Last week I got to spend a day and a half at the Learning Technologies exhibition in London, and had many interesting conversations. As I’ve commented before, learning tech feels like a strange parallel universe where intranets barely exist, so would this year’s show be different?
Something borrowed, something blue
There is a concern in Learning and Development (L&D) that too many organisations throw e-learning at anything that looks like a problem. E-learning is, I suppose, the core of “learning technology” and naturally there were many designers, developers, providers, aggregators, distributors and Learning Management Systems on display.
Looking at these learning delivery tools, I couldn’t shake the impression of follow-the-leader (or next big thing), and lots of solutions for apparent problems. There were many LMS or LXP designs with card-based designs, and a good proportion of them were coloured blue. I might have suffered a mild case of déjà vu, especially since many also included functionality to “favourite” items—something we introduced at Barclays nearly six years ago.
It feels that no-one has addressed what I call the playlist problem. It doesn’t take long for favourites to become unmanageable, and I didn’t see approaches for sharing playlists of recommended learning, for managers or HR people to add or manage other items. Neither did I see course rating or feeding back to raise standards. The LMS stands are some of the busiest, and finding the right people to talk to is hard when you’re not a corporate buyer.
Serving people in their broader needs
It’s always nice to find surprises at a trade show, and I had a few “do people really pay for that?” moments. Of course, there are very tangible needs for products that handle learner management, co-ordination for trainers and bookings, testing and invigilation. Similarly, tools for coaching and mentoring can be valuable, but I struggle to see how well they can work as a destination rather than being integrated into the digital workplace.
There were lots of apps aimed at front-line workers, particularly aimed at collaboration. It’s hard to tell from a cursory look, but Yoobic could be as useful as the likes of SpeakAp and LumApps. Looking at Squadify, I began thinking about the benefits of a low-cost ready-to-launch app: could it be used to as a temperature spot-check across a business before designing bespoke training?
Meeting-meets-collaborative-sketching app Klaxoon was there too, making its pitch as a training tool.
One practical tool that I found was WhatFix. It’s an overlay tool that provides all kinds of contextual help, and appears useful in creating other forms of training too.
I believe that there is only going to be more learning content to manage, as it becomes easier to build individual learning resources or curate en masse. Aside from the many libraries of content (courses, microlearning, videos, ebooks and even ebook summaries), there were tools for authoring, animating, managing assets, documentation, and probably a lot more. These resources appeared to be dedicated to learning, but clearly run the risk of duplicated content.
Content, content everywhere…
If I were feeling ungenerous, I’d say there seemed to be even more ways of accumulating content debt, and building an even less manageable library of resources. Some of these things are possible within a digital workplace, while other tools need to show greater potential for integration.
From content to connectivity
Learning technologies are built on connectivity, indeed LMSes would be pointless without protocols like SCORM and xAPI. So it puzzles me why too often they tend to be a destination and not open to integration into other tools. It was good to see LMS365 exhibiting again, but the team were kept busy by a continuous stream of attendees, so it proved difficult to see how the product has developed. I note the recent announcement of their new partnership with Content Formula, and hope to see some interesting integrations.
In many respects, the most exciting thing I saw was Signature’s PROPEL platform which makes the connections between LMSes for you. This could be for a migration, or it could be to unify learning management systems across an organisation. It appears possible to connect disparate sources of training, or even create tools to bring useful learning information into the intranet.
I didn’t see as much as I’d hoped for enterprise social network integrations, and only a handful of chatbots were on display. One tool combining the two is Filtered’s AI-powered Magpie (this article shows it working in Teams), their stand was consistently busy, so I take that as a good sign of both the product and the level of overall interest.
Another company talking about AI is Elephants Don’t Forget. which supports learning with mini quizzes and reminders that adapt on the fly to employees’ answers and other factors. It’s the kind of thing that could integrate well onto intranet home pages or on more “doing” parts of the intranet. It’s important to know where training is most or least effective, and I also enjoyed talking to Watershed which provides an analytics platform. It can extend the idea of training data through the likes of xAPI to all kinds of employee interactions, and could lead to useful and timely insights.
Conclusion
Most telling was the first seminar I attended. Social training tools and content company Hive curated a good discussion on how to create a culture of learning. Many of their points weren’t about learning, but went beyond L&D into change and adoption.
Walking around the exhibition, I kept feeling that learning tech risks solving problems that have already been solved, and potentially creating multiple shadow digital workplaces. This suggests to me that there are much better opportunities for conversations and co-operation between L&D, intranet and digital workplace, HR, Comms, IT, compliance and more.
Everything I’ve argued, for example in Lessons from Learning – the post, suggests there’s plenty of room in the digital workplace for learning, but there’s a long way to go to make room in learning for the digital workplace.