Ask any senior manager at your organisation how to improve your corporate e-learning, and they’ll most likely say: "Just make it short and relevant!"
It’s a simple enough request, but quite complex to implement, because what’s relevant to one person may not be the same for another.
Key takeaways
- The point of e-training is to achieve a set of behavioural outcomes or competencies.
- To improve your corporate e-training, try our intelligent learning approach, which uses personalisation, adaptation, gamification and analytics.
- An intelligent learning course identifies what an employee needs to know based on their role, assesses what they already know, evaluates confidence in that knowledge, and delivers only what they need (and do not already know).
- Intelligent learning courses also use pre-course assessments to establish an employee’s competence level; being correct and confident is the ideal scenario.
- You can generate analytics by breaking a course down into competencies and assessing against them.
- Intelligent learning can help identify knowledge gaps, spot red flags and feed into future training initiatives.
- The technology behind intelligent learning works within the standard SCORM framework.
- Barclays and Société Générale partnered with Skillcast, harnessing intelligent learning techniques to drive outcomes.
How do you create an intelligent learning course?
When building e-learning courses, we find developers focus on compelling narrative, scenario-based learning activities, meaningful visuals, video and responsive design.
These are all useful, but even more important is asking, "What’s the point of this training?" The answer reveals a set of desired behavioural outcomes or competencies. For the course to be effective, the narrative, learning activities and assessment should be mapped to them.
These competencies also provide the basis for introducing intelligent elements to personalise, adapt and gamify the training content, and generate valuable analytics.
An intelligent learning course will:
- Identify what an employee needs to know based on what they do
- Assess how much of it they already know
- Assess their confidence in that knowledge
- Deliver only the sections they need and do not already know
Personalise
Identifying competencies within the e-learning scope gives the basis to personalise the course for each employee. It can be made shorter and more relevant by asking them what they do at the outset.
The competencies they need may be defined simply by their job role/position, or it may require deeper probing to understand what tasks they perform. This could take the form of a decision tree structure, which the employee works through. It establishes which competencies apply to them and selects course content and assessments accordingly.
Adapt
Along with personalisation, the course content can be adapted – again to make the e-learning shorter and more relevant – by assessing the employee’s performance in learning activities. It’s typical to use a pre-course assessment. This can be limited to questions that match the employee’s desired competencies.
Another use for adaptive content is providing differentiated feedback in learning activities. For instance, an employee who struggles with a basic concept could be provided with further reading on it.
Pre-course assessment
A pre-assessment, which establishes an employee’s competence level to which the course content is adapted, should test them to a higher standard than a post-course assessment. If you provide a cut-down course or allow them to skip all the content, you must be sure they are competent.
To meet this higher standard, the employee must be correct and confident in their answer(s). If that’s the case, give them a bonus point. If they are incorrect and confident, they get a minus score.
By setting the passmark as correct and confident for all answers, you weed out those who may be guessing and identify some crucial information: employees who are supremely confident but don’t actually know very much!
Confidence levels
After completing the pre-course assessment, evaluate the scores and adapt, remove or re-purpose the content on any given topic. This ensures the employee learns just what they need to know, and the business is confident its people are appropriately trained.
By intelligently delivering learning, a course that may take a new starter 20 minutes to complete could drop to around eight for a more experienced employee. This will save time and money, and make new joiners and senior managers happy.
Analytics
By breaking a course down into competencies and assessing against them, you can show employees a detailed breakdown of their strengths and weaknesses. Whereas a standard course only tells them the percentage they achieve, intelligent learning goes much further. The person can see their performance in each area of the training.
They can also see how they performed against their peers, their highest scores and averages, and where they sit on a leaderboard.
Management information
Intelligent learning produces a high level of detail and analytics to help identify knowledge gaps, spot red flags and feed into future training initiatives.
It provides a breakdown of performance against each competency at an individual level and across the business. It also shows confidence levels against knowledge and competencies, making it possible to have conversations with people who demonstrate poor understanding yet report a high degree of confidence.
Delivery
The technology behind intelligent learning works within the standard Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) framework. Therefore, such e-learning modules can be hosted and delivered on any SCORM-compliant learning management system (LMS).
This article was originally published by T-CNews Online, an independent resource for people development and people regulation personnel within the UK financial services industry.
Intelligent learning case studies
Our breakfast workshop at London's Shard showcased how Barclays and Société Générale have partnered with Skillcast, harnessing intelligent learning techniques to drive outcomes.
Marines Romero-Caniz from Société Générale explained how intelligent learning helped benchmark compliance knowledge to formulate future training initiatives.
Emma-Louise Fern described how Barclays’ Chief Security Officer used intelligent learning to assess knowledge retention and understand key concepts through gamification.
E-learning: FAQs
Why is corporate e-learning important?
It saves businesses time and money, enables scalable training and ensures consistent learning across the company.
What types of training are typically delivered via e-learning?
Compliance and safety, onboarding, sales, product, leadership, technical and IT.
Who creates e-learning content?
Internal instructional designers, learning and development (L&D) teams and human resources, or it can be purchased from external providers such as Skillcast.
Looking for more compliance insights?
Our Essentials Library contains e-learning content designed to help organisations meet fundamental compliance requirements. If you’re looking for focused training, our training packages offer a complete solution for your compliance programme.
Our e-learning courses are designed to engage employees with our microlearning library, which was created to support knowledge retention.
Our Compliance Portal also features a range of tools to digitise and automate your compliance learning. These include our:
- Learning Management System (LMS)
- Policy Hub
- Compliance Register
- Compliance Surveys
- Compliance Declarations
- AI Digital Assistant (Aida)
Explore our collection
