Learning tech de-mystified

Learning technology explained and simplified

Without a doubt, we are now in the most exciting age of learning and learning technology but also the most confusing. On the plus side, we are now seeing workplace learning becoming a critical, strategic component of a business and we see the shelf life of skills move from 10 years to less than three. Continuous learning has also become as much of a critical trait to recruit for, as creativity and problem-solving. We see progressive organisations transform their L&D functions, where success was historically measured based on outputs, such as the number of learning days delivered to business outcomes and value such as increased sales, improved customer satisfaction and employee retention and attraction.

However, the path to choosing and utilising technology to achieve this new success is extremely confusing as the digital disruption of L&D means new technologies and terms are coming through at pace. It sometimes seems easier to understand all the arguments for and against Brexit than the current world of learning tech. But, as one of the early pioneers of the industry, I am going to provide clarity and I’ll do my best to de-mystify the terms while explaining how they all fit together, as well as outline the options available to companies.

The evolution of learning technology

15 years ago when our industry started, it was simple. There wasn’t a huge choice of learning technology to choose from, in essence, there was one – the elearning course and learning management system (LMS), which was aimed at doing just three things:

1.   Managing classroom training events

2.   Delivering elearning courses (mainly compliance) and testing what you understood and what you had just read

3.   Tracking and reporting on the above 

Since the creation of the LMS over 15 years ago, consumer technology has transformed our expectations of technology. It’s amazing to think companies like Facebook, YouTube, Google and WhatsApp were founded after the concept of the LMS, and smartphones like the iPhone hadn’t even come to market. These companies fundamentally shifted the way we think about information, knowledge, communication and learning. In turn, they inspired a new wave of Edtech and encouraged learning tech companies to found a suite of non-LMS companies. These companies started to bring these ideas from the consumer world into the corporate learning world and their success has transformed the corporate learning landscape. They have changed the table stakes functionality of companies needing just LMS functionality, to a richer learning ecosystem. And because of this, employees are now starting to recognise the benefits and using it as a reason to stay in the company and recommend it as a place to work. 

Without a doubt though, there is some confusion as to how best to label and categorise these new companies. Josh Bersin initially called out the next-gen category as LXPs or learning experience platforms with vendors in this area focused on content curation. Whereas European HR analysts “Fosway” saw this category as too narrow and put these next wave of companies into a wider category called NGLEs or next-generation learning environments. They recognised that functionality such as social learning, video content management, analytics also made up this non-LMS category. Fosway were the first to position the main players within their market in their 9 box grid which overlayed the next-gen players as a separate dimension (squares versus circles) over its traditional LMS 9 box grid.

Since then, Josh Bersin has evolved his thinking and published an article called, ‘The rise of the integrated learning platform’. He recognised, like Fosway, that the LXP is likely too small a secondary next-gen category and that organisations need more functionality in the next-gen area to get the real business benefit. It looks like the two analysts are now aligned at least at a high level around next-gen, even if their terminology of the integrated learning platform and next-gen platforms isn’t.  

NB: Fuse believes that although this article is broadly accurate, it misses Fuse's rich functionality in the CMS and LMS space and the learning ecosystem below is a closer match to our existing offering 

What all the analysts also seem to agree on is that LMS functionality is still needed and won’t go away. But that the core learning technology functionality that an organisation needs won’t be met by LMS functionality alone and a wider ecosystem is needed. The below diagram is what we see many progressive learning leaders like Donna Johnston and Simon Brown are starting to build out.

I'll do my best to summarise the core purpose of each of the main next-gen features in order to give a holistic view.

Learning experience platforms are ultimately about providing a better end-user experience to learners. And some vendors do their best to do this by automatically aggregating content from across an organisation’s landscape, while others do this by aggregating other learning technologies as well as the content. Many large organisations can have anything from five platforms to 100 as the inflexibility of the LMS has forced operational business units to buy a new platform for their nuanced local need where they can configure an LMS or next-gen platform to their specific needs. Some LXP vendors will look towards adding their layer on top of these 100 platforms, whilst others will look to provide technology to reduce redundant platforms.

Social learning platforms focus on user-generated tools that allow peer-to-peer learning to happen across an organisation. Any individual using the platform, can record videos, read articles, upload files and share to communities, individuals and groups, this will allow conversations to happen and content can be easily searched for. The early leaders of this style of learning was Jambok, founded by Karie Willyerd. Social learning functionality has evolved since then to add other elements including performance coaching, observational assessment, continuous 1:1 conversations, AI-powered social feeds and consumer-grade search and find.

