There is an ever-growing array of options to get a degree or specific training entirely online without ever setting foot on a physical campus of any kind. As this shift continues to occur in the digital world of the twenty-first century, some are beginning to wonder whose responsibility it is to look after online learners’ mental health.

Traditional Higher Education and Student Mental Health

On college and university campuses across the nation and world, more attention is being paid to the mental health of students than ever before, and for good reason. According to some of the latest research available, “…three out of 10 students have struggled with depression in the last two weeks, and over one in four have expressed issues with anxiety. Even more distressing is the one in 20 college students who had created a suicide plan in the past year.” Suicide is the second leading cause of death in the age group that includes traditional college students. It has also been well-documented that student mental health challenges lead to discontinuous enrollment, stop-out, and lower GPAs.

Those are alarming figures, to be sure. Many institutions of higher education have stepped up efforts to better address student mental health while others are lagging behind. The American Council on Education conducted a survey to which 410 college presidents responded. Fully 81% of the presidents say student mental health has become more of a priority now than it was three years ago. About 71% of them have responded by reallocating or finding additional funds to do something about it. A quarter of them are hearing about student mental health issues and concerns on a weekly basis. When it comes to who is charged with addressing student mental health, 92% of the presidents place that responsibility with their VP of student affairs or the dean of students. These presidents also wish they could hire more staff for their campus counseling centers.

Students themselves in colleges and universities everywhere have stepped up to raise awareness about their mental health issues and reduce the stigma associated with asking for help. One such group is called Active Minds, a campus-based student group started by Alson Malmon when she was a junior at the University of Pennsylvania following the suicide of her older brother. 16 years later, Active Minds has chapters on 700 campuses a reach as many as 600,000 students with a combination of campus awareness campaigns, events, advocacy, and outreach. On other campuses, students have formed various kinds of peer support groups to help each other address mental health issues.

But these are all campus-based activities – brick-and-mortar counseling centers, physical in-person meetings of groups and organizations. Where does this leave online learners’ mental health? Who is looking after the well-being of students who will never set foot on a physical campus during their learning journey? Given the growing number of online learners, this seems like it should be a top priority for any institution or company offering learning programs that take place entirely online. There are a couple examples worth noting.

How Post University is Addressing Online Learners’ Mental Health

Some of the reasons why online learners’ mental health is not being robustly addressed has to do with misperceptions, as outlined by Lisa Antel, director of the counseling center at Post University, in Connecticut. Part of why online programs are so appealing to educators is the belief that they can cost less because online students need fewer services. Mental health is often sidelined as a “discretionary” offering. This makes no sense to Antel, who notes that most of the 10,000 online learners at Post are working adults who have a much more complex array of responsibilities to families and employers than the average college-age student on a campus. People trying to balance work and family duties along with participation in an online learning program – many of which are purposefully intense and fast-paced – are arguably more vulnerable to a mental health tailspin when the fragile balance is thrown off by something. And they can’t just walk over to the campus counseling center if they’re nowhere near it. The mix of services related to online learners’ mental health Post is ramping up includes the following:

• Raising awareness by providing online learners with information about the importance of their mental health.
• HelpPro: A service to help online students find counseling options in their local area.
• 211.org: A more immediate way for students to get help in a mental health crisis.
• Mental health screenings: Available to both campus and online learners, these provide suggested next steps should the results warrant them.
• Instructor training: Online instructors receive training in what to watch out for with online learners’ mental health, which is different from what professors teaching students in physical classrooms observe as signals of possible mental health issues. Online instructors share anything they notice of concern with a campus threat assessment team.
• Crisis Intervention: If something extreme like a suicide attempt is mentioned, Campus Safety would reach out to the student, and also alert local authorities to check in on them.

While the above strategies and services are a good start, Antel will be the first to admit that more can and should be done. Institutions of higher education with online learning programs would do well to catch up to Post if they haven’t developed specific programming for online learners’ mental health, and then work hard to go above and beyond such modest beginnings to identify and help online students experiencing mental health problems.

Lambda School Partners with Modern Health for Online Learners’ Mental Health

Lambda School is the online tech-career training program for which students pay nothing until they’ve landed a job paying at least $50k per year (see my previous article, Will Lambda School Disrupt Online Education?). Co-founder and CEO Austen Allred recently announced Lambda is partnering with Modern Health to provide new mental health benefits to students and staff. Here’s how he described what would be offered:

“Today Lambda School is announcing a new partnership with Modern Health to give our staff and students access to resources that help support personal well-being and mental health, including personalized assessment, evidence-based digital healthcare, and access to licensed coaches and therapists. This partnership will assist our students and staff with eight areas of wellness: Work Performance, Stress & Anxiety, Healthy Lifestyles, Financial Wellbeing, Belonging and Inclusion, Life Challenges, Mindfulness and Meditation, and Relationships.”

Students will access services through the Modern Health app and are eligible to take advantage of up to six virtual visits with a professional coach and up to six in-person sessions with a licensed therapist – all at no cost to them. The plan also includes unlimited texting with a coach, and access to a digital library with courses for building resiliency and tools for managing stress. Crisis prevention services will also be available when needed.

This is a substantial array of services being made available to students free of charge by a startup EdTech company looking to do right as it attempts to disrupt online learning. I can’t help but wonder how many coding bootcamps are willing to make this kind of commitment to their online learners’ mental health.

Oregon State University’s Ecampus Mental Health Services

There are more than 6,000 students who take classes exclusively online through Oregon State University’s Ecampus. The average age of these online learners is 31, most of them are working adults and parents returning to school many years after first starting, and nearly half are first-generation college students. That all adds up to a lot of pressure to succeed. Here’s how Oregon State is supporting online learners’ mental health:

• Special Web Page: An Ecampus students web page on the university’s Counseling and Psychological Services website that outlines how to get help and support.
• Ecampus Success Coach: While these success coaches are academically focused, they can help students sort out what’s contributing to their mental health challenges and refer them to resources and support.
• CAPS Counseling: Students located within the state of Oregon can access limited distance counseling through CAPS.
• Resilience Toolbox: A variety of online and self-help resources students can access and use at their own pace.

Similar to Post University, Oregon State University has taken some important first steps in addressing online learners’ mental health. CAPS associate director of clinical services Marcey Bamba helps ensure Ecampus students know what’s available, and hopes the university will continue to expand the services and resources available to online students.

There is no shortage of stories in the media about the student mental health crisis that has been growing in recent years, but very few of those headlines are about online learners. What’s needed now is more coverage of what the online learning community is doing in order to show what successful models look like for addressing online learners’ mental health.

Featured Image: Daria Nepriakhina, Unsplash.

