDs to face the impact of digital transformations were based on skills development.

To foster skills development, we need to focus on learning, which in turn relies on training that must be continuous, accessible, and above all, integrated with the applications and tools already existing in the organization. This is the new paradigm that is shaking up training and the HR function: Learning in the flow of work. 

Training integrated into employees’ work life

In his article “A New Paradigm For Corporate Training: Learning In The Flow of Work“, Josh Bersin describes this model for Deloitte. Companies are implementing solutions to support continuous learning, but the entry point to training is quick and easy access to the learning tool. As J. Bersin points out in his report for Deloitte, an employee will spend only 1% of a working day learning new skills. By integrating a training solution directly into the work tools, employees will be able to devote more time to their learning and thus develop their skills much more effectively. 

With a short format, personalized content, and a learner-centric learning experience, training is transformed. Learning in the flow of work allows you to learn whenever you need to, at any time of the day. It is when faced with a difficulty, being able to train in a few minutes to overcome this obstacle. You’ve probably already found yourself not knowing something, looking for the answer to a question you’re asking yourself, right? Your first reflex is to “Google” your question? This is already a first step towards Learning in the flow of work as you learn at the very moment you need it. 

With learning in the flow of work, you are only one click away from accessing training content, most often in the form of microlearning (course formats reduced to a few minutes). For example, on the Coorpacademy platform, our 5-minute learnings allow you to understand a subject very quickly and without interrupting your work. If you need to understand the stakes of 5G, what is SCRUM, or develop your agility in a few minutes, to meet an immediate need, learning in the flow of work is an adequate answer. Directly integrated into your organization’s productivity spaces, you can, in record time, immerse yourself in a subject that may have seemed complex at first. Learning while working also means better retention of information, because not only do we really need it when we learn it, but we also put into action what we have learned, in a short period. By making these tools available to employees, the company creates an agile culture and develops reflexes, so that training is a real tool for change. 

What revolutionizes learning in the flow of work is temporality. While traditional training requires the mobilization of a specific time, even when it is done remotely, this new paradigm revolutionizes our learning time by integrating it into our professional life. It all lies in its name: it is integrated into our workflow and becomes an integral part of the daily life of the employee, the learner, the individual in general, as they progress in their daily tasks. Training time adapts to the learner and not the other way around, the content comes directly to them, i.e. at work.

Learning in the flow of work also means promoting agility, an essential skill to develop in a constantly changing world. Better adapted to the challenges of tomorrow, but also employees’ needs, this model improves employee’s experience, who no longer perceives training as an imposed time, but rather as their initiative to nourish their curiosity and to upskill. By integrating training into employees’ workflows, we also make the learner an actor of their learning path. With more involved, engaged, and interested learners, the impact of training increases and influences employee satisfaction, and ultimately the overall productivity of the organization. 

In short, learning in the flow of work means integrating digital learning content and an engaging learning experience directly into the employee’s work environment. In other words, it means integrating the functionalities of a training platform into professional software, accessible to employees at any time. For training to become natural, access to online training must be simplified, allowing an increase in usage. Without interrupting the work in progress, learning in the workflow is a revolution that not only trains employees in the essential skills of tomorrow but also provides them with the skills they need for today. 

But then, how do you integrate learning into the employee’s work environment? Learning in the flow of work requires the integration of tools within human resources management information systems (HRIS) and software that accompany and manage the learning paths of employees, the LMS (Learning Management System). To find out more, don’t miss our next articles on how to make training just a click away.

Learn by listening : Cybercafé, the first podcast to learn everything about the Web

 

Coorpacademy, an EdTech startup offering smart learning experience platforms to one million learners, is launching Cybercafé: a series of 5-minute podcasts in 5 episodes to learn about the great history of the Web.

With over 135,000 educational podcasts produced in 2020, the audio format is booming. The productions are increasing, the audience is growing with 90 million listenings per month and the engagement rates are very good: 93% of people listen to podcasts in their entirety or almost. 

Coorpacademy innovates by launching an audiolearning series of 5 episodes to better understand the Web and thus develop digital skills, to accompany the training of employees and more broadly, the digital transformation of companies. 

Cybercafé is a discussion between Yann and Lya. Every morning, Yann takes his coffee with his virtual assistant. He shares his questions about the vast world of the Web while Lya corrects him, informs him, and gives him information on a multitude of digital-related topics. 

