This week I had the pleasure of launching an entirely new eLearning concept – the Instilled Learning Experience Platform (LXP). It really was not until I first saw the Instilled LXP in June this year that I realised just how dated our entire eLearning approach has become.
To understand LXPs, it’s important to remember that the ideas on which we base our current approaches to eLearning were developed in the 1990s – more than twenty years ago.
Back then we were not asked how videos will play let alone virtual reality. We were being asked “will it work over my 28k dialup in a remote area?” and “can you guarantee no content will be more than a few kilobytes?”
As for collaborative learning, well those of you who are getting old like me might remember the revolutionary forerunner of social media – Myspace. We are talking of a time ten years before Myspace was released so no-one had ever thought of people sending content up to a server. Servers do the delivery right?
Sure, a lot of tools have bolted these kinds of things on since then, but why don’t LMSes report when people skip a video? Why don’t they easily associate discussions with the content people are discussing well? The answer is that every one of the 700 LMSes in the world today is fundamentally based on 1990s concepts and any extensions are just that. Little wonder that digital natives would prefer to learn from a system not originally intended to teach – YouTube – than a system that is!
If we had our time again, we’d create a system that is much more like a social platform than a static website.
- Where everyone can share their expertise by clicking a button and having the system capture it then and there;
- Where content is automatically translated into your preferred language;
- Where artificial intelligence matches your knowledge needs to the best content;
- Where the whole experience of getting some knowledge takes two minutes and two clicks;
- Where staff capture nuggets of information and have a truly intelligent system work out what they are saying so others can search for it;
- Where others can add to that information and make it richer by contributing their thoughts and having the system link each thought to the most relevant spot within the content being discussed;
- Where any type of content – be it a course, a document, a video or a presentation will play through a single player;
- Where you get what you need when you need it and content is a click away at all times – no need to muck around with enrolments.
- Where compliance and formal training can also be loaded and reporting is based on modern learning analytics;
- Where the system extends out into the coalface and fosters on the job learning and experiential training (xAPI)
In short, we’d build a Learning Experience Platform.
If you were not able to make the launch, let me know and I can send you a link to the recording, but either way it’s time to fasten safety belts – online training is about to meet the 21st century!.
