In recent years, the learning and development (L&D) landscape has dramatically transformed, embracing digital learning. For countless organizations, this transition was driven by urgent necessity. Covid restrictions, the rise of hybrid workforces, and increasing turnover rates forced organizations to rapidly adapt their methods of training and onboarding employees. Now that some time has passed, organizations may find themselves unsure how to evolve and improve their digital offerings.
In a strategic design context, digital learning programs occupy one of three levels of maturity: Fundamental, Strategic, or Integrated. Identifying which level you are at will help you define your current priorities and identify the steps necessary to push your learning efforts to the next level. This can enhance the quality of your learning, uncover areas for additional improvement, and provide valuable improvements at every level of your organization. Here is a closer look at each step of the journey, the unique challenges you will encounter, along with a list of strategies you can use to advance from one level to the next.
Level #1 Fundamental
At this level, a company’s L&D efforts will be largely reactive and driven by the basic needs of the organization. Employee data is hard to come by, resources may be limited, and there is little in the way of overall strategy. Content at this level focuses primarily on maintaining compliance and filling basic skills or efficiency gaps.
Key Challenge: Creating Content That Builds Engagement and Improves Knowledge Retention
At this level, you should focus your attention on improving the quality of your content. If your content is boring and repetitive, your learners will likely tune it out and fail to absorb what you are teaching them. Injecting some variety into your courses will make for compelling content that is better at driving improvement throughout your organization. To accomplish this, there are two obstacles to overcome: learner fatigue and the forgetting curve.
- Learner fatigue: results when employees are forced to consume too much training in too short a time with too little variation.
- The forgetting curve: refers to the speed at which learners forget what they have learned. Research shows that people forget roughly 50 percent of new information within an hour and nearly 90 percent within a week.
Learner fatigue results in a lack of engagement, while the forgetting curve is tied to a lack of retention. These two concepts are closely linked. A study found that spending more time on learning does not inherently improve learner performance, while improving the quality of learning leads to higher levels of engagement, which drives deeper retention.
Strategies to Improve Engagement and Retention
Create Blended Learning Journeys
Blended learning content is the perfect way to maximize your learners’ engagement and increase their retention of important concepts. In a blended learning journey, participants learn through a combination of different activities, modalities, and media. Even if your organization has limited resources, there are plenty of modalities available that can fit even the tightest budget. Some common blended learning components include:
- Videos: use narration, characterization, and storytelling to make learning more interesting and create emotional engagement
- Animations: simplify complex ideas and concepts through visualization and storytelling techniques
- Podcasts: provide flexible learning that can be done anywhere at any time and combined with other activities
- Online forums: provide a valuable space for learners to ask questions, discuss best practices, and share troubleshooting tips
- Roleplaying: enable hands-on learning experiences where learners analyze problems from different perspectives
- Games: build engagement through play, immersion, rewards, and competition with peers
- Workbook activities: embed key concepts through personalized practice
People enjoy learning through a variety of different methods. Providing a mixture of different activities not only drives deeper engagement but also ensures that there is an activity aligned to the way each member of your workforce prefers to learn.
Incorporate Learning Scenarios
Learning by doing greatly boosts knowledge retention. According to the 70-20-10 model for Learning and Development, learners obtain 70% of their work-based know-how from job-related experiences. While digital learning is at a bit of a disadvantage when it comes to delivering true hands-on experiences, you can achieve similar gains with learning scenarios.
Scenario-based learning works by immersing learners in realistic yet challenging fictional situations. These scenarios mimic the experience of hands-on learning by allowing employees to put knowledge into practice. Not only does this improve retention but it provides learners with an ideal space to experiment and fail safely, while gaining deep insights into the impact of their decisions.
Learning scenarios can take many forms. Learning games and virtual reality simulations boost audience engagement, but scenarios do not need to be this elaborate or costly. A simple story can deliver the same benefits if it is immersive and directly tied to the learner’s specific role.
Level #2 Strategic
Once you are creating content that fully engages your audience, it is time to start thinking more holistically. Organizations at the second level of their L&D journey will begin looking past immediate needs to incorporate basic strategies and begin prioritizing user experiences.
Key Challenge: Incorporating Measurement and Prioritizing Accessibility
To further develop your learning programs, you need to put a measurement plan in place. Collecting data enables you to assess the impact of your training and allows you to identify and solve problems.
The second challenge at this level is prioritizing accessibility. While accessibility standards should always be a priority, it becomes increasingly important as your organization grows. To drive effective change, your learning content must be made as accessible as possible to every one of your learners.
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Strategies for Improving Measurement and Accessibility
Tie Learning Goals to Organizational Objectives
Adding basic testing to a course will provide you with more data than simple completion rates. Questions, delivered within the course or at the conclusion, will reveal which concepts employees understand and which areas they are still struggling to master. This will not only help you shape and improve future content but it will also start to establish a link between performance and learning strategy. To really move the needle, however, tie your learning goals to specific business objectives, then use that data to improve in specific areas.
