Our recent webinar ‘The future of learning – 6 trends that will change behaviours’ saw Rose Benedicks, Programme Director from our North America office, and Andrew Joly, LEO Learning’s Director of Strategic Design, discussing the future of learning and how the latest trends will change behaviours.
The webinar covered six different learning trends that will change behaviours and featured world-class examples and recent case studies from NHS Leadership Academy and L’Oreal. Rose and Andrew explained how these learning trends can be delivered, with a focus on a blended and omni-channel approach.
The webinar concludes with an interactive questions and answers segment. The attendees asked some great questions during the session, which have been shared below.
Q1) What is a wiki?
Rose Benedicks: “It is an online space or document that users can collaboratively create, edit, and maintain. Wikipedia is an excellent example. Google (e.g. Google Documents) and SharePoint have wiki capabilities too.”
Q2) What is omni-channel learning?
Rose: “Omni-channel learning is learning that happens through different technologies, methods, modes, and touchpoints. It is a term that comes from marketing and refers to all the ways you can reach your audience. Technology has matured to the point where we have nearly endless channels to use to deliver the right content in the right way at the right time.
When you have a huge architectural blend of different components (omni-channel learning), the challenge is to take people through each learning channel to the next in a way that delivers the right journey. Think of this as aligning (right place, right time, right content), deliver, and sustain to prevent drop off. Omni-channel learning is an extremely powerful way to create a learning experience that acknowledges how people truly learn by doing, through informal channels, and through formal learning events (70:20:10).”
Andrew Joly: “In the marketing world it also refers to an experience that ‘follows you around’ from medium to medium, in the way that Amazon shows the same key components to you, personally, whether you check in via your phone, PC or even TV. This is a more ambitious level of learning experience but one that users expect more and more: Always on, always contiguous, whatever channel I use.”
Q3) How did you communicate to users the value of forums and the benefits of joining them?
Rose: “This is a great question, and it is the challenge. What we see often is an “if you build it, they will come” approach. This does not work. You have to make it compelling. Start small, with a specific task to be achieved collaboratively and use a social tool. For example, ask new employees to contribute to a virtual wall their most valuable advice for other new starters. Another example is to use action learning sets whereby small teams have to actually do something together and report back in a forum or by creating a short video to post.“
Andrew: “We often call the practice of drawing learners into a new level of engagement as ‘scaffolding’ – it’s where we carefully design in ‘hand-holding’ (technical or human) to encourage and support learners to try out a forum and engage with it as part of a broader experience. In its simplest form this could start with a simple task, set by a trainer, for a small action learning group to use a prescribed social tool to share their thoughts or findings. Next time, they have to comment on each others submissions, and the time after that, they jointly contribute to a wiki for instance.”
Q4) What role can adaptive assessments play in creating personalised learning?
Rose: “When we asked what you thought the answer to that question was at the beginning of the webinar, 63% of you agreed with us that behaviours could be changed with technology–enabled learning. At the end, we asked the same question and that figure had risen to 90% – you certainly are believers now!”
Andrew: “If you’d like to see more then talk to us – we can show it to you in action.”
If you missed the webinar or would like to watch it again, you can head over to our resources page for the recording.