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What is arguably the world’s first eLearning platform devoted exclusively to the sports industry–AKTO–was officially launched in October to help young people from developing countries achieve their dreams of a career in the sports industry. While sports career eLearning in and of itself is not a new idea, an eLearning platform designed for and devoted to this singular purpose is.

AKTO Sports Career eLearning Platform

With a motto of “Play Your Future,” AKTO aims to help prepare youth for employment opportunities to grab their own slice of a global sports industry pie worth hundreds of billions of dollars. And the way it’s going to achieve this goal is through eLearning.

The platform will feature content developed and certified by experts from within the sports industry, delivered most often in the form of animated videos thought to be especially appealing to its youth-aged target market. Gamification features will also be prominent in order to keep student engagement high and evoke a healthy level of competition among learners.

Topics will cover key areas of the sports industry such as marketing, finance and governance. You can think of it as vocational training to prepare for directly entering the sports workforce, and/or as specialized pre-learning to help them get into a bachelor’s or master’s degree program in higher education.

Learners will have the opportunity to customize their learning path through an open model framework, with content doled out in a microlearning approach based on 3-minute videos. The company website is in its early stages of development and says pricing will be affordable but doesn’t give details. Learning takes place through the AKTO mobile app available for iOS devices from the App Store and Android devices through Google Play.

More than Just eLearning

Everyone knows there’s more to developing a successful career than just learning. AKTO recognizes this and plans to help learners work towards concrete job opportunities by facilitating direct relationships between leaners and potential employers. Employers could be federations, clubs, leagues or specific team properties. But in an interesting move, qualification for internship and job interview opportunities hinges upon learner performance and engagement. Only the top-ranking students will be eligible for those opportunities. After all, sports are competitive if nothing else.

Initial Geographic Focus

AKTO isn’t rolling out in all global markets at the same time. Its initial focus is beta testing in Cape Verde with the blessing of the Cape Verde Government, the University of Cape Verde, and the country’s entire sports ecosystem. When beta testing is complete, AKTO will be launched in addition markets, including Portugal at the end of 2019, Brazil in the first quarter of 2020, Mexico and other Latin American countries in late 2020, Africa and the Middle East in 2021, and then India and China in 2022.

Featured Image: Abigail Keenan, Unsplash.

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TikTok, the Chinese social media platform, has been downloaded by more than 1 billion users around the world. The platform allows for users to upload, edit, and share short, bite-sized videos. It has grown wildly popular with younger generations, attracted the ire of U.S. lawmakers, and has even found its way into the sphere of eLearning with the hashtag #EduTok. But is it even possible to impart knowledge in a video lasting a few seconds?

To understand what’s happening with TikTok, it’s important to recall the short history of its precursor short-video platform: Vine.

TikTok’s Precursor: Vine

When Vine was developing its short-form video hosting service in 2012, Twitter quickly snatched it up before it launched in January of 2013. Videos could be browsed and shared through Vine’s social platform via the Vine mobile app and shared to other social networks as well. Its six-second looping videos were an instant hit with many people, and within two years the platform had amassed more than 200 million active users.

In spite of this success, Twitter cancelled Vine in 2016 as other social media networks launched their own short-form video features. The cancellation also had a lot to do with the fact that marketers found the platform’s six-second video length limit to restrictive for effect marketing, opting instead for longer short-form video options. Many loyal fans of Vine were sorely disappointed when it went away.

TikTok Makes a Splash in Social Media

During the final stages of Vine being taken out of circulation, the China-based app TikTok (called Douyin in China) was in development. Chinese developer ByteDance launched Douyin in China in September 2016, and outside of China as TikTok in October 2016. A year later in October 2018, it was the most-downloaded app in the US. By February 2019, the TikTok and Douyin apps had achieved more than 1 billion downloads.

Although TikTok is like Vine in the basic sense of being a social media app for creating and sharing short videos, there are key differences. Regular short looping videos recorded using the TikTok app can vary in length from 3-15 seconds. Up to four different 15-second videos can be strung together for a grand maximum of 60 seconds. Longer videos recorded outside the app can be uploaded into TikTok, but longer videos cannot be recorded using the app. The Duet feature allows one user to combine or “duet” their video with that of another user into one looping video. The two videos are shown side-by-side. Users who don’t want their content to be used in duets can disable the Duet feature on their account, or make their whole account private.

The platform has become hugely popular all over the world. It also faces a similar array of challenges as other social networks over inappropriate content (sexually explicit, cyberbullying, deep-fakes, etc.) and how to develop and implement effective content moderation policies. It has been banned in various countries such as Indonesia and India, but managed to have those bans lifted in relatively short order. The ban in India lasted three weeks and the ban in Indonesia lasted only eight days.

TikTok Focusing on Positive Uses, Including #EduTok

The bans and censorship issues around content have led TikTok to focus as much attention as possible on the more positive ways of using the platform. The official stated mission of the company is to “…inspire creativity and bring joy.” Its TikTok for Good campaign highlights various hashtags centered on good causes to make a positive difference in the world, and also gives advice to organizations who want to leverage the platform for their own good causes.

In June 2019, the company launched the hashtag #EduTok, and the videos bearing the hashtag quickly amassed 37 billion views. Based on that impressive response, the company began further solidifying partnerships with a variety of EdTech companies to create and publish education content on TikTok, including the following:

• Vedantu: An online learning company in India where students can browse, discover, and learn from the tutor of their choice. The service is aimed primarily at helping students in India prepare for the Indian Certificate of Secondary Education (ICSE) examination and successfully complete the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) curriculum. 
• Vidya Guru: This is another company in India that focuses on training students for a career in the public sector, including preparation for SSC exams, banking exams, CTET (central teacher eligibility test), law enforcement, and government jobs. 
• Hello English: Asia’s largest online English learning platform founded and headquartered in India.
• CETKing: An educational company in India that provides both classroom and online instruction and mentorship to get students ready for wide variety of exams. 
• Testbook: An Indian company providing online support and instruction to students preparing for an array of government-related and public career exams.

You might notice that all of these EdTech partners are Indian companies. When a country with a population of more than 1.3 billion bans your app, you can bet the app company is going to bend over backwards to make things right. India is one of the countries that temporarily banned TikTok. In an effort to show it is supportive of democratizing learning and supporting the economic well-being of India, TikTok chose to begin its foray into eLearning there.

Sachin Sharma, Director of Sales and Partnerships for TikTok India, puts it this way:

“Digital evolution and the boom in smartphone adoption is redefining the learning patterns of the digital community at large. With these partnerships we are building an education ecosystem that gives learners the opportunities to thrive in their respective careers and subjects and help solve their challenges with ease while using a platform that they love. We are very happy to have established education partners joining us in our mission and we look forward to seeing our audience benefit from the content.”