With this format, which is conducive to storytelling and arouses emotions, Coorpacademy relies on the audio to allow the learner to be truly immersed in the world of Yann and Lya, as Laurence Mijoin-Duroche, in charge of pedagogical innovation at Coorpacademy explains: 

“Digital culture is a strong axis of Coorpacademy’s catalog. This is why we chose audio to tell the story of the Web. The audio format offers us plenty of possibilities, especially with storytelling, sound design, and sound staging, which engages the learner and optimizes concentration.”

Because there are many ways of learning, Coorpacademy integrates audiolearning into its training catalog and optimizes its global digital learning offer. Learning through various learning formats allows better retention of information, as well as a more diverse content proposal, to adapt to all uses. The audio format is accessible everywhere, practical for the learner, and offers a multitude of creation tools, to always better accompany training in companies. 

 

Audiolearning: a media that makes noise

 

Do you use voice messages instead of sending a text? You can’t live without Alexa, Siri, or another voice assistant? Indeed, our uses have changed since audio became part of our lives. To meet these new expectations, Coorpacademy investigated this popular format.

Learn how to provide an offer of engaging and efficient training podcasts and audio content! To better understand this phenomenon, discover our e-book on The rise of audiolearning, or learn about the key topics covered in this 2021 study through this article.

The podcast, a growing format

You can listen to it anywhere, whenever and it lasts an average of 25 minutes: the podcast. Born in the early 2000s, this downloadable digital audio content has experienced an exponential rise in recent years. With the use of cell phones and the unprecedented situation of lockdown, the audience today represents 90 million listeners per month. A trend that is not likely to decline: estimations project it will double by 2023. Investing in this medium becomes essential, as audio content is in demand and appreciated.

Learn by listening: it’s easy, engaging, and effective

Podcasts cover different uses: they can inform, entertain or immerse their audience in life stories. Yet, 74% of listeners want to learn new things quickly and screen-free! With an increase of 135,000 educational podcasts produced in 2020, this format is leading the way. Following the lockdown, audiolearning has taken off, and the offer is even wider! Lending itself to the art of storytelling, podcasts provide better memorization, and engagement rates are excellent: 93% of people listen to podcasts in their entirety or almost.

The multiplication of media allows us to solicit all of our senses and therefore to make our brain work! No scientific theory corroborates the popular misconception that everyone is rather “visual” or “auditory”. Sylvia Koenig, Director of Digital Learning at our partner Bookboon (world’s leading publisher of ebooks and audio learning for professionals) reminds us, audiolearning is like reading and it does not differ for the brain if the word is spoken or read.

What are the main audiolearning formats and their advantages?

Available in various formats such as interviews, talks, or stories, audiolearning is a fresh way of learning. Audiobooks are also flourishing and can be a real audio pleasure, even on “corporate” subjects! Beyond the diversity of formats audio content offers us, it has many advantages: easy to carry, you can listen to it at your own pace, and be able to multitask while listening. It satisfies listeners to be free of any screen, to learn informally, and find real flexibility to integrate learning moments into their busy schedule.

Download our e-book The rise of audiolearning to find a detailed typology of audio content, a podcasts’ selection dealing with major business transformations, a guide to best practices, and an overview of all opportunities offered by this format. Learn how to create and/or integrate an audiolearning offer for your training!

The Digital Learning Club to build the future of corporate digital learning together comes back in 2020 in a new format

 

Club: an organization of people with a common purpose or interest, who meet regularly and take part in shared activities.

Digital Learning Club: an organization of people with a common purpose – building the future of corporate learning, who meet at least once a year and take part in shared activities. Lifelong learning is the topic gathering them.

The future is uncertain. Especially during this global pandemic of Covid-19, especially at times when lots of places in Europe go into lockdown again. 

A few figures to realize how complex and uncertain the world of tomorrow will be: according to the World Economic Forum, in 2022. 75 million jobs will disappear when 133 million new jobs will be created. Also, in 2020, most of 2030 jobs actually don’t exist yet! Still according to the World Economic Forum, 65% of jobs in 2030 have not been invented yet.

Facing this uncertainty, one certainty: lifelong learning is key in order to remain competitive in a fast-changing world. And that lifelong learning idea, our clients understood it very well!

This is how and why the Digital Learning Club has been conceived. This event has been created for our clients, by our clients.

Every year, the Digital Learning Club is an event that our clients hold in high regard. They can share insights with their peers and co-imagine the future of digital learning.

Because it’s 2020, we had to come up with a new format. It will be online, for 45 minutes, and we will share with our clients the latest trends in training for 2021, the best practices to adopt, the pedagogical innovation with our R&D programs supported by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, our product roadmap but also what’s new in content production and editorial partnerships.