My personal opinion is that social learning is a critical technology within the learning sphere, but it shouldn’t stand alone as a separate platform. It should be a core technology of a richer integrated platform. This would likely explain why these early incumbent companies were acquired by larger organisations or failed to fulfil their growth potential and become mainstream.

We then have Learning Record Stores companies. They were invented to address the need for meaningful and advanced analytics and to move past reports and spreadsheets into live meaningful data insights. Again this is a critical technology component and one that any modern learning organisations need. Although, like LXPs and social learning companies it’s hard not to see these become less standalone technologies in the future and rather part of an integrated learning platform.

Next up, we have Learning Content Management System and video streaming. I would put these two into the same category, as any learning content management system should be able to mimic the functionality of YouTube for corporate learning, considering that video receives more than 50% of views for progressive organisations and 80% plus of consumer traffic. Whereas LMS’ started supporting SCORM elearning content, LCMS' add all content old and new from PDFs, HTML 5 articles, all video formats, audio, Word, Excel, PowerPoint as well as new formats like VR and AR. Most LCMS will also supply the players as there is no point in storing all those formats if you can't play them. 

Being able to host, and manage all your content on a modern LCMS, especially video gives a whole suite of advantages. These include using automatic machine translation, accessing deeper and richer data analytics, enhanced security, automatic video to voice for video content and automatic tagging. Again the challenge around this is that it should be integrated within a core learning platform. 

Connectivity, another big challenge in an L&D world in the midst of disruption is future-proofing. Vendors like Fuse and others will undoubtedly have new ideas and continuous breakthroughs but no company will outpace an industry's innovative capabilities, even Apple recognised they needed an Apple Store to unleash the creativity and expand its ecosystem.

A modern learning ecosystem needs to allow for other new entrants to the market to plug in easily such as; Sana Labs who focus on Spaced repetition, Training Orchestra who focus on Training Resource Management, Electronic performance support companies like Whatfix and career management like Fuel50.

LMS vs Next Gen/ILP

Undoubtedly, LMS vendors like Cornerstone and others would argue that they have some next-gen functionality, and that is true to some degree. But the question for each category such as social learning, LXP or analytics is, would they be a viable option for each sub-category if you were to compare them to a specialist? For example, take a feature like search functionality, one company could spend 10,000 days designing and developing the functionality using the brightest minds in the world and the results are that users of the feature, return successful searches 99% of the time and users consume what they would need within a minute versus another that could take two weeks and get a really basic version working. Both tick boxes on a feature list and look the same on a marketing spec sheet. I would advise that the best and fastest way to see if the technology is near usable, is to see if that component could, and is standing alone in any of their customers, e.g. do they have social learning as a core feature? Do they have any customers using them predominantly for that functionality? Or is it only available if you buy their LMS e.g is it an after-thought to the product, to fill a tick box rather than part of their vision?

LXP vs ILP

In the LXP vs full next-gen category, this comes down to learning strategy and where you want to be in the years to come. Once you have that mapped out then it’s easy to see whether the next step you are planning is the best next step towards that, or whether it’s a step in a different direction, which will mean you are back at square one in a few years. At the highest level, the answer to the question is how many platforms do you want to manage and integrate. For a mid-size organisation do you want to add additional core functionality and mesh them together or one integrated system or perhaps a few systems like an LMS and a next-gen/ILP?

For Fortune 1000 sized companies, the challenge is slightly more complex as often they have more than 50 Learning management systems. Generally, the reason why there are so many different systems doing the same thing is because of the inflexibility of the central LMS e.g. it is configured one way and therefore each business unit purchases another LMS to configure their version for their different needs. The LXP solution to this is to add their 51st system on top versus the ILP approach which is to reduce the redundancy and cost by offering more flexibility in a central platform and in time reduces the number of learning platforms by 90%.

Ultimately the decision of direction will depend on what the end picture will look like. Once that has been defined, the first step towards that, once you are fully aware of the options on the table, becomes clear to see. The challenge is to avoid making the next step before deciding what the end destination looks like.

If you would like to learn more about these services and discuss what solution would work best for your organisation, please do get in touch with me. Or if you want to see the components of a learning ecosystem in action, you can get in touch with the team here to book a conversation with someone from the team.