Depending on how #EduTok plays out in India, TikTok might well decide to launch digital learning campaigns in other markets as well. The initial response, although early in the rollout phase, indicates there may indeed be a place for TikTok in online learning.

Featured Image: Wikimedia Commons.

The post TikTok Enters eLearning Market Through #EduTok appeared first on eLearningInside News.

When I first heard of Lambda School, I must admit I was skeptical. The basic idea is that Lambda will teach people high-tech skills and students don’t pay anything for their education until they land a job that pays at least $50,000 a year. My skepticism was a knee-jerk reaction to how similar it sounds to all those annoying injury-lawyer commercials that say something like “you pay nothing unless we get money for you.” Lambda School is basically saying the same thing, “you pay nothing until you get a great job.”

Once I got past that initial reaction and looked into what Lambda School is doing, I am thoroughly intrigued. If their approach pans out, I think it could seriously disrupt online education as we know it today. The company also just hired its first chief technology officer (CTO), Namrata Ganatra, who is a woman – which is pretty disruptive in and of itself.

Lambda School’s Innovative Business Model: Learn Now, Pay Later

The Lambda School business model was created to offer people what they call a “zero-risk” path into a tech career. Accepted students can start learning tech skills without paying anything at all up front. Right now the four learning tracks offered include the following:

• Data Science: Python, SQL, Statistics & Modeling, Machine Learning, Linear Algebra, Databases, Big Data, and Visualization.
• Full-Stack Web Development: JavaScript, HTML, CSS, Node, React, Python, Express, and SQL.
• iOS Development: Swift, Objective-C, C, Python, UI, Networking, OOP, and Core Data.
• User Experience Design: User Research, Ideation, Usability, Wireframes, High-Fidelity Design, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

The key to making this business model work is the Income Share Agreement (ISA), which is only available to residents of the US, EU and UK. When students enroll, they sign a ISA and start learning. After completing 1,500 hours of interactive online coursework (full-time over 9 months or part-time over 18 months), they still don’t have to pay anything. And they won’t pay anything until they land a job making at least $50k/year. At that point, they will begin making monthly payments equal to 17% of their gross pay for two full years. And it’s capped at $30k total, even if they land an insanely well-paying job. The ISA is also time-capped at five years, whether you’ve paid anything or nothing. A graduate who has to stop working puts their ISA on pause, with no interest accumulation. Students also have the option to pay $20,000 up-front for their education.

Is it working? The Lambda website claims it has helped thousands of students jumpstart their tech career so far, with 86% of its graduates getting hired within 6 months and making more than $50k. That’s pretty impressive by anyone’s standards. I can only imagine that this means it must be highly competitive to get in. Lots of people would jump at the chance of getting an education without paying anything up-front, which means Lambda School must be screening applicants very carefully to ensure they get their investment back. As explained on the Lambda School FAQs: “This is our way of investing in you. We select students we believe will be successful, and cover the costs of your education until you’re in a financial position to pay us back.”

You can also be sure that they put some serious effort into helping you land the job that is key to recouping their investment. The school’s commitment in this regard is described on the website this way: “We’ll match you with expert career coaches, local mentors, and our nationwide network of hiring partners to help you find the right fit.” Elements of the career placement program include the following:

• Meet 1:1 with mentors: Students are paired up with a mentor in their city who is working in the same field and who will provide additional support during their job search.
• Polished resumes and profiles: Creating a polished resume, portfolio, and LinkedIn profile with expert feedback and guidance.
• Practicing interview skills: Lambda provides technical and behavioral interview prep.

Reviews of Lambda School

Everything outlined above are the basics anyone can see about Lambda School as presented on the company’s website. Lambda also presents a series of compelling student stories and testimonials. But what are people saying on third-party platforms about Lambda? I could only find two sources with a decent number of reviews as of this writing:

• Course Report: 72 reviews with an average rating of 4.9 out of 5 (source).
• Switchup: 156 reviews with an average rating of 4.9 out of 5 (source).

It gets really high marks from participants, and that’s important. So what are the potential downsides? It seems to me that the biggest danger with this model is people who live in places with a high cost of living who land a job that only pays between $50-$60 after graduating. Remember that the 24 payments of 17% is calculated on the graduate’s gross pay, meaning before any taxes are taken out. The rub, of course, is you have to make your payment out of your monthly take-home pay after taxes and any other deductions have been taken out. In a high-cost-of-living location, your take-home pay on a $60k/year salary ($5,000/month) is going to be something around 25% less than your gross, so call it $3,750. Your Lambda School payment will be $850, reducing your take-home pay to just $2,900. That’s what you’d have left to pay all your expenses in a high-cost-of-living city. Ouch. Still, it could work out quite well for people who land the right high-paying job and are able to live in a place that’s not especially expensive.

Lambda School Hires its First CTO: Namrata Ganatra

Kudos to Lambda for not just trying to come up with an innovative way to do for-profit online education, but also for hiring a woman to be its first chief technology officer. Namrata Ganatra was born and raised in India and had dreams of a computer-related career, ideally at Microsoft. But with three siblings and a middle-class family, there was no way of paying for the schooling she would need.

She was able to leverage her strength as a highly successful student into scholarships that helped her pay for a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the University of Mumbai. She didn’t apply right away for a job at Microsoft, at least not directly. She wanted them to notice her, so she first went to work for a little startup that handled small projects end-to-end for Microsoft. And Microsoft did notice her. Within three years she had an offer to join Microsoft full-time in Seattle, where she helped build the company’s first billing platform. While working for Microsoft she also obtained her Master’s degree in Computer Science from Stanford University by studying part-time on top of her full-time job.

Namrata’s time at Microsoft ended when her fiancé received a great job offer in San Francisco. They moved there and Namrata took a position with a startup that was eventually acquired by PayPal. Then she went on to Facebook to lead their payments engineering team, then served as CTO at Stockpile, and was then briefly Senior Director of Engineering for Coinbase when she stumbled across Lambda School with its model of making tech education accessible and free of risk, something about which she is passionate.

When asked what impresses Ganatra the most since joining Lambda, her answer is how obsessed the school is with student success – which is good news for prospective students. Lambda School isn’t about granting credentials. Instead, it’s about teaching the kinds of skills that employers are demanding more and more right now. If getting a practical education from a school that teaches high-tech skills without having to pay for it up-front sounds like a pipe dream, Lambda is trying its best to make that dream a reality. Traditional institutions of higher education simply have far too many “legacy” overhead costs in the form of physical campuses and tenured faculty positions to offer this kind of model.

How successful Lambda School will be in its attempt to disrupt the traditional model of online education remains to be seen, but I for one will be watching closely to see how it goes.

