The future of the learning ecosystem

With the introduction of so many new and specialized tools, apps, and microlearning options,
the possibilities when it comes to designing a learning and development program have
dramatically increased. While there has been much conversation regarding the evolution of the
learning management system and its role in the learning ecosystem, the LMS will continue to
serve as a hub of learning activity. By making xAPI and a learning record store part of your
learning environment, you can collect data from across the tools and technologies that you use
and translate it into a single, standardized data format. You can then bring that xAPI data into
the LRS, which serves as a database and which offers real-time data dashboards and reporting
tools for your organization, allowing you to get a 360-degree view of the complete experience of
your learners.

but it is important to be aware that there are some limitations in the type of learning that
happens within the LMS. For many organizations, the LMS sits at the center of the learning
ecosystem, but it is not the only place where learning happens. It is, however, the main source of
formal learning experiences.

Formal learning is the structured, programmatic coursework that is generally prescribed as part
of initial onboarding or ongoing professional development within an organization. However, this
typically represents only a small percentage of the actual learning that takes place within an
organization. It is the informal or experience-based learning that represents a much larger and
more valuable part of employee development in an organization. The collaboration between
employees, the mentoring that happens as a team grows, the articles and videos that an
employee engages with on their own time because they are hungry to learn more—these are all
day-to-day instances of informal learning; they are critical experiences that happen outside the
LMS. xAPI and the LRS were created to help us capture this activity so that we can track the
progress of employees as they gain valuable skills across the many technologies used in today’s
modern workplace.

Collect and store information across platforms

The combination of these xAPI-powered technologies has opened a world of possibilities for the
learning technologist. By offering significantly new and improved ways of understanding
employee performance, training leaders are now able to improve outcomes that are relevant to
the business as a whole, with real-time insight into skill gaps and employee strengths, improving
efficiency and productivity across all teams. If implemented strategically, this can significantly
increase revenue and lower training costs across an organization, making human capital
management a critical value-add to key stakeholders at all levels of the business.
 The hard part to start with is finding the right piece of the problem, the right individual
challenge, where you can have a measurable impact. If you can work with your team to identify a
tightly scoped project for which you can design a proof of concept, you’ll be able to quickly
demonstrate the value of an xAPI solution to stakeholders in your organization.

Consider the following challenges:

 Onboarding—Many companies have fixed onboarding times. Could you combine

assessments and self-guided learning to help people get to proficiency faster?
 Resource use—Jobs are complex combinations of learning, performance, and supporting
content. Can you collect data about learning pathways and use of resources in the LMS to
recommend the best content to your learners?
 Competency tracking—The greatest limitation to organizational performance is employee
knowledge capacity. Could you measure the competency of your employees over time to
predict when you will need to hire in advance of need?
 Human capital analytics—Learning and training programs have a direct impact on
performance outcomes. How can you use that data to improve the quality of the learning
experiences provided to your team?
 Key performance indicators (KPIs)—Every organization and every department has unique
KPIs that their success is measured by. How can you triangulate data across systems to
identify why successful team members are successful?


Digital Learning does not mean learning on your phone, it means “bringing learning to
where employees are.”
 It is a “way of learning” not a “type of learning.”

Today’s “digital learning” does not simply mean producing videos that are easy to view on your
phone, it means “bringing learning to where employees are.”

In other words, this new era is not only a shift in tools, it’s a shift toward employee-centric
design. Just as we use apps like Uber to locate a ride or like Doordash to order food, we need
learning and information support to be as easy and intuitive to use. Shifting from “instructional
design” to “experience design” and using design thinking are key here.
Consider how quickly corporate learning has evolved. In only one generation we have gone from
traditional corporate universities to e-learning, blended learning, talent-driven learning, and then
continuous learning. Tools like Google, YouTube, Workplace by Facebook, Slack, and others have
totally changed the learning landscape, so our job now is simply to “deliver learning to where
people are.”

the paradigm that we built was focused on the idea of a “course catalog,” an artifact that makes
sense for formal education, but no longer feels relevant for much of our learning today. As a
result, LMS systems tend to be very hard to use, there are often thousands of courses to look
for, and most employees simply find them of limited value (except for mandatory or compliance
training).

