I Le@rn, how to potentialize and capitalize my elearning system

1. Challenge: The underuse of the eLearning platforms by the employees in the department, despite

large scale of diversified online courses, that limits their capabilities in learning new and diversified

things.

We have noticed that employees in our department are underusing the eLearning platform put at their disposal  by the company. An investment -time and resources- has been exercised by the company to allow the

employee to learn based on their needs and time. However, the uses of this fantastic platform could not take  off. On the other hand, it was also noticed that this learning platform was accessed by the employees only at

the time of mandatory training assigned by the company in the basic onboarding and limited curriculum.

2. Selection:

A linear analytical approach would have been useless to improve and encourage the employees to access this

platform more over the time and become active learners.

Another approach has been put in place to know the reason behind the unsuccessful experience and how to  improve it. the methodology used was spontaneously similar and close to the Design thinking approach,

despite there was no innovation to think about but the novelty was materialized in finding new attractive way

to rally the employee in using the learning system.

“What is” has been clearly investigated in order to understand the reasons behind the limited use and  attraction toward the system. Among those reasons, we noticed as major: “lack of advertisement”

about the system and its capabilities was identified-people do not know the content and consequently  under-estimate its potential-. Lack of self-awareness, and this was crucial information, since the

employees were not fully aware about their needs and consequently unable on what course to search.

Two tools have been utilized to find new Wows, the Visualization & Learning Launch

a. Visualization: show the employee the capabilities, Themes and center of interest offered by the  system AND the potential that they can unlock by following those courses that would interest them.  How would this learning would improve them, as workers but as human as well?    b. Learning Launch: a small committee of members from the training department, managers in the  concerned functions and Users was created in order to explore the system and seek for a panel of  basics & diversified activities that would be included in the onboarding curriculum (per each function)  to make it more attractive and less boring.

A couple of curricula including courses that are out of the filed of specialization and totally new for the  employees were included, like wellbeing, artistic courses with the purpose of showing that such tools should  be used in an entertaining way rather that a simple system to learn skills.

3. Application:

With the help of the committee some experiences were made to assign to a small group of people to this new  model / presentation, re-enforced with a friendly approach to invite them taking part to this experiment over  a period of 3 months. The curricula were exposed to them based on selection made from different concealers  in order to provide them with a diversified and entertaining content, completed in the order of their preference  and at their own pace.

Initially the idea, was to appeal the learners at the first stage and make this self-learning experience so  entertaining that they would be their own training to seek for further content alone and without assistance.

4. Insight:

In order to gather the insight, we referred to the people who were selected and their managers, who gave us  their feedback.  The intention of the experiment was not the completion of the curriculum but to assess their  frequency of accessing the system, their level of entertainment and the added value brought by the training  completed.

A Manager of the field forces team reported that his entire team completed the full curriculum within the  proposed timelines (which again were not mandated). In fact, they reported that “ they should have been told  that such contend was existing” because it guided them and entertained them at the level of completing the  rest of the courses and even starting searching for more courses that are n line with their personality and  needs.

The experiment was so successful, that it has been turned into an academy. The company has made specific  days to present the large contents, mode of browsing and enrolling to the programs. A sort of treasure to what  can be achieved through this system. The message was also re-enforced by the testimony of the learners  themselves, by setting realistic challenges -like completing a specific number of hours – anonymously the   training department gather the total number of hours of learning completed by the company employee all over  the world, giving them a mindset and feeling that their own achievement contributes in something bigger.

The learning academy was of course extended to all function, all department without any limitation. It was for  the pleasure of learning what we want, when we want!

5. Approach:

Reaction to novelty or innovation is always hard to transmit, only early adopters can answer the call of  innovation (~13% of the population) the challenge remain in our capacity to provide the people a visual  projection of what the results of the adoption of this novel would look like. Definitely, the visualization would  have been put at an early stage (as in our case it came lately as reactive action to the initial failure of the  project) a Mind Mapping would also be applied at an early stage in order to understand what people try to  achieve in their life.