Featured Image: Chris Ried, Unsplash.

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There was a recent press release posted on Yahoo! Finance about a partnership between corrections technology company GTL and vocational training company VirtualiaNet. The joint project could bring skills training to inmates across the nation in the form of eLearning to become freelancers in the rising gig economy. Although this story didn’t make a big splash in the media, it could be a real game-changer for millions of people. In fact, inmate eLearning could be the source of a whole new wave of skilled workers desperately needed in today’s increasingly tight labor market.

Making the Connection Between Mass Incarceration and Employment

 According to the most recent Mass Incarceration report from the non-profit, non-partisan Prison Policy Initiative, the criminal justice system holds nearly 2.3 million people in 3,163 local jails, 1,719 state prisons, 109 federal prisons and a variety of other detention facilities. Yes, that is a lot of people. But consider also that, at any given moment, there are 4.5 million people under the supervision of community corrections, meaning they are on probation or parole for some period of time after being released from incarceration (this can range from months to years).

The 4.5 million on probation and parole represents a pool of people trying to transition back into society post-incarceration. One of the biggest challenges faced by this population is securing gainful employment. Phil Alfaro, Cofounder of VirtualiaNet, notes that studies have shown how even more than year after being released from jail or prison, more than 60% of former inmates remain unemployed.

It’s easy to paint this population with a very broad brush. After all, what company wants to hire a criminal, right? This is why many companies still ask about a person’s criminal record on their employment applications. But many see this as an unfair disadvantage to people who have served the time for their crime and are trying to find their way back into society. Their applications are routinely tossed out in the very first stage of screening without any consideration that they may be perfectly qualified and able to do the job, which may have nothing at all to do with whatever landed them in jail or prison.

In reaction to this perception of discrimination, there has been a growing “ban the box” movement where companies voluntarily remove questions about criminal records on their employment applications. If a candidate advances into the final rounds of a recruiting and hiring process, there will likely be a background check that will reveal their criminal record, and that is the point at which a company can make an informed decision about whether or not to pursue an offer of employment with that candidate.

Former president Barack Obama recognized the difficulty faced by these millions of people who can’t even get their foot in the door of the economy in spite of having officially paid their debt to society. His administration responded by launching the Fair Chance Business Pledge. In addition to banning the box, companies taking this pledge “are committed to providing individuals with criminal records, including formerly incarcerated individuals, a fair chance to participate in the American economy.”

While these efforts are laudable, it’s unclear what real impact, if any, they are having on the employment prospects of the millions of people with criminal records who are trying to find work. But what if there were a way to bypass all of that? This is the promise and potential of the GTL/VirtualiaNet partnership for inmate eLearning mentioned at the outset of this article.

The Gig Economy, Freelancing, and Inmate eLearning

 There are now dozens of freelancing websites that connect people with particular skills to companies who need project work completed utilizing those skills. Sites like Upwork, Freelancer, Project4Hire, peopleperhour, Simply Hired, Fiverr, and many more collectively post thousands of jobs. People get hired based on their ability to do the work and write a compelling bid for a project. Most include freelancer profiles to explain your skills and a portfolio area to showcase previous work.

The distinct advantage of freelancing in the gig economy is that there is no box to check if you have a criminal record. The hiring company typically doesn’t care about criminal records, they just want to know if you can produce quality work. After all, in the vast majority of freelancing gigs obtained online, everything will happen in the online environment. The freelancer will never meet the hiring company in person or ever spend time there. It’s naturally a more level playing field where former inmates could have a shot at gainful employment without the stigma and discrimination associated with having a criminal record.

The challenge, of course, is whether or not the formerly incarcerated have the skills that are most in demand in the growing gig economy. And this is why GTL and VirtualiaNet want to bring inmate eLearning to prisons and jails across the nation. The VirtualiaNet course package includes nine different modules, each geared towards a different kind of digital job. They include transcriber, translator, customer support, virtual assistant, web content, social media manager, web designer, online advertising manager, and your own product or service. Participants can receive training in all nine vocations over the span of 90 days, and the goal is to reach a sustainable level of income within six months. That’s ambitious, but possible.

Is Corrections Ready for Inmate eLearning?

 While the approach being taken in the GTL/VirtualiaNet partnership could be a game-changer for millions of presently and formerly incarcerate people, there is a major stumbling block that has to be dealt with. It’s hidden away in the following quote from the press release:

“GTL is working to help inmates access this growing employment trend by offering VirtualiaNet coursework on its Learning Management System (LMS); the backbone of GTL’s education solution portfolio – delivering educational content for those inmates with the opportunity to access solutions.”

The key phrase is at the end of the quote: “…for those inmates with the opportunity to access solutions.” People serving longer sentences in state and federal prisons may or may not have various options available to them in terms of career development. But the quality and availability of offerings varies widely. It’s a much bleaker picture for people incarcerated in local and county jails, many of which have strict policies prohibiting inmates from ever using computers or accessing the internet for any reason.

What’s behind this varying access to devices and the internet? At its root is the core philosophy behind corrections. Should it be retributive or restorative? When corrections broadly or at specific facilities is constructed as a way to punish, to exact retribution for a crime committed, less attention is paid to what support and programming is needed for inmates to improve their post-incarceration prospects for employment and a more successful life. The result can be repeat offenders who get stuck in a vicious cycle of incarceration. If, however, there is a strong restorative and/or rehabilitative component to corrections, then more is done to ensure a smoother post-incarceration transition back into the community and society by providing opportunities for self-development and skills training.

I mentioned at the beginning of this article how the GTL/VirtualiaNet partnership could be a game-changer for those under the supervision of the corrections industry. But what would it take to make this come about? The answer is nothing short of a major shift in corrections, as well as society at large, toward a more rehabilitative and restorative framework that sees the merits of providing self-development programming and skills training for inmates. Until that shift gains more traction, inmate eLearning will remain little more than a good idea whose time ought to come.

Featured Image: Emiliano Bar, Unsplash.

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Millennials became the largest segment of the workforce in 2016, displacing the Baby Boomers who are now retiring in droves. Media headlines are sounding the alarm as the growing wave of retiring Boomers is putting a huge strain on the social security system many people rely on at least in part for income in retirement. What’s not getting as much attention as it should, however, is the “brain drain” effect as Boomers exit the workforce, taking with them all their general experience and wisdom acquired throughout their adult working lives. Even more critical is the specific knowledge they have about the last company where they worked at their time of retirement. Companies that want to avoid a major Baby Boomer brain drain must prioritize knowledge transfer strategies to capture essential information before it’s too late.

