What are organisations really looking for from learning technology?
Organisations are looking for learning technology that helps them reach more people, respond faster and create learning that transfers into behaviour change.
Wendy Lee Berger is Impact’s Global Lead for Client Service and Operations, with responsibility spanning global client delivery and our digital technology team. Her international client experience gives her a practical perspective on one of L&D’s biggest challenges: how to use technology to reach more people without reducing learning to content consumption.
This podcast is part of our mini-series on Air and digital learning. In this episode Dan Jones talks to Wendy about what organisations really need from learning technology, why information alone doesn't create development and how digital learning can scale without losing the human experiences that create meaningful learning and behaviour change.
Watch the full episode here:
What are the biggest learning and development challenges organisations face today?
There are three common challenges that I hear from our clients.
- Scale. Organisations are getting bigger; they're getting more distributed and they need to deliver content to many more people across very different potential geographies.
- Speed. Everything is moving faster than it used to. The ability to deploy learning programmes quicker is something that is very important to our clients.
- Transference. Just running a training is not good enough. It has to actually equal some sort of learning and behaviour change at the other end.
What is the difference between delivering information and creating behaviour change?
When I think of traditional e-learning, I think that the majority of it is very cognitive. It's information that I get into my brain either because I'm reading it, watching a video or listening to something. But information alone does not equal development or behaviour change. Something has to happen with that information for someone to process it, to internalise it, and then to help them create a new behaviour. That is what development is. The ability to do something different and new.
Why should organisations start with the learning need rather than the platform?
The first question I always ask a client is "What's the challenge that you're trying to solve? What's the problem?" I think some clients come in thinking that they need a certain thing, and that thing that they're asking for doesn't meet what it is that they really need. There are two big questions you need to ask to really dig down into your challenge.
- Need: what is it that you're trying to achieve?
- Constraints: what are the factors you must work around so that you are able to deliver this?
How can organisations scale learning without losing the human experience?
There are four things that need to be protected: context, choice, consequence and connection.
Any learning engagement that someone engages with should have the correct context so that they can make sense of it in their world. The second piece is around choice. We're working with adult learners and that element of choice around learning is something that allows people to feel like I'm owning this. The third bit is around consequence. That doesn't equal any sort of learning or change if it's inconsequential. And the last thing is really about connection. Humans are going to human and we are wired for connection. I think people are more motivated to change when there are others around them in a similar journey.
What excites you most about Impact’s digital learning platform: Air?
My favourite thing about it is it has some new features in it that enable even more creativity and that element of choice. You and I might be on the same programme and we're going through the same content, but at one point you choose to go in one direction and I choose to go in a different direction. It will push us down different learning pathways, but then we'll come back together at the end and debrief with each other. It's adding all those little pieces together that equals both an individualised learning but a cohort-based learning.
And I think the other thing that I'm excited about is because the people that we have within Impact are just really creative. I'm excited to see what people create.
Listen to Wendy's podcast on Spotify
Hit the button below to find out more about Air - Impact's digital learning platform and how it uses adaptive content to enable different learning pathways while bringing learners back together to share and reflect on their experiences.