The Digital Learning Club is also a space for discussions and gathering: our clients will meet on November 26th at 14h00 to build together their Coorpacademy! If you’re interested in becoming a client of Coorpacademy and joining the Digital Learning Club, don’t hesitate to contact us!

With the Digital Learning Club, we want to build the future of Coorpacademy’s Learning Experience – which needs to be unique for each learner.

If you want to know more, contact us!

Elo, who’s the best?

 

Do you know who this is and how this person succeeded?

Mark Zuckerberg

This is Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder and CEO of Facebook. The David Fincher movie The Social Network depicts his rise to fame, from being a Harvard student to becoming the CEO of the most-used social network in the world. Zuckerberg is described as someone showing a lack of empathy for people and girls particularly. Before Facebook, one of his first ideas was to code Facemash, a ranking system of Harvard girls, of whom he managed to get all pictures.

Facemash©The Social Network

In the movie, he asked about the algorithm in order to create the “ranking”. His business partner Eduardo Saverin writes a formula, on a window, in order to successfully “rank” Harvard girls. This is the formula that will be used behind Facemash.

The Social Network

©The Social Network

Do you know what it means? This is the Elo rating system, a method for calculating the relative skill levels of players in zero-sum games such as chess. It is named after its creator Arpad Elo, a Hungarian-American physics professor. We will see in this article how this system is used, how the formula works and how it could be used in what we’re doing here at Coorpacademy. 

TL;DR

ELO is a classification system which tends to order a group over time. The more time passes, the more the group is correctly ordered. The principle is to predict the result of an encounter between two players and to carry out this encounter. If the prediction does not correspond to reality, we adjust the ranks of the two parties. And we repeat the operation.

How does it work?

Let’s take the existing ranking of a chess game. All players already have a score which represents an estimate of their ability, of their level. This is the rating floor. In chess, it’s 1200. 

Formule Classement Elo

©The Social Network

On the following image, we display two people, who have never played against each other. One has a score of 1,200, the other of 1,600. By using the formula we can see in The Social Network movie, we can calculate the probability of someone winning against someone else.  

By applying the above formula, we calculated a probability of winning.

In this example, we calculated that the person with 1,200 points has a 10% chance of winning, while the other person (with 1,600 points) has a 90% chance of winning.

Next, we compare what was predicted and what really happened during the clash between the two players. For example, in the first scheme, the purple player won when there was actually 10% chance of winning. He then gains 27 points, while the other loses 27. The score of the two players adjusts.

In the end, when two people compete several times, if each person wins half of the games, they will have exactly the same score, it will even out. If one player is way stronger, the score will grow but will stagnate after a while (we will see why later in the article).

In this case, the one who had little chance of winning wins, so wins a lot of points (27).

27 points

In this second case, if that purple person loses, it complies with something that was planned (with 90% chances). The purple person will then only lose 3 points. The chances of winning influence the final outcome and the number of points won.

3 points

In the case of Facemash, Zuckerberg’s idea, in the movie, was to rank Harvard girls in terms of “hotness”. If a girl considered as “hot” battles against someone considered way less “hot”, and wins, it was already “predicted” by the formula and her score won’t change much. She won’t evolve much in the ranking. On the other hand, if a girl considered as “very pretty” competes and loses against a girl considered as “way less pretty”, the rankings will evolve a lot. This would have been considered, by the ranking technique, as an anomaly – the algorithm will then try to rebalance forces and try to “fix the anomaly.”

The formula written on the window in the movie tells us how to calculate the Expected, the chances of winning or losing.

In a chess game, this is used as such. R being the actual score, and E the Expected. 

Classement Elo aux échecs

This method shows that by competing with people on the same level as yours, or a bit better – so there’s less “probability” for you to win – you will evolve way more in the ranking than if you only compete against weaker opponents. This is showed by the number of points you earn – or lose – after each games.

There is also the K in the scheme, which is the maximum you can earn or lose in terms of points, or score. In the example above and the competition between the purple and green people, K is 30. 27 points earned or lost after a game is almost the maximum, and this reflects the chance of winning pre-calculated (10 % for the purple person, who eventually wins).  In chess, and in a lot of other various systems, K varies. A player first games will use a high K of 40 to rapidly position the person in the ranking. Then, K goes down to 20 to limit fluctuations.