Baby Boomer Retirement by the Numbers

According to the Pew Research Center, it was 2011 when the oldest members of the Baby Boomer generation reached the standard retirement age of 65. In terms of the workforce, it began a two-decade period during which no fewer than 10,000 Boomers reach retirement age every single day. And while that rate will then start to decline, it won’t be until 2030 when all of them will be 65 or older. When that happens, fully 18% of the population of the US will be 65 and older.

Thanks to the lasting impacts of the Great Recession on retirement savings, there will no doubt be a lot of Boomers who will attempt to keep working past age 65 to make ends meet, but the plain fact of the matter is that most of them are going to retire and exit the workforce, resulting in the biggest “brain drain” effect corporate America has ever witnessed. Are companies ready, willing, and able to mitigate the effects this brain drain will have? It will depend on how agile they are in creating and implementing knowledge transfer strategies.

Why Knowledge Transfer Strategies are Critical

I recall a number of years ago when a local stage college facing declining enrollments and financial challenges opted to offer early retirement to many of its employees who had been there the longest. Why? Because they could replace older, more expensive employees with younger, less expensive employees and save a ton of money. But the first thing that popped into my mind upon hearing of this was what they were going to lose in making this move – all the institutional knowledge held within in the longest-tenured employees. I couldn’t help but wonder if, in the final analysis, the college would reap the financial benefits of cutting costs only to discover they did more harm than good through a self-inflicted and sudden brain drain.

The knowledge loss can be all too real and profound, as explained by long-time General Mills employee Dave Toblemann, who retired several years ago. In an interview with National Public Radio, he put it this way: “Let’s say you have 30 people retire in a year and the average years of experience is 30 years. So you just had 1,000 years walk away. That’s hard to lose.” As you might expect, workers of the Baby Boomer generation are more likely to have been employed in the same company for far longer than is expected of today’s younger workers. This makes the Baby Boomer brain drain effect more serious for any company with a higher percentage of Boomers in their workforce.

Industries Facing Serious Brain Drain Challenges

While the Baby Boomer brain drain is affecting all sectors of the economy, there can be no doubt that manufacturing is facing the biggest crisis. Here’s how it was laid out last year in an IndustryWeek article:

“According to research from the Society for Human Resource Management, citing Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data, the percentage of boomers retiring has doubled over the past eight years and will continue to increase until the last of the boomers reach 65 around 2030. This is particularly challenging for manufacturers. Not only are more than a quarter of manufacturing workers over the age of 55, but the BLS also notes that manufacturers have the highest tenure compared to other sectors. That translates into more institutional knowledge within the sector, which is now steadily declining, as is the productivity that these experts bring. In a survey of manufacturing HR professionals, 34% said this would be a real problem, and 11% said it would be a crisis by 2025.”

Another industry being hit hard by the retiring boomer brain drain is the insurance business. The average age of insurance company employees was in the late 50s as of several years ago, and the industry has been discussing the crisis in earnest since then. In many cases, they’re explicitly trying to entice recent retirees back into the business with more flexible work hours, better health care benefits, and opportunities to mentor younger employees.

It might also just come down to what the situation is at any given company, regardless of the industry. Michelin America, for example, has 40% of its workforce getting close to retirement age, and the average tenure among those employees is 25 years. If they all retire over a five-year period, the company will experience a major brain drain. The company is trying to slow the process down through phased retirement, as well as offering part-time hours to many retirees. The critical areas being affected the most at Michelin are technical maintenance and long-standing vendor/client relationships.

Knowledge Transfer Strategies

When you start digging into the details of mitigating the brain drain effect, you’ll find many articles related to prevention – ways to keep key employees happy in order to retain them longer. But this tip simply doesn’t apply as much to workers who are retiring. Most aren’t just exiting a company, they’re exiting the workforce for good. This is why companies must prioritize knowledge transfer strategies aimed squarely at capturing the knowledge of retiring Boomers. Specific strategies include the following:

Cross Training: While many companies are at least vaguely aware that robust cross-training throughout the company can have big benefits, the Baby Boomer brain drain makes it one of the most important knowledge transfer strategies companies should be using now. Whether it’s within a department or across departments, there should be multiple people who could step in and be effective at performing the duties of a retirement-age worker who could leave at any moment. And then the company has at least one person in-house with enough of an understanding to train a new hire when that happens.

Job Shadowing: While the cross training strategy is a program that should be put into place throughout a company on an ongoing basis, job shadowing is for when the situation is urgent. As soon as a company finds out a key employee is going to retire (hopefully at least a week or more in advance), someone should immediately be assigned to shadowing the retiring worker to learn the ropes of what they do. For manual and physical labor positions, this could even include making video recordings to capture the details of the how the work is done.

Employee Exit Interview: The exit interview is typically a process HR handles with departing employees to learn from their experience working at the company. It can also be turned into a last resort way of addressing brain drain from retiring employees. Use it to learn more about their daily activities, the status of important projects in progress, and any other vital information that might otherwise not be documented.

Hire Them Back: Some retirees may be willing to jump back into some kind of role at a company, which effectively extends the horizon for making knowledge transfer happen before it’s completely off the table. Not long after previously-mentioned General Mills employee Dave Toblemann retired, he was back at the company, but this time through a staffing agency specializing in retiree placement. Companies can also bring retirees back into the fold as consultants. IBM in Belgium does something similar with a company it set up called Skill Team to employ those forced into retirement when the company needed to cut costs. The retirees work 58% of the time they were putting before, and make about 88% of what they were previously making. These can be win-win scenarios where retirees extend their work-life and compensation while the company retains a significant chunk of its knowledge pool.

eLearning: The rising Millennial segment of the workforce wants their workplace learning to be available on-demand through engaging eLearning experiences that make use of all the latest technologies such as mobile learning, video content, gamification, virtual reality, and so on. Companies actively capturing retiring boomer knowledge need to do so in ways that facilitate incorporating it into the kinds of eLearning experiences Millennials demand.

Given what’s at stake for so many companies facing Baby Boomer brain drain, now is the time to put knowledge transfer strategies into place.

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You arrive to your workplace for another day on the job, but things aren’t right. You feel exhausted even though you slept reasonably well. You’ve got lots of work to plow through but you lack motivation. The mere thought of work makes you feel frustrated. You try to get into your work but you feel like you just can’t focus properly. And you’ve been feeling this way for weeks. You could be suffering from workplace burnout. It’s not just in your head, either. The World Health Organization (WHO) recently brought new attention to this problem. Is there a role for eLearning to play in addressing workplace burnout?

