Training content is moving beyond large courses, tosemantically rich nuggets of information. Developers have created a whole hostof specialized, next-generation performance-support apps that deliverpersonalized, bite-sized learning to employees at the moment-of-need on thedevice of their choice. But getting there is noteasy.
Adjusting our expectations: Amazon and Yelp
People often ask whatpersonalized learning looks like. My answer: it’s right in front of you. That’sbecause we are used to, and even expect, personalization in our lives. Thinkabout when you shop at Amazon. With every visit, Amazon collects data about you.Amazon is building a comprehensive profile in order to serve yourecommendations based on:
- Items that you’ve bought in the past,
- Items you browsed, and
- What others who have browsed the same items ultimately purchased.
Amazon also helps potentialbuyers by allowing users to rate a review as helpful or unhelpful. It thenaggregates these ratings, scores them, and presents a list of the most helpfulcomments, providing an instant filter for the most relevant of what are oftenseveral hundred reviews.
The applicationto learning is unmistakable:
- How satisfying would it be if the training materials offered to anindividual learner were based on the types of materials and content they havefound most valuable in the past?
- How helpful would it be if learners could see what training assetspeople in a role similar to theirs are using to reach the same or relatedobjective?
- How much more quickly could learners perform if they couldinstantly zero in on the most helpful content based on peer reviews andratings?
What’smost striking about personalization though is that location and context arevery important. An example of an application that does an excellent job of leveragingthese two attributes is Yelp!
Yelp! is not only great about giving you information about placesnear where you are, but also making sure that the content is relevant and freshat the moment you need it. It will tell you if a place is open at the time youare searching for it. It will let you know if it is within walking distance. Itoften displays messages corresponding to your search terms (e.g. “Vegetarianslove this place!”).
Like Amazon, the application to on-demand learning or performancesupport is unmistakable.
When someone is performing a task, they require only theinformation that is relevant to the specific circumstance in which they findthemselves. Imagine an airplane mechanic trying to fix a sudden system problemon a plane scheduled to depart in a few hours; it is imperative that theprocedure delivered to the mechanic is for the specific issue at hand, thespecific plane, and the exact airport where the plane is located. Withoutcontext, this is impossible.
But how do we get there? How do we leverage our content across theenterprise and deliver this information on-demand for a particular role, aparticular time, a specific skill, etc. And, more importantly, how do we makethis informational delivery as powerful and as personal as the applications weuse every day?
Strategic and agile content development
The answer is that content development needs to finally become astrategic initiative within the Learning and Development organization. As anindustry we need to move past the mentality of delivering monolithic content in9-12 month cycles and move towards agile content development that includes the elementsin Figure 1.
Figure 1: The agile content development system
The key elements, however, are bite-size content nuggets, userprofiles, and social feedback.
Bite-sized content nuggets
Buildingcontent as small nuggets and tagging it with semantically rich informationmakes it possible to reuse and deliver that content in any way, shape, or form.For example, a designer can elect to deliver a single nugget such as aprocedural video:
- Through a mobile app;
- Through a granular searchapplication; or
- As part of an assemblagewith other lesson and topic nuggets as a course.
User profiles
The moreyou know about your audience, the more capable you are of matching them up tothe right content. The chart in Figure 2 shows the results of a survey of HR andLearning executives. The survey asked them to rate how much they know about theemployees of their organization. As you can see, we still have limitedknowledge of our workforce.
Figure 2: Summary of responses by HR and Learning executives: knowledgeabout their companies’ employees.
Collecting data aboutemployees is a critical capability for personalization. Having rich user-profileinformation gives us the ability to marry these profiles with tagged nuggets ofcontent to create truly individualized learning experiences.
Social feedback
With theadvent of social and mobile technologies, subject matter experts are now onlyhalf the equation. Successful content developers, the ones who will be seen asstrategic to the business, are the ones who will embrace the trend to agilecontent development. This means exposing content to the community of learners,allowing them to rate and provide feedback on how to improve the content, andthen immediately updating nuggets of content for continuous and ongoingimprovement—a far cry from yearly course updates.
Analytics: the key better performance
Whenwe use analytics to understand how individual nuggets of content are performing—forexample, which nuggets learners are accessing, how they are accessing them,where they are using them, who is using them, and what the ratings are —what weend up with is the ability to make frequent adjustments to the content tobetter meet learner needs. The more of these adjustments that we make, the morecustomized and personalized the content becomes. This in turn gives designers instantperformance connection data. We know immediately what type of impact eachnugget of content is having on our learners. This moves us closer to the holygrail of personalization—where analytics drive the right content to thelearner, rather than the learner finding the content all by themselves. Soundsa lot like Amazon and Yelp! doesn’t it? That’s the point.