As I talk with companies all over the world I hear a continuous story that “employees simply do
not use the LMS unless they have to,” and this has caused a lot of pain in L&D. Companies spend
millions of dollars on these systems and to find that employees don’t use them is a painful
process
I’m certainly not saying the $4 billion LMS market is dead, but the center or action has moved
(ie. their cheese has been moved). Today’s LMS is much more of a compliance management
system, serving as a platform for record-keeping, and this function can now be replaced by new
technologies. And these systems have typically been very expensive, so companies are now
starting to find ways to turn them off. IBM, Visa, Sears, and others have now done this, and I
expect more to follow.

2) The emergence of the X-API makes everything we do part of learning.

I don’t have to write this, but let me say it: everything you do is part of your learning experience
at work. When you talk with your boss, attend a meeting, read an article, or view a video – you
are learning something. And of course when you finish a project, get feedback from a project
lead, or complete a new design, you are creating a part of your “credentials” that help you show
others what you know how to do.

In the days of SCORM (the technology developed by Boeing in the 1980s to track CD Roms) we
could only really track what you did in a traditional or e-learning course. Today all these other
activities are trackable using the X-API (also called Tin Can or the Experience API). So just like
Google and Facebook can track your activities on websites and your browser can track your clicks
on your PC or phone, the X-API lets products like the learning record store keep track of all your
digital activities at work.

3) As content grows in volume, it is falling into two categories: micro-learning and macro-learning.
The world is awash with instructional content, and it’s falling into two broad categories.
One is what I call “micro-learning,” things we can quickly read, view, or consume and they only
take 10 minutes or less. These may be a video, a blog, or a set of instructional questions that
help us think differently than we did before. We as information-seeking animals consume this
kind of material all day, and most of the news sites and social networks now offer such learning
in a massive, curated stream. Twitter offers a primary example of a micro-learning experience.

Vendors of Micro-Learning solutions include YouTube, and vendors like Grovo, Axonify, Qstream,
Pathgather, and Edcast.

Macro-learning, on the other hand, is something we do when we want to truly learn a whole
new domain. If you want to learn all about SEO, or digital marketing, or cyber-security, or the
new sales methodology – you are going to have to commit some time. The content may be a
MOOC, a series of small videos (ie. Lynda.com, Udemy, etc.), or an instructor-led program that
includes simulations, group discussions, and exercises. While we used to call these “courses,” in
the context of digital learning they are simply “macro” in size, and they should be designed for
use in special ways.

This includes vendors like Coursera, Udacity, EdX, Udemy and libraries of content like BigThink,
Lynda.com, SkillSoft, General Assembly, Pluralsight, CrossKnowledge and hundreds of others.

We need to make sense of these two formats, and agree that the two work together. Consider
the actual path we take as we progress in a job or career.
In today’s digital learning world, we must think about these journeys in every role, and
categorize content so it can be used for all these purposes. One of our clients made a simple
design decision: learning would be tagged informational (type 1), instructional (type 2), or
expert-level (type 3). This simple framework helps employees find what they need wherever they
are and gives the company an ability to organize content for easy discovery by employees.
Donald Taylor, a leading L&D analyst, recently conducted a survey of L&D leaders and found that
the #1 growth area in the future is not MOOCs or Video, or even mobile learning – it’s the topic
of personalization. We now live in a world where each employee’s learning needs are unique to
them, and while we should architect a meaningful set of programs around macro and micro-
learning for them, they want to learn when they want in the most natural way possible. Today
learning is about “flow” not “instruction,” and helping bring learning to people throughout their
digital experience.
While we have not yet published our detailed landscape of the market, let me suggest that the
categories are breaking out as shown above.

On the upper left is a relatively new breed of vendors, including companies like Degreed, EdCast,
Pathgather, Jam, Fuse, SkillSoft Percipio, and others, that serve as “learning experience” systems.
They aggregate, curate, and add intelligence to content, without specifically storing content or
authoring in any way. In a sense they develop a “learning experience,” and they are all modeled
after magazine-like interfaces that enables users to browse, read, consume, and rate content.

Today these vendors sit in front of the massive amount of content we have to serve (internal and
external), and offer easy-to-use interfaces (including mobile apps) with context and simple
pathways to help people find what they need. Most of these vendors are using machine learning
(or starting to) to make recommendations more efficient, and they are now mapping skills
libraries against their content to help make it easier to map content to different jobs and roles.