WHO Revises Workplace Burnout in ICD-11

ICD-11 is now out (11^th revision to the International Classification of Diseases) and it contains a new, more detailed description of what the WHO calls burn-out. Yes, the WHO hyphenates it in their materials, but in the U.S., we write it as one word. It’s important to understand, however, that just because workplace burnout appears in IDC-11, it doesn’t mean it’s a “disease” in the technical sense. It is not considered a medical condition. Instead, it is described as an occupation phenomenon. As such, it is included in the chapter of the document that has to do with various factors that affect people’s health even though they aren’t technically illnesses. Here’s how burnout is described in IDC-11:

Burn-out is a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. It is characterized by three dimensions:

• Feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion;
• Increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one’s job; and
• Reduced professional efficacy.

Burn-out refers specifically to phenomena in the occupational context and should not be applied to describe experiences in other areas of life.

Although burnout was included in ICD-10, the description was a bit vaguer than the one provided in ICD-11. Perhaps even more importantly, the WHO has announced it is going to develop evidence-based guidelines for mental well-being in the workplace.

Who Is Responsible for Burnout?

People who study workplace burnout are welcoming the new attention to what has become a serious problem for many people. Some also think employers should feel a sense of responsibility to monitor conditions in the workplace, such as the following:

• Is there a sense of community in the workplace?
• Are there strong social relationships?
• Is the environment collegial?
• How burdensome is the workload?
• Do workers have a sense of agency in the workplace?
• Can people achieve a healthy work-life balance in the company?

Workplace burnout hasn’t received serious or widespread attention. This might be in part because people think of it as an individual problem people have to just deal with on their own. Then again, when it appears to be rampant in specific industries, it can be worrisome. This was what happened with air traffic controllers back in the 1980s and 1990s. Word got out how stressful the job was and actions were taken. After all, everyone wants the people in charge of keeping planes from crashing into each other to be fully engaged.

A more recent focal point is workplace burnout among physicians. People are understandably concerned that the people providing their medical care might be suffering from burnout. And yet very little in the way of good research is even happening on the topic. One recent survey found 63% of nurses report burnout.

Some even fear that an entire generation could suffer from the condition, as Anne Helen Petersen wrote in How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation. They’ve been groomed from day one to be constantly “on” when it comes to work, and it’s beginning to take a toll. Given the prominence of eLearning throughout the corporate landscape, it seems reasonable to wonder if it can play a role in reducing workplace burnout.

eLearning Courses About Burnout and Related Topics

If you’re interested in finding courses that are about managing stress or avoiding burnout in the workplace, it’s a bit harder to do than you might think. If you attempt searches using combinations of “eLearning” and “burnout” or “stress” you’ll see why. What comes up are all the articles geared towards learning professionals for how they can keep their learners engaged and avoid eLearning burnout. Finding eLearning materials to help workers manage stress and avoid burnout takes a different search tactic. Using “stress reduction eLearning course” yields the following:

• Unum (UK): Managing Stress in the Workplace. Free online stress workshop with six interactive modules that include quizzes, videos, PDFs and discussion tools to cover topics such as what is stress, why manage it, how to recognize the signs of stress, managing stress-related problems, your role as a line manager, and keeping you and your team healthy.
• Total Success Training (UK): Stress Management – Understanding Stress. This free course focuses on understanding stress and your responses to it along with using several different new stress management techniques.
• Palouse Mindfulness: Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR). Assembled by certified MBSR instructor Dave Potter, this free eight-week course would be of interest to anyone who likes the idea of “mindfulness” as found in the works of Jon Kabat-Zinn. If you do a search on MBSR (spelling it out), you’ll find similar courses, but most of them won’t be free.
• Carole Spiers Group (UK): This is a full-blown workplace stress and wellbeing consulting firm, but they also offer a free Six-Week Lifestyle Management eCourse for learning how to live stress-free.
• Highfield e-Learning (UK): Stress Management Short Course is only 20-40 minutes but covers a good deal of ground related to understanding and managing stress.
• Verztec Learning (Singapore): Stress Relief and Stress Reduction. This is a one-hour course costing $49.99 per user license. The little preview snippet wasn’t especially compelling.

The above are just a few highlights from the first couple of pages of search results. None of them looked particularly impressive. It’s interesting to note how many of them come from the U.K. Are they more concerned about workplace stress in the U.K. than the U.S.? Another approach to finding potential stress-related eLearning courses is to go to some of the larger course providers and see what’s available. Here’s a summary:

• Udemy: 764 results returned when searching on the single term of “stress,” and most of the results appear to be right on track for workplace stress or stress in general. The wide range of offerings are priced from $19.99 up to $199.99. You can filter results in different ways to see what bubbles to the top based on ratings, price, duration, etc.
• LinkedIn Learning (Lynda): 3,100+ results when searching on “stress,” or 1,400+ for “stress management.” Search results can be filtered a number of ways to fine-tune the results, including content type, skill level, release date, duration, and so on.
• Coursera: Using the same single search term of “stress” yielded only 46 results, not one of which was on-point in terms of reducing or managing workplace stress. How is that possible? Using “stress management” didn’t improve the results at all.
• Skillshare: This site doesn’t even let you conduct a search of courses without first signing up, which feels a little desperate. But you can see examples of courses in different categories, and the productivity category did have one related to stress called Burn Your Burnout: Strategies to Fight Stress and Burnout in Your Life and Work, but the short introductory snippet was a total snooze-fest.

Other sites are more focused on specific kinds of skillsets or knowledge areas and yielded nothing on the topic, including Simplilearn, QuickStart, Udacity, Khan Academy, Pluralsight, Treehouse, Codeacademy, and Code Avengers.

What was missing from all these search results was something that would probably be the most helpful – microlearning courses for reducing stress. Focused searching on that topic yielded the following result:

Cortex Leadership Consulting: Stressed for Success. This is a two-week microlearning quick course that comes with a $297 price tag. It would have to be very good indeed to justify the price.

And that was it – a single result for microlearning stress reduction content. There is a clear opportunity here for some enterprising eLearning professional to fill a niche – hopefully without stressing over it too much. In general, the eLearning offerings available on stress reduction vary widely, and none are specifically positioned to take advantage of the growing concern over the phenomenon of workplace burnout.

Featured Image: Eutah Mizushima, Unsplash.

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Millennials reached two big milestones in 2016. Not only did they become the largest living generation overall (displacing Boomers), but they also became the largest segment of the workforce, with one in three workers belonging to the generation (more than either Boomers or Gen-Xers). For employers who think the Millennial stereotypes are true, this could be seen as worrisome. One question that has been on the minds of learning professionals is to what extent Millennial workplace learning needs are different from other generations.