This is the theory. When you apply this Elo rating technique on a large population, and you make them compete for a long time (they all start at the same level, with the same number of points), you will end up with a natural repartition of the population in a bell-shaped curve (or the curve of a normal function). People that have the same level will naturally regroup. People that have a very strong level can’t evolve infinitely, will have less potential opponents, and it becomes hard to go away from the bell in the middle.

Cloche du milieu

Everyone will be drawn by the middle bell. Even the people extremely strong or weak won’t go too far from it. It allows us to divide the population by level, like in the schema below:

Clusters de population par niveaux

In chess for example, only 13 players have been above 2800. Today, the highest Elo rating of chess History belongs to the World Champion from Norway Magnus Carlsen with 2889 points, only 2 points above the legendary Garry Kasparov.

It’s not possible to win an infinite number of points, also because, when you’re the best chess player in the world, the chance of winning are very close to 100%. Players are drawn by the middle of the curve, which creates clusters of level in the population.

By cutting the curve, you can regroup people with approximately the same level and make them compete.

A lot of games are using this technique, because it is simple and automatically creates leagues of players with similar levels. We find the Elo rating technique in a lot of video games, such as Counter Strike, Age of Empires or League of Legends, such as in the example below:

Ligues FPSPossible use cases at Coorpacademy?

We could possibly use this rating technique in our “Battle” system, when two players compete on a particular course and must answer correctly and rapidly a series of questions in order to win. We had a few learners feedback saying that they’re afraid the other players are way too strong. It’s a common reaction in multiplayers games, where the question “Will I be crushed?” can induce frustration.

At Coorpacademy, a Elo-type system could reduce this frustration and reassure learners.

Putting a matchmaking system with this method would allow learners with skills in management, or digital, to compete with similar-level learners in the same skill area. This being said, we just launched a Massive Battle feature, which allows learners to challenge a large population of learners simultaneously… We will tell you more about it very soon!

To go further.

Cantor’s Paradise

Microsoft’s TrueSkill (an improved Elo rating technique developed by Microsoft for Halo and team multiplayers game, not only in one-to-one).

GDC: Ranking Systems 

Arthur has been Software Architect at Coorpacademy for 5 years. Every month, he presents on Monday mornings the Tekacademy, gathering Coorpacademy’s tech team around digital and technical innovations. This article had been presented to the team in February 2020.

Coorpacademy trained 20,000 medical professionals and caregivers in 2 weeks during the COVID-19 outbreak

 

This article has been published in Les Echos, an economic French newspaper, and has been written by Déborah Loye. You can find it here in its original version.

Coorpacademy trained 20,000 medical professionals and caregivers in 2 weeks during the COVID-19 outbreak

The startup specialized in online training for large corporations launched a pro bono platform for medical professionals and caregivers. In particular, they can train in resuscitation processes.

 

Specialized in online training for large corporations, Coorpacademy, founded in 2013 by the former Google France Managing Director, and which raised 13 million euros, had no intent to position itself in the medical field before the coronavirus outbreak.

Training in resuscitation

Antoine Poincaré, Coorpacademy’s Director of Sales, explains: “We only had a small ongoing research project with the AP-HP (Paris Hospitals) before that. The day before the confinement in France, we’ve suggested to them that we could launch a series of online training courses based on Covid-19 recommendations, for their medical staff. They answered positively right away!” At this moment, the AP-HP is expecting to call for renforcements for resuscitation in other medical fields, and even in the poll of interns and medical students. The need for skills is urgent.

At Coorpacademy, 15 people are mobilized among the 45 employees, in order to launch the platform and to make it up and running. “We gathered existing videos and shot others, which we keep doing“, Antoine Poincaré indicates. The training material is very practical, and allows medical staff to act fast with resources available. “The platform looks like Netflix, with series of online training courses.“

Martin Hirsch is the Managing Director of the AP-HP.

In two weeks, the Coorpacademy platform saw more than 20,000 people signing up. Less than half are nurses, 30 % are doctors, 10 % are midwives and 14 % have other specialties. For Coorpacademy, offering this service, the goal is to make it known by as many people as possible.

“For now, people mainly know us thanks to word of mouth“, Antoine Poincaré says. The AP-HP wrote a press release about the partnership and Martin Hirsch, its Managing Director, published a tweet praising the initiative. “We think the platform will be particularly helpful for hospitals taking in charge COVID-19 patients“, Antoine Poincaré estimates.

Déborah Loye.

If you want to read the article in its original form, in French, it’s here.

If you want to share the platform, it’s here.