Let me warn vendors like these – if they continue down this path without being careful, they are
likely to build an LMS. Compliance tracking, certification paths, pre-requisites, assessments,
learning credits, and all the other business rules people want are still stored in the LMS, and the
jury is out whether these companies will try to replicate that functionality or perhaps the larger
LMS vendors will simply copy, acquire, or mimic what these companies are doing.
The second category I show is what I call the “program experience platforms” or “learning
delivery systems.” These companies, which include vendors like NovoEd, EdX, Intrepid, Everwise,
and many others (including many LMS vendors), help you build a traditional learning “program”
in an open and easy way. They offer pathways, chapters, social features, and features for
assessment, scoring, and instructor interaction. While many of these features belong in an LMS,
these systems are built in a modern cloud architecture, and they are effective for programs like
sales training, executive development, onboarding, and more. I believe they have a role to play,
and companies are using them for many purposes (including content providers using them to
build content offerings). In many ways you can consider them “open MOOC platforms” that let
you build your own MOOCs.

The third category at the top I call “micro-learning platforms” or “adaptive learning platforms.”
These are systems that operate more like intelligent, learning-centric content management
systems that help you take lots of content, arrange it into micro-learning pathways and
programs, and serve it up to learners at just the right time. Qstream, for example, has focused
initially on sales training – and clients tell me it is useful at using spaced learning to help sales
people stay up to speed (they are also entering the market for management development).
Axonify is a fast-growing vendor that serves many markets, including safety training and
compliance training, where people are reminded of important practices on a regular basis, and
learning is assessed and tracked. Grovo just introduce their new micro-learning platform, and it
looks like a fantastic new content development environment. Vendors in this category, again,
offer LMS-like functionality, but in a way that tends to be far more useful and modern than
traditional LMS systems. And I expect many others to enter this space.

In the middle of the architecture I show two broad category of tools: assessment and content
development tools, and of course content libraries. The reason I show them at this layer is that
both these market segments are complementary to the top and bottom layers of systems. In the
area of assessment and content development there are literally thousands of tools, and many of
the most exciting ones are AI driven, built on virtual reality, use gamification, and all support
video and micro-learning content. Most of these are relatively small companies (Adobe used to
dominate this space years ago), and it’s important for each designer to pick a tool they like.

While I have never seen one company completely dominate the tools market (Articulate has
come close), there could be consolidation or growth if companies like Workday, SAP, or Oracle
get into the tools market. Workday now offers a light video-authoring tool and Oracle has
recently reinvested heavily in its LMS product (a whole new product is now available called
Oracle Cloud Learning) but many of the bigger companies find the tools market frustrating (it
changes so fast) so they tend to stay out of it.

Perhaps the most exciting part of tools today is the growth of AI and machine-learning systems,
as well as the huge potential for virtual reality. I saw a tool last month which can read text and
use machine learning to identify the instructional nature of the content, build a series of
assessments, and deliver a test on the content in only a few seconds. Imagine the power of this
tool for all the “documentation” you use for training. Tyessenkrupp, a global provider of elevator
and mobility systems, uses Virtual Reality to train its service teams. (Video overview here.)

Yes it’s important for employees to be able to quickly find the content they want. But when it
comes to sustainable development, we believe there are “Four E’s of learning” at work
(education, experience, environment, and exposure). People at work must have time to learn,
they must feel their new skills will be valued, we must take time for discussion and reflection,
and managers must give people space and freedom to discuss mistakes, ask questions, and often
experiment with new ideas.

Consider the client architecture I showed above. If you build such a system for your employees
(and hundreds of companies are starting to do this today), why would you lay out millions of
dollars to buy content libraries and software to make this work? What if the employees don’t
want the content you have, or the materials or systems become out of date? Are you going to
have to make another “big bang” investment like you did for you LMS, only to be force to keep it
for many years as the content and technology changes?

Just as we now “rent” our news subscriptions, our email software, and most of our other tools,
it’s time to shift much more of our L&D investment away from capital purchase toward “pay for
use.” This particular company renegotiated many of its content licenses around “pay for use,”
and as a result uses user-generated feedback to give learning vendors feedback ratings on how
well their content is doing. Once per year these contracts can be renegotiated, and over time the
buyer has more flexibility to move to new vendors and technologies as needed.
I”m not saying that vendors will stop offering you three-year contracts for their cloud software
or content, but I do believe the days of spending millions of dollars on learning platforms is
starting to come to an end. We do have to make strategic decisions about what vendors to
select, but given the rapid and immature state of the market, I would warn against spending too
much money on any one vendor at a time. The market has yet to shake out, and many of these
vendors could go out of business, be acquired, or simply become irrelevant in 3-5 years.