Many Millennials are “Digital Natives”

One of the most talked-about characteristics of the Millennial generation is how most (but not all) of them are so-called digital natives, meaning they were born into-, and raised in, the brave new world of digital and mobile technologies. Millennials who have grown up without being steeped in digital technologies, whether by design or happenstance, should not be considered digital natives. The key question is whether digital natives are fundamentally different from the many people who are digital ‘immigrants’ – those who are also steeped in digital technologies but weren’t born into it from day one. People were worried Millennials would automatically be inferior at face-to-face social skills from being online too much. Others have assumed they will be much better at multitasking. Yet others figured they would be naturally better at both using and/or fixing computers and other digital equipment.

These have all turned out to be Millennial digital native myths. The youngest working generation is no more socially stunted than digital immigrants. They are also not any better at using or fixing digital implements. And as for multitasking, keep in mind that the human brain can only focus on one task at a time, which means “multitasking” is really just switching frequently between different tasks. While it’s true that Millennials are more likely to engage in multitasking than older generations, they aren’t any better at it than anyone else.

Are Digital Native Brains Fundamentally Differently?

It was in 2001 when education consultant Marc Prensky claimed digital native Millennial children “…think and process information fundamentally differently than their predecessors.” He even suggested their brains had become physically different. He was seeing a rapidly expanding gulf from digital immigrant teachers and digital native students, who seemed to speaking entirely different languages. The teaching methods of digital immigrants seem hopelessly outdated to digital natives who are used to everything being online and instantly available.

In 2008 Dr. Gary Small, a psychiatrist at the University of California Los Angeles, had co-authored a book called iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind. He and his co-author (and wife) Gigi Vorgan also suggested that the brains of digital natives were being rewired by their exposure to digital life. While his thoughts were largely speculative (as opposed to evidence-based), some studies do seem to validate the idea, such as one showing greater brain engagement among digital natives reading a website online than when reading printed text. The plasticity of the brain does mean that neural connections are made based on activity, so the more one does one type of activity, the stronger those connections will be (and the less one does another thing, the weaker those connections become). But this applies to all areas of life and is not unique to being a digital native. One outcome is that digital natives who do the most, if not all, of their reading digitally may struggle a bit more in educational programs that are print-based.

In this sense, the brains of digital natives aren’t fundamentally different in the way they work – any new activity repeated creates new neural connections. For digital natives, this just means they tend to be better at digital life earlier on, and more of them fall into this category than older generations. But digital immigrants are also forming those new neural connections as they immerse themselves in digital life. In short, the most solid thing to be said about it is that Millennials who are also digital natives are likelier to be more comfortable in the digital environment from an early age. And the same would hold true for everyone coming along after Millennials.

Millennial Workplace Learning

How does all of this translate into Millennial workplace learning? It’s about their preferences more than anything else. But this is also very important. After all, there are only going to be more digital natives moving forward, not fewer.

Digital Native Millennials are going to want their learning programs to be digital, meaning eLearning. And they’re going to want eLearning to be on-demand with high quality. If your company hasn’t fully embraced eLearning for its learning and training programs, or has a clunky, outdated learning management system (LMS), you’re not doing yourself any favors with the growing Millennial part of your workforce. In fact, the Harvard Business Review highlighted how more than only 40% of leaders 36 or younger say the L&D programs at their companies are “excellent” while 51% describe them as “inconsistent or underperforming.” Furthermore, an extensive 2011 survey published by PWC showed that among Millennials, “excellent training/development programs” ranked third for what they want from potential employers, and “training and development” was rated as the single most important workplace benefit to them.

In an increasingly tight labor market, companies might find themselves having a hard time hiring and retaining Millennials if they don’t up their digital game on the workplace learning front. Now would be the time to start making the changes needed to meet Millennial workplace learning needs. A significant chunk of the learning offered also needs to be geared towards leadership development. A Deloitte survey in 2016 revealed that of the Millennials planning to leave their organization within the next two years, 71% said it is because they aren’t satisfied with how their leadership skills are being developed. Meanwhile, a Millennial survey by The Hartford found that 60% of Millennials want leadership skills training from their employers.

Microlearning should be implemented as much as possible with digital natives because it aligns best with how their digital lives happen, and it’s already shown itself to work well at many companies. It also goes without saying that eLearning for digital natives must be mobile-optimized for smartphones, tablets and even wearable technologies. Many Millennial digital natives have also been thoroughly steeped in modern gaming, which means both gamification and game-based learning are going to go over well with many of them. If your company has ample resources, consider Virtual Reality (VR) learning, Augmented Reality (AR) learning and Mixed Reality (MR) Learning. Finally, working in robust opportunities for personalization along social media elements will also help.

It is time for employers to ditch the Millennial stereotypes and start catering to the workplace learning preferences of digital natives or risk losing talent. The companies who take the steps outlined above will be well on their way to the winning combination of approaches to learning and training that will serve the digital natives of the Millennial and rising generations for years to come.

Featured Image: Helen Lopes, Unsplash.

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Among the most-read articles on this site last year were two articles about microlearning, including Microlearning Essentials: The What and Why and Corporate Microlearning Examples: Real-World Case Studies. This article is presented to interested readers in order to provide a corporate microlearning update for 2019.

Corporate Microlearning: More than Buzzword

According to the Association of Talent Development (ATD) It appears microlearning has moved beyond the “passing trend” phase to settle into a bona fide method through which more and more corporate learning occurs. Microlearning has become more than a buzzword because it’s incredibly effective. One of the reasons it works so well is because it opens up the possibility of just-in-time learning.

The “just-in-time” (JIT) concept first became known as it was applied in manufacturing in Japan, and specifically in Toyota’s production system (which also morphed into “lean” manufacturing). Then JIT is applied more generally to all kinds of inventory management to reduce the cost of keeping any more inventory around than what is needed. Companies figure out how to keep on hand only what they need in a relatively short timeframe, with more inventory delivered when they know it is needed. Applying this concept to learning makes a lot of sense – learn what you need right when you know you need it in a bite-sized bit of learning content with which you can engage in a matter of minutes. This can be especially useful in last-minute meeting preparations.

The Purchase of the Microlearning Pioneer

Grovo, founded in 2010, has been widely recognized as a pioneer of microlearning through its software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform. In fact, Grovo managed to trademark “microlearning” back in 2017 – a move that didn’t sit well with many corporate learning companies who were already using the word as a generic term for bite-sized learning. But Grovo argued that there’s more to microlearning than just serving up small chunks of content. The company claimed its trademarking of the term was a way to elevate the conversation and make sure people had a more robust concept in mind than might otherwise be the case. Will the company pursue legal action against those who use the term in a way that doesn’t live up to the Grovo standard? That remains to be seen, but first Grovo has to demonstrate exclusive use of the term for five years. Meanwhile, other companies can use the word without crediting Grovo. The only thing that is really protected is Grovo’s specific microlearning services.

