Suggested or Elective Learning

  • 22 March 2022
  • 7 replies
  • 80 views

Userlevel 7
Badge +6

Hi folks. In my world we are getting beyond the first wave of mandatory training that forces everyone through the gates which is a really great sign for us. Our usage is nice and high….a great story. We are looking to grow in the elective learning space, and I need a little bit of help.

A little background

I am in the healthcare industry and typical to the industry I have found a training culture at our organization (Here is a reference on Training Culture vs a Learning Culture). We do have some hopes of making strides towards a learning culture, but I do know that one of the most important things is a crawl walk run model….so we will do it in crawl strides.

We have batted around a few approaches and have come towards generating themes and a learning series for the year with a monthly release schedule.

But - one of the things that I thought was important was to allow people to self-enroll into elective learning and not to necessarily “push” these materials out. Where I can see merits to both? Pushing materials out has an impact on the learners transcript and has other reporting consequences. Where establishing a pull scenario is important, it has to be effective with lots of communication and call to action in peoples faces to get them going.

An initial strategy is to align towards the Manager an HTML widget dedicated to suggestive learning. And the same thing for the employee.

So I am thinking we do a “soft push”. We will make an HTML widget available with suggested materials on the front page for 1) Managers (we have a flag so we know who they are) and then 2) for all employees. Which means cooking up a little more, but that will not have the impact on the learning record like enrolling folk.

We are supporting Elective Learning with an open catalog concept (98% of our catalogs any employee can view) and an HTML widget on the front page.

Some may ask what do we want our outcomes to look like.  We are looking to have 20-25% of our managers engaged by the end of this year with some of that elective learning.

I am curious about how you are approaching something similar...I know there are a few right ways - and alot of problematic ways to go about it? But if you have tackled something like this add it below...would love to “chat” about it.


7 replies

Userlevel 7
Badge +3

Have done very similar to what you are thinking for the first phase, the big piece was to rotate those suggestions over time so that they aren’t just static. I had been working on a way to do some email campaigns based on completion of certain courses or learning plans to recommend other optional but related courses for enrollment.

Userlevel 7
Badge +6

Have done very similar to what you are thinking for the first phase, the big piece was to rotate those suggestions over time so that they aren’t just static. I had been working on a way to do some email campaigns based on completion of certain courses or learning plans to recommend other optional but related courses for enrollment.

@Bfarkas - thank you for the share. I recognized - that there are gong to be some challenges with content needing a reasonable amount of rotation. Did you try or have luck with the AI suggestions?

Userlevel 7
Badge +3

I tried very little, and then more broadly we have had most of those things turned off so it was no longer an option, plus there were some team members with strong thoughts/wishes for what should be shown, so a content calendar was essentially made for them to update and then have it swapped out on the various persona pages. The more regular ones get handled by the email piece more regularly.

Userlevel 7
Badge +6

By the way @Bfarkas  - we went the same way - and turned off the AI pretty much as soon as we knew how to do it...if it is on too early with a small catalog? It feels like noise instead of being more helpful.

I do know that the noise improves itself with algorithm.

Userlevel 7
Badge +3

By the way @Bfarkas  - we went the same way - and turned off the AI pretty much as soon as we knew how to do it...if it is on too early with a small catalog? It feels like noise instead of being more helpful.

I do know that the noise improves itself with algorithm.

Yeah, I think the issue is even if it improved, theres a few too many decision makers who don’t like being in control and are not fans. Plus the search being such a disaster to begin with caused such a negative taste to a lot of them that it would be an uphill fight. Maybe some day.

Userlevel 7
Badge +5

Our training is all self enrollment based on the product the user has, but we also offer some product agnostic content that anyone can consume. About 4-5 years ago we started making Best Practice courses that apply to all organizations. It was a really slow start because it’s all in the marketing of the offerings. You have to really sell it to the user as to why this training is worth their time. Finding out what they’re interested in before building the courses will also help. 😁 In our previous LMS we had “ad” space on the home pages so these course could be highlighted, but it was also a battle of rotating banner vs. static image/button to the course. Rotating banners are great on pushing our more and saving space, but people typically only see the first 1 or 2 banners. Either way, we saw the most success when there was a marketing strategy with a dedicated owner that had a schedule for what titles are being advertised and when and how often they are changed out. AI to do the change out would be great, but we haven’t had success there either.  In Docebo, we’ve created marketing space on the home page and each of our 19 custom product pages. It’s just an image widget that takes you to a custom page for the Best Practice courses.

 

Userlevel 6
Badge +2

Hey @dklinger.  I work in the legal industry, and so understand the training vs learning culture.  We too have struggled with elective learning, but the tide is beginning to turn for us now.

We push Docebo and our courses at every turn, any firm-wide publications usually have a piece from us in it promoting something!  We create a monthly newsletter that is purely focused around elective training, as well as using the home page banner to advertise the ‘hot topic’.

We found that once a learner finds something they ‘care’ about, they then come back for more.  To that end, all of our events (wellbeing, innovation week, International Womens Day - that kind of thing) are put onto Docebo to hook people in.  Once they realise there is content that means something to them (and not just the compliance / compulsory training), we have ‘won their business’.

We have also worked hard on aligning our curriculum of courses to our performance framework as a business.  This way, during reviews and 1:1s, line managers can point learners to Docebo to complete some training on a specific area.  This has helped a lot!

Good luck!

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