The growing proportion of employees—and thereforelearners—who are digital natives is transforming the face of eLearning. InFebruary, Skillsoft will release new business-skills content for customersworldwide that embraces these changes.
It’s not only younger learners who expect a differentapproach to eLearning, according to Apratim Purakayastha, executive vicepresident and chief technology officer at Skillsoft. “We do believe thatthere’s a new class of users coming into the workplace. Users that are cominginto the workplace—and also existing users conditioned by consumer userexperiences—want much more short, video-based content,” Purakayastha said.
Gone are the days of multi-day in-person seminars; thatshift began a decade ago. Now the early waves of eLearning—six-hour courses,30-minute videos—are getting their pink slips as well. They are making way forsnappy, interactive, engaging eLearning.
Skillsoft’s new business skills content—242 courses in all—islaunching in February on its Skillport platform, and will include a wealth ofvideos that run anywhere from two minutes to about seven minutes. “You canactually do bite-size microlearning,” Purakayastha said. The launch, just thefirst step on a road map that will ultimately lead to updating all Skillsoftcontent (leadership training and IT skills are up next), reflects the goal of“right-sizing the content for the modern learner,” he said.
Repackaging content in shorter “bites” is just one aspect ofthe update. “The second aspect is actually refreshing the content from anaesthetics perspective,” Purakayastha said. Rather than old-school videos of atalking head on screen, the content includes animations, scenario-basedlearning activities, and access to a continually updated library of books andresources in mobile-friendly formats. A preview of the content includedbranching scenarios where learners got instant feedback on their choices andthe opportunity to try out several approaches to solving a problem. Presentationsranged from one person or a panel of experts delivering short talks—somenoticeably more comfortable in front of the camera than others—to simpleanimations. A “course” consists of several videos, books, and activities thatcan be consumed in short “bites” but that add up to a coherent package.
Accessibility is front and center; it’s mentioned in thedemo, on the website—and, naturally, built into the content. “We have focusedtremendously on accessibility over the last year or so,” Purakayastha said. Eachof the thousands of videos in the business-skills library includes accessibilityfeatures, such as audio descriptions and transcripts, for example.
Next-generation learning platform debuting in May
In addition to updating content, Skillsoft is preparing tolaunch, at the end of May 2017, a new cloud-based content delivery and learningplatform: Percipio.
“Percipio is not the next version of Skillport; Percipio isa completely new reimagination. It is a new platform,” Purakayastha said,emphasizing that there is not a one-to-one transfer of features. Skillsoft willcontinue to support Skillport users, and, he expects, many will migrate overtime to the new platform.
“Percipio is a very, very consumer-centric, personalizedlearning user experience. It begins in a personalized homepage, where you’llhave favorites, popular channels, recommended learning, and so forth,” Purakayasthasaid. Learners can set and track goals, follow custom learning paths, and takea variety of assessments. They will interact with a collection of highlycurated, personalized channels, he said, not a mass of “content thrown at you.”The “state-of-the-art search engine, which will let you discover content veryquickly,” and the redesigned look and feel aim to appeal to modern learners. Percipiois also “one of the most accessible platforms” that will be on the market,according to Purakayastha.
Content on both Skillport and Percipio is designedresponsively and available anywhere, enabling learners to access it when andwhere they need it. This reflects the way today’s employees consumelearning—actually, the way today’s employees consume all kinds of digitalcontent. Learners need content that is not locked into an office computer orLMS but is available for use on multiple devices. Responsive design andbuilt-in accessibility support those learner needs. Eventually, the contentwill also be available on apps, Purakayastha said.
While heavily consumer-focused, Percipio offers features geared towardlearners’ managers as well—an operations dashboard lets managers track progressand identify ways to increase individual learners’ content use. The goal is tochange the way learners engage with eLearning, improving results in theprocess.