The role of Grovo as a microlearning pioneer was further solidified when it was purchased at the end of 2018 by cloud-based learning and talent management solution provider Cornerstone OnDemand. Cornerstone paid $24 million in cash.

The 2018 Benchmark Report

Grovo isn’t the only microlearning leader. Axonify is another leading microlearning platform founded in 2011, just a year later than Grovo. But Axonify is the company that has taken the time to produce “…the first and only comprehensive analysis of what microlearning looks like in terms of general trends, adoption, demographics and industry applications” according to its 2018 Microlearning Global Benchmark Report. Here are some interesting highlights from the report about microlearning:

• Good for Deskless Workers. Adoption rates of microlearning are highest among companies who have a higher percentage of deskless workers, like retail (27%), manufacturing and logistics (25%), and the finance and insurance industry (22%). This makes sense because they can easily learn on their handheld device of choice (smartphone, tablet, etc.). Moreover, when companies allow workers to get microlearning training on mobile devices, training frequency increases by an eye-popping 42%.
• Boosts Learner Engagement. Because microlearning simply doesn’t have any room for fluff, learners appreciate getting right to the point in a short amount of time, and even more so when it incorporates gamification and/or is game-based. As a result, microlearning training and learning has much higher rates of engagement than traditional eLearning approaches. In fact, 74% of employees who have microlearning available to them participate in training every month.
• Better Knowledge Retention. Employees who receive training through microlearning are found to have 85% of the knowledge they need on the job, as opposed to knowing only 73% of what they needed when they first started. This can be described as a 12% “knowledge lift” thanks to microlearning.
• Gaming Works Best. Gamification can be thought of as the motivational wrapper on microlearning content (levels, avatars, badges, points, achievement rewards, competitive leaderboards, etc.) while content delivered as a game is game-based microlearning. Combining both make for truly irresistible learning and training experiences. When rewards are part of gamified/game-based microlearning, voluntary participation can increase by as much as 200%.

Corporate Microlearning in Action: Southeastern Grocers

Southeastern Grocers is the parent of such supermarket chains as BI-LO, Harveys, Winn-Dixie, and Fresco y Más, which means they need to effectively and efficiently train more than 45,000 associates. The company’s previous traditional computer-based training was described by the company’s Chief People Officer Liz Thompson as not very engaging. Thompson likened it to drinking water from a fire hose (meaning not helpful for knowledge retention). Southeastern Grocers worked with Axonify to develop its Gnome microlearning platform, which launched in 2016. Since implementing Gnome, the company has enjoyed a 15% knowledge lift and an impressive 97% participation rate. Thompson is pleased to see how workers are engaging the platform several times a week, often when on breaks, and are enjoying the competitive gamification features. Other grocery stores are signing on with Axonify to get these kinds of training benefits, including Wisconsin’s Festival Foods and southern California’s Northgate Gonzalez Market.

But Microlearning is Not Effective for Every Skill

The effectiveness of microlearning is found in the way it presents one manageable, very specific idea in a compact way, thereby avoiding outstripping a person’s working memory capacity and attention span. But it’s not necessarily the best way to teach everything. An article in Chief Learning Officer by Todd Maddox notes that what microlearning excels at is training for hard cognitive skills handled by the prefrontal cortex part of the brain. But when it comes to those soft people skills or situational awareness that rely more on the emotional and behavioral parts of the brain (the amygdala and the basal ganglia), microlearning might actually do more harm than good. Unfortunately, many learning and development vendors don’t necessarily understand these important distinctions based on brain science and are pumping out tons of microlearning content for everything under the sun, and some of it simply won’t work.

Featured Image: Luis Villasmil, Unsplash. 

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There is an ongoing debate about whether the traditional learning management system (LMS) is becoming obsolete or dying. Previous articles that lay this groundwork include Are Learning Management Systems Worth Improving? and Corporate Vendors Still Attract LMS Investment Funding. Those who lean towards the-LMS-is-dying side of the debate are likely to cite the rise of  the learning experience platform (LXP) as the emerging technologies and approaches that render the LMS a thing of the past. It’s worth taking a look at the LXP vs LMS debate in corporate eLearning to get a handle on what it means for companies of all sizes.

Is the LXP Replacing the LMS?

Josh Bersin of Bersin by Deloitte (his articles have appeared in Forbes, Chief Learning Officer, and his own website) coined LXP as a term a few years ago, and it quickly took root. Janet Clarey, Lead Advisor of Tech, Analytics and Learning at Bersin by Deloitte, provides the following definition:

LXPs are single-point-of-access, consumer-grade systems composed of integrated technologies enabling learning. They can do many tasks, such as curating and aggregating content, creating learning and career pathways, enabling networking, enhancing skill development, and tracking learning activities delivered via multiple channels and content partners. By delivering on a central platform, LXPs enable businesses to provide an engaging and learning-rich experience and may lessen their reliance on an LMS or talent suite as the learning hub (source).

What that high-level definition means in more practical terms has been translated by Josh Bersin into seven key characteristics of LXPs:

1. They present content in a “Netflix-like” interface, with recommendations, panels, mobile interfaces, and AI-driven recommendations.

2. They accommodate any form of content, including articles, podcasts, blogs, micro-learning, videos, and courses.

3. They are social, and include social profiles which connect content to people to create authority.

4. They have paths or learning track or trails so you can follow content to a logical learning outcome.

5. They have some form of assessment and often badging or certification.

6. They make it easy to publish your own content as an individual.

7. They are mobile, fun to use, fast and easy to traverse and have great search and embedded learning features.

In short, while the traditional LMS is geared towards the management tasks of administrating, tracking and reporting on a company’s training and learning programs, the LXP has a much more learner-centric approach that puts the learner in the driver’s seat in meeting their current and future learning needs. Traditional LMS vendors have tried to incorporate many features that go beyond their core management focus, with widely varying degrees of success.

But it’s also fair to say that the traditional LMS will continue to play a vital role in the learning and training efforts of many companies – especially the smaller and medium-sized businesses that don’t have the time or money to put into being on the cutting edge of emerging technologies and platforms. In fact, rather than thinking of the LXP replacing the LMS, the more likely scenario is that an LXP will complement and enhance the LMS in many companies. As might be expected, many LMS vendors are adding LXP capabilities to their core offering.

The LXP vs LMS TL;DR

The primary takeaway from this article on the LXP vs LMS debate it is this: The corporate eLearning landscape is one where rapid change is the only constant. It can feel like businesses who need better training and learning and the vendors who develop the solutions to provide it are in a constant state of scrambling to keep up with the pace of change. Instead of playing a zero-sum game of LXP vs LMS vs LRS and whatever-comes-next, most companies would be better off trying to see how each new solution can be leveraged into better learning and training outcomes.

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