For example: Let’s suppose that you work for an international bank that wants to improve the effectiveness of their unusual activity reports (filed when an employee suspects potential money laundering). Currently, employees are over-reporting, and the quality of the reports is poor. This is impacting the effectiveness of the bank’s Financial Crime Unit, whose role it is to respond to these reports. This is a key risk for the bank as a weakness in their money-laundering controls could result in huge fines and reputational damage. Here is an illustration of how data can address this business objective.
- Design a course that focuses on the key role the employee plays in spotting and reporting the red flags for money laundering.
- Interview members of the Financial Crime Unit and script scenarios within the course that focus on the common errors made by employees when completing unusual activity reports and illustrate how much time is wasted by over-reporting and filing incomplete reports. The scenarios enable employees to practice when to make reports, when to gather more information and how to complete reports.
- Monitor changes in reporting behavior and continue to shape the course’s content to address future issues.
Provide Transcripts, Screen Readers, and Translations for Learning Content
Prioritize reviewing your learning content and provide the necessary accommodations so that everyone in your organization can use it. For example, you need to provide transcripts for deaf individuals, screen readers for people who are blind or visually impaired, and translations for employees who speak different languages. It is also important to reflect the diversity of your employees in the content itself via the characters appearing in videos, animations, and stories. Focus on integrating accessibility and inclusion into your learning from the start of the design process, rather than integrating it as an afterthought at the end.
Level #3 Integrated
At this level, measurement is a major part of your organization’s L&D efforts and is used both to assess the impact of your learning and drive company-wide improvements. Accessibility is top-of-mind during the production process, ensuring that your entire workforce can engage with content.
Key Challenge: Creating Integrated Learning Journeys
Moving through the earlier levels, you may have taken a piecemeal approach to creating content. This is fine as a starting point, but as your content continues to evolve, you will want to adopt a more unified approach that prioritizes long-term employee development using learning journeys. A learning journey provides a continuous, integrated process that reinforces and builds on what came before.
Learning journeys allow you to maximize learning by providing content that is tailored to each specific learner. In a personalized learning journey, factors such as a learner’s role, job scope, region, and level of expertise are used to define their needs and provide them with more effective experiences. Not only does this provide more engaging learning but it contributes to a culture of continuous improvement in which employees feel more valued and empowered to advance in their careers.
Learning journeys offer several benefits for the organization as well. In a continuous learning culture, it is far easier to retain and promote employees. Continuous learning also makes employees more open to change, which can help an organization be more flexible in responding to disruptions.
Strategies for Creating Learning Journeys
Incorporate Spaced Practice
One key advantage of an ongoing learning journey is that it provides the opportunity to reinforce critical learning. Remember when we discussed the forgetting curve? One of the most effective ways of improving knowledge retention is through spaced repetition. Spaced repetition (also known as spaced practice) is a learning technique that breaks up important concepts into smaller sessions that are absorbed over a longer period of time.
When incorporating spaced repetition into a learning journey, try to space lessons out by about one week. You should also vary the activities for each lesson. For instance, let’s suppose you are teaching a group of employees how to use a new supply chain management tool. The learning journey might look something like this:
- The learner is introduced to the tool in a text-based eLearning module.
- One week later, the learner watches a tutorial video that details how the tool works.
- On the third week, the learner is given a scenario that enables them to explore the results of their choices.
- On week four, the learner is evaluated with a short quiz.
Introduce Branching Pathways
A branching pathway serves as a fork in the road that allows learners to choose how they interact with your content. These pathways may be controlled directly by the learner, or determined by the decisions or answers they provide as they navigate the training.
There are many ways to incorporate branching pathways. When designing courses, you can provide additional content that digs deeper into fundamental concepts and allows learners to choose whether to engage with this content or skip it based on how it pertains to their role. The use of branching content is also ideal for delivering employee development content. As employees navigate their journey, they can build valuable skills through optional courses that enable them to pursue advancement opportunities.
Add Test-Outs to Learning Content
While branching pathways provide an advanced option, there are other simpler steps you can take to personalize learning. One of the easiest methods is the use of test-outs. Test-outs divert the learner from content with which they are already familiar. This is frequently done by adding assessments to the beginning of a course. The learner is asked a set of questions based on the course and if they show sufficient knowledge of the material, they can skip parts of the course related to those concepts. Test-outs are an effective way to make learning more engaging while reducing training seat time and eliminating learning waste.
Innovate and Evolve Your Learning Content
In order to evolve performance, organizations must continuously improve and adapt its L&D program. That means providing employees with fresh and engaging content, developing a robust measurement plan, and prioritizing accessibility. Regardless of the size of your company or the current state of your digital learning, improvement is always possible. Start by assessing your current capabilities, then devise the strategies necessary to move your learning forward. These efforts may start out small, but by putting in the work to differentiate your digital learning solutions, you can evolve content from a selection of random courses to a series of carefully curated learning journeys that deliver real value throughout your organization.
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