LXP: Towards a consumer-grade platform

           1. Introduction

           2. The user above all else

           3. Collaborative, contextual and bottom-up learning

           4. Learning for employees, by employees

You probably already know about the BYOD (Bring Your Own Device).  This practice consists of bringing your personal device (tablet, smartphone, pc) into the work environment.  Consequently, it applies even far beyond computer hardware.

A large number of B2C platforms like Spotify, IMDB, Amazon, Facebook, Netflix, Youtube… can be brought to the work environment.  With their interface designed around the end user, they make us question traditional SaaS platforms used in enterprises.

Nowadays, everyone has codes, habits.  Everyone uses apps with intuitive ergonomics designed for intuitive use on a daily basis.  It would therefore be counterproductive not to find these same codes in the applications we use at work.

E-learning software editors, whom for the most part, have noticed this change in the end customer, have therefore set out to renew the “employee experience”.

There even are tools that were originally designed for B2C use that are being used in companies as a result of pressure from employees on their CIOs.  For example, Workplaces on Facebook, Coursera for Business or Slack.

While some flirt with GDPR, companies do not hesitate to deploy them. The attractiveness of the products speaks for themselves. Of course, they do so because they see a significant increase the usage compared to the B2B counterparts.

Not doing so is like trying to curb BYOD as CIOs.

Generally, where technical limits cannot be set, the law remains to define the framework in effect.  We can equip ourselves with security rules, firewalls, software to install on personal computers, but we all know that nothing can avoid the human action of copying files from our work computer to our personal computer if not the law.

This is all to say that it is very hard to prevent employees from using Slack, Trello or Youtube, Gmail.  And they are probably right because these are very good tools.

The exact same goes for e-learning.

For the Bealink Learning Experience Platform, we used Spotify as the inspiration.

Spotify, like many other services, is all about listening to music. But, its real added value lies in its collaborative side, the quality and variety of its references…

Spotify allows you to create, share playlists, follow influencers and see the playlists they create, search for content in a huge, centralized database, receive music recommendations based on usage, rate music, view featured playlists…

The codes, ergonomics and use case are well known to all.

Now, if we replace the word “music” by the word “learning content”, you end up with a mobile app that allows you to launch digital training content, create content playlists, follow experts with a given skill to see what playlists they create, search in a huge aggregation of content to add to your playlists (one of the key principles of the LXP), share playlists, have content recommendations based on its use or peers, see playlists put forward by L&D managers or those generated by artificial intelligence… Most importantly, allowing users to create content in order to give a bottom-up dimension to your learning activities and facilitate internal knowledge transfer.

We therefore adopted a very collaborative and bottom-up approach.  An approach where no content has to have strict visibility rules, everything is accessible to everyone and indexed in a kind of meta-search engine within the Learning Experience Platform.

Fundamentally, it is therefore a matter of making employees choose for themselves how and on what they want to be trained.  The company would only be an actor, a facilitator of their personal development.

The new Personal Training Account (PTA).  The xAPI standard seems to be moving in this direction. It is designed to capture reporting data on informal learning.

However, this does not mean L&D professionals don’t have a big role to play.  They will  be advisers, marketers, and curator, rather than content creator and administrators.

This also gives a special important to team managers.

They will be able to create micro-content and share it with their teams.  They will also have the opportunity to inspire them by creating playlists and adding content that people will receive in the form of notifications.

We remain convinced that every manager wants his or her teams to develop as best as possible the skills of their team. It is however a difficult for him or her to fulfill this role of curation, prescription or even inspiration.

How many managers, or even employees, send their team a link by email or chat to an interesting article?  How many of you have sent yourself links to articles by email to keep track of them?  And on the day, you want to find the information, what happens? You can’t find it.

That’s why we came up with the LXP Mobile Bealink.

To blend formal and informal learning.

To stop focusing on the KPI “time spent on content” every morning and convince yourself that mentalities have or will evolve.

To show that the paradigm of investing in training solely in terms of ROI is a thing of the past.