Plug and Play for Fast Learning Technology Development

Life for learning leaders has gotten more complex and challenging over time. When learning was classroom based and instructor focused, developing a strategy for training was pretty straightforward; build a curriculum, schedule some dates, take attendance, mark complete. The only requirement to support learning was a learning management system.

Learning leaders have know for a long time that things are not this simple, especially for adult learners. People learn all the time and everywhere. On the job learning is probably the most important learning that happens and it’s still not easily supported, tracked, or measured. But it’s getting easier.

To meet rapid turnover in requirements, support local requirements, and avoid data islands, we need to reduce the complexity of individual projects, and lower the cost of integration so departments and individuals can try things that suit their learning needs. We need a modular approach to functionality and easy integration processes. In other words, we need to think of learning technology in terms of a plug-and-play learning ecosystem that can quickly evolve as requirements change.

Here at work, we are embarking on a project to make supporting an ever growing set of requirements in an affordable way and make learning technology help learners rather than hinder. This is a different approach than we have taken in the past, and even currently. We are moving away from monolithic learning, performance, talent, etc. systems that purport to do everything and starting to think modular, lightweight, and quick. We’re building out a learning ecosystem based on the xAPI standard, a learning record store and an App instead of an APPLICATION/SYSTEM-in-capital letters-approach to learning.

As new requirements arise and we need technology to support those requirements we are starting every project with the following questions:

• What are the impactful questions we want to answer?
• What data do we need to answer the impactful questions?
• How do we structure our assessments so we get the right data?  
• How do we ensure data constructs from different sources have the same meaning?
• What other data already exists that we need to tie to the data that will result from this new technology to make full analysis possible?
• How do we make using this technology as easy as possible for the learners? For the instructors/trainers?
• What types of learning interventions do we need to support in this instance?
  
  

Analysis of these questions will better expose the results we need to make our organization more effective, to get the most value out of technology investments we have made and will make, and to support and develop our employees. Once analysis of these questions is complete, then decisions on how to meet requirements can be made. We have obviously two options:

• Buy pieces where our use cases are similar enough to other institutions or companies that vendors adequately support them (e.g. standard learning management capabilities like registration and roster management)
• Build the pieces where our use-cases are unique or so different that they will be poorly supported by vendors

 
Convincing leadership, in an era of cloud based applications and when leadership is concerned with IT costs that building instead of buying is the better decision can be hard. It takes a lot of research into current costs, long term costs, and great estimates of return on investment. But if each “build” project is an App, and not an APPLICATION, and comes with a low price of entry it’s possible.

Some strategies we’re considering is partnering with vendors to create a more robust app than the vendor currently has. Sharing costs of development can reduce leadership’s concerns. It’s also possible to develop a shared sales model with the  vendor where we each get a piece of the action when the final product is marketed.

 Our overarching requirement no matter how we choose to solve a particular learning technology requirement however,  is to ensure that every addition of new technology or replacement technology conforms to predetermined standards for integration and data interoperability (which may involve buying or building middleware pieces to provide data transformation).  This requires that we collaborate with internal departments and external organizations and vendors to create common vocabularies for learning analytics so data from many sources has common meaning.

Recent developments in learning technology, in particular the development of the Experience API (xAPI) through the agency of the ADL (Advanced Distributed Learning) as a standard for tracking learning events  interoperably and the ability for industries or organizations to develop specific xAPI profiles (see Medbiquitous for example) which provide a framework for reliably and consistently reporting learning performance, have created the space where questions that were previously prohibitively expensive to answer can now be reasonably addressed. We now have a framework for imagining new, useful and impactful questions about learning and performance, and we have a method for collecting the necessary data.

The xAPI standard makes it possible to insert data-capture capabilities into the daily workflow with smartly developed and lightweight apps, and to develop common agreement on the meaning of learning events and actions so we all understand each other and data can be normalized across institutions, domains, and roles. This means we can design assessments that result in data that allows educators to answer the questions they want to answer. A common learning vocabulary means team learning and cross-institutional learning analysis is possible. A flexible data format means that new vocabularies can be developed that are relevant to the activities they describe and to the industries they are used in. Quality improvement concepts of system feedback for improvement can be applied to professional development and competency assessment, implemented first on local scales then scaled out over time.

Learning leaders have the best opportunity possible to positively impact the bottom line with plug-and-play learning technologies that make learners happy, empower trainers and educators to answer truly impactful questions, and finally hand leadership the data they’ve always wanted. Even if they don’t know they want it.