These new platforms, which are now rolling out in a new war for IT dollars, reinvent the digital
experience at work. They include integrated tools for content discovery, communication,
messaging, and AI-based intelligent access to content. The newest versions of Google Hangouts
and Google Drive, Workplace by Facebook, Slack, and other enterprise IT products now give
employees the opportunity to share content, view videos, and find context-relevant documents
in the flow of their daily work. This is where digital learning will eventually go, and I’d suggest it
will happen sooner than you think.

Imagine an engineer who simply uploads an article or video to Slack or Workplace by Facebook
to share with her workgroup. Isn’t that an example of curated digital learning?

I”m not saying the market for dedicated learning tools will go away, but I encourage you to talk
with your IT department and look at the next generation of messaging tools they are evaluating.
These are digital learning environments in the making, and I believe we can think about them as
the “future platforms” for learning.

And there is more to come. Imagine if LinkedIn integrates Lynda.com content in the flow of
work. (Imagine if you are trying to build a spreadsheet and a relevant Lynda course opens up).
This is an example of “delivering learning to where people are.” A variety of learning vendors
now offer learning embedded into Salesforce.com and Slack, so we have to expect this to appear
soon.
xaPI hace esto, xAPI hace lo otro…

Algunos hablan de xAPI como si fuera un sistema, un software que hace algo. No lo es. xAPI es
una especificación para una API, así pues esencialmente es un documento, un conjunto de reglas
que les dice a los programadors cómo implementar ciertas cosas en sus sistemas. Si los sistemas
implementan esas “ciertas cosas” siguiendo las reglas que prescribe la especificación, entonces
serán capaces de comunicarse entre ellos, y tendrán podrán interpretar lo que significan los
datos que estos sistemas transmiten y almacenan.

Cuando lees u oyes algo sobre xAPI, fíjate en cómo se usa el lenguaje, ya que esto puede
ayudarte a separar las exageraciones de la información útil. Por ejemplo, un artículo que leí
transmite lo siguiente (no de manera literal, pero casi):

“xAPI será capaz de decirnos [muchos detalles sobre la experiencia de aprendizaje] … analizará
todo… buscará tendencias… proporcionará informes completos… descubrirá relaciones entre
actividades de aprendizaje, resultados, y desempeño…”
Si ves u oyes lenguaje de ese tipo, sé cauteloso. Como ya he mencionado, xAPI es una
especificación, así que no hace nada. Solamente te dice lo que hacer. Así pues el afirmar que
xAPI hará todas esas cosas debería disparar las señales de alertae Quiero creer que quienes
expresan las cosas de esta manera son bienintencionados y simplemente quieren poner de
manifiesto el potencial de xAPI, pero este es el tipo de lenguaje que denotan un bombo
publicitario exagerado

Así pues, no se trata de xAPI haciendo un montón de cosas estupendas. Se trata de un conjunto
de sistemas diversos (y puede que complejos=, que se pueden comunicar entre ellos
y entenderse gracias a xAPI. Son sistemas diferentes, alguien tiene que crearlos, configurarlos, y
alguien tiene que planificar cómo deben funcionar juntos, etc. No es que existan
automágicamente porque xAPI exista. Y ciertamente, xAPI no hace todas esas cosas. De hecho, la
especificación no dice nada en absoluto sobre análisis e informes, por ejemplo.

Así pues, no se trata de que “xAPI puede hacer seguimiento de cualquier cosa”. Más bien es que
los sistemas se pueden programar para hacer seguimiento de cualquier actividad (eso no es
nuevo), con el nivel de detalle que los diseñadores consideren oportuno, pero ahora xAPI
permite que esos sistemas expresen y transmitan esa información en el formato de
declaraciones estándar xAPI, de manera que otros sistemas puedan consumirlos.

Es importante recordar que lo que xAPI te permiter capturar es información,

datos… no“aprendizaje”. La idea de que un sistema técnico “captura aprendizaje humano”
debería poner nervioso a cualquier diseñador instruccional.