E-learning: A simpler approach, please?

 

This article from Antoine Poincaré, Head of Sales at Coorpacademy, featured in Training Journal in the November edition – the UK’s most influential Learning & Development publication – argues the case for a fuss-free way to produce e-learning. 

Discover the article!

E-learning: A simpler approach, please?

Antoine Poincaré argues the case for a fuss-free way to produce e-learning.

The good news is that we all agree we’ve moved beyond SCORM in e-learning. The bad news is, have we really?

There’s no contradiction, because what’s happened is that SCORM was so dominant for such a long period that it’s very hard for the sector to shake off the paradigm. The issue is that its legacy is limiting the way we design content, and therefore is harming learners, as well as an important but neglected constituency – the e-learning designer. Let’s refresh our memory to see why.

SCORM stands for shareable content object reference model, and is a model that was all about creating units of online training material that could be shared across systems. 

SCORM defined how to create shareable content objects that could be reused in different systems and contexts and was a useful innovation.

The problem is that all these years later we have ended up with two major SCORM-related issues. First, it’s an old standard since its last official update was in 2004, so what it offers is not suitable for the way we work with content today.

The second problem is that along with the standard came software to build SCORM-aligned course content, which has been shaping the way we have been consuming e-learning ever since. 

The first feature developed with this software was the ‘import my PowerPoint deck’ tool and too much of the market never progressed any further. It’s easy to appreciate how this came to pass: PowerPoint is the norm in the classroom training context, so let’s apply what we know works here to the online setting when moving learning and development online.

Let’s get disruptive.

But when Elon Musk started PayPal, he didn’t approach NatWest and ask them how they would approach creating an online bank; he developed something disruptive and new. But that’s what we just don’t really do yet in the e-learning world.

In e-learning, we never progressed beyond the SCORM view of the world and that dominant PPT metaphor. As a result, we’ve had a full generation of training L&D professionals uploading PowerPoint decks into learning management systems and presenting that to group of learners. 

Fortunately, there was a step forward in 2013 when the global learning industry decided not everything has to be SCORM-compliant. At at once, great new Edtech start-ups came along promoting new, more stimulating delivery styles and UX, including mobile-first content. 

Unfortunately, along the way too many of the new players neglected that important constituency: the e-learning designers – who are now challenged to produce new and engaging content for these new platforms, but with tools that are almost antiquarian in look and feel. 

As a result, a huge question mark hangs over content creation and authoring; will it be easy to create and engaging enough?

At the same time, we are demanding these same content creators and authors improve their skillsets. The ideal list presented in the Learning & Performance Institute’s Capability Map which features 25 skills across five categories aimed at individuals and teams, and ranging in scope from strategy to learning facilitation. 

It’s hard to imagine how we can expect to add great user interface, design, composition, audio video, platform and art competencies, to name some of what makes great content that engage users. 

Today’s e-learning content creator demands more.

We need a solution that will help inspire and empower today’s e-learning content created. In effect, it’s high time a WordPress or a Wix emerged for learning content creation. After all, in the 2000s it became possible to build great websites with easy-to-use tools which allowed people to create them without the need to ever look at the Javascript and string exception handling that lay behind them.

Yet no equivalent revolution has taken place in the world of e-learning. Most e-learning designers are still stuck in the e-learning equivalent of that raw html hacking phase. E-learning designers need great, easy-to-use, drag and drop interfaces that hide technical complexity and promote creativity.

That way, they can devote their creative talents to developing the user interface, design, composition, audio video, platform and art skills with the best tools at their fingertips.

E-learning designers need great, easy-to-use, drag and drop interfaces that hide technical complexity and promote creativity.

After all, active learning is not the same as passive consumption of a PowerPoint slide or a 10-minute video. To truly engage, learning has to be structured, measured, involving. There must be useful, participative activities for the learner, and that activity has to be tracked and evaluated. You need to keep the learner motivated, supported, and on top of their own learning journey.

In addition, there must be ways to work and access the same content through multiple modes, from traditional study to something more playful. It should be consumable in multiple ways and times, solo or as a group activity. It has to be scalable and look great, but still track and provide quantifiable metrics that show the specific skills the learner is acquiring, or struggling to grasp.

Achieve design goals.

So, let’s get to a stage where there is a Wix to help designers achieve those instructional design goals. Workplace learning influencer Josh Bersin says in his 2019 analysis on HR tech trends: “While we’d all like to have a YouTube system at work, there are times when we need a [structured way] that steps you through an entire curriculum and actually delivers you at a point where you have truly learned a new body of knowledge.”

You can only achieve this via a learning platform that is entreprise-class, and data-based from end to end, and was designed to put the learner at the heart of every process. 

Noted senior learning transformation strategist Lori Niles-Hofmann recently stated: “Over time, we have expected the standard instructional designer to be both an expert in designing content as technically proficient in one or more rapid authoring tools. But I have rarely met anyone good at both – and the fact is, rapid authoring tools deliver the weirdest digital learning experience, unlike anything else online. 

“Likewise, you cannot get detailed analytics unless you know xAPI, which is again another coding skill. You have to know how to break Storyline 360 code and add xAPI, but I want an e-learning tool which is exactly like SquareSpace – but which can do quizzes! I want it to build digital experiences easily, and have the robust data behind it without me having to code one single thing.” 

Insightful remarks from commentators like Bersin and Niles-Hoffman help us the see what a ‘Wix for e-learning for learning content creation’ would look like. A few Edtech innovators and learning platform providers are designing solutions with the content creator and the learner simultaneously in view. We owe it to all the frustrated content builders out there to deliver on the experience promise for all our users. 

Antoine Poincaré, Head of Sales at Coorpacademy. 

Show Me How You Learn And I’ll Tell You Who You Are!

 

We all learn in a different way! But only a few online training platforms, especially in the corporate learning space, take behavioral specificities into account… It’s high time training providers start using behavioral analytics!

According to a study from Accenture Strategy, Harnessing Revolution: Creating the Future Workforce, by acquiring soft skills (such as problem-solving, creativity or emotional intelligence) two times faster than we do now, it will reduce the part of jobs threatened by automation by a third or even by half!

What are we waiting for to accelerate the rhythm of corporate training and engage employees on developing their soft skills?

Digital learning is a powerful tool when it is flawless, seamless, individualized, omnichannel – pretty much like a successful customer experience. And like customer experience, training begins with a deep knowledge of the users/learners. A HR executive, a training manager or a learning officer must begin with understanding the way their teams learn!

Big Data doesn’t rhyme with individualization.

A training manager has to gather data but also select the data, exploit the data and analyse the data in order to improve the experience offered to employees. Doing so will also allow training managers to detect new talents, open career suggestions or even anticipate people leaving…

When learning analytics didn’t exist yet, data was not “Big” yet and online training data were only attendance rates or achievement rates. They were only performance indicators. Not a lot of improvements were coming from this type of data.

Big Data arrived after allowing companies to collect and store large amounts of data, with the big promise of revolutionizing training with ‘Learning analytics’. But what do we really learn from this type of data? To improve learners’ engagement, does the number of followed courses, the time spent on a course, the connexion frequency or the obtained results really help? They’re obviously important indicators but are not enough to improve engagement or detect talents.

To develop a behavioral analytics culture.

We all learn in a different way. It’s a complex, evolutive process and depends on several factors linked to us or to our environment, such as our emotional state, context, topic or even to the time of day. A learning experience will then be successful only if we take into account these new indicators which mirror all these different learning behaviors. Like curiosity for example. Curiosity is linked to evolved capacities, including when it comes to learning. Curiosity is a skill that comes from our evolution: individuals with curiosity had a competitive edge on their counterparts lacking curiosity. Research show that learners will show more curiosity about a topic when they already have some knowledge of it but lack insurance. We need to take that into account in our choices of corporate training content.

Perseverance is another example. People retaining interest and effort over a long period of time succeed more than individuals showing less perseverance. It is wise to consider the engagement, but not only – it’s also important to take a look at the activity that motivates the learner to complete a training.

Regularity is another behavioral indicator which gives information on how a learner manages his/her time and training course.

By using behavioral analytics, the sets of data available to HR and managers will be way richer and more complete. But only a few training platforms provide these types of analytics. However, exploiting them in HR and at the operational level (algorithms and machine learning) brings more and more beneficial insights for the company, as well as for the user.

Companies now can access all kinds of new insights: not only what a person actually learnt, but also how the learner ended up learning this, what learning approach he/she chose, and therefore companies can suggest the most precise recommendations, accurate in regard of what the learner really needs. In order for the employee to be autonomous in the way he/she trains, in order for him/her to control and secure his/her employability: it’s necessary for the company to understand the way the learner learns!

This article is the English adaptation of an article from Frédérick Bénichou, co-founder of Coorpacademy, published in the French press (Journal du Net). You can read it in its original version here!

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