Learning System & Content — esther steiner

Global food manufacturer, 45bn revenue, 130k employees

“Define our design practice, processes and tools. Build a learning curriculum and content for teams across the globe and across functions. Consider multi-modal delivery and pilot a learning platform.”

Approach

Frame current barriers to learning and articulate current vs. future state (from-to)
Profile learning requirements across busniess units, regions, functional expertise and hierarchies
Define learning outcomes for the different audiences and develop flexible curricula (learning journeys)
Build the learning ecosystem architecture and content, and determine mode of delivery
Build a pilot training module to test with audiences, gather feedback and make adjustments for following modules

Multi-modal Learning Ecosystem

Stakeholder, audience and subject matter expert interviews revealed that processes and tools commonly used weren’t accessible or regarded as relevant only to a particular function (R&D). The learning ecosystem is therefore designed to meet people where they’re at. It includes

Training content hosted on an interactive learning platform, tiered into foundational, essential and advanced learning content
Online support for specific project questions
On-project coaching support by subject matter experts, both ad-hoc and via dedicated project coaching roles
Databases for external expert support (rosters), and other people resources
Leadership awareness content and touch points

Training Platform Curriculum

The comprehensive curriculum was created using Bloom’s Taxonomy. It resulted in a tiered training content structure that layered knowledge and comprehension with activities to increase abilities of application and analysis. As learners progress they are increasingly challenged to think critically, eventually becoming subject matter experts, and coaches. Learners who only need awareness training or input as they are asked to contribute to a process, are met with actionable exercises and key questions to ask, good and bad output examples and the possibility to have their inputs reviewed by a coach. The flexible training content allowed for courses to be tailored without having to gather and package resources, meeting the needs of a wide range of audiences with success.

Adaptive Learning System Pilot & Flexible Learning Journeys

The learning management system tested was Area9 Rhapsode. It uses machine learning, artificial intelligence and cognitive engineering to support various types of learners. Building the pilot required articulating probes, pairing those with learning resources and learning objectives (e.g. a question referring to a visual stimuli that aims to assess the degree of understanding of a subject matter). Different learning objectives, modules and whole courses could be bundled to tailor learning journeys for different audiences, while the system responded to learner’s progress and allowed automised performance management.

Keywords: capability development, learning system, platform integration, design, upskilling

Curriculum Design

The Bloom’s Taxonomy provides a solid framework to structure learning content and objectives. However, before anything can be structured it needs to be brought to the surface. The learning content for this particular training programme was deeply embedded in subject matter experts (SME’s) heads. Training until this point had been delivered in-person during off-site events requiring people to travel. It was found that while in-person training has its place, it could not be sustained. Furthermore it was found that during the training sessions people were engaged and did achieve learning objectives, but due to lack of use of the knowledge they quickly forgot about what was learned and couldn’t easily retrieve it. A digital system as a supporting solution was devised to help employees maintain their knowledge and apply it when the need arose.

Hence, a series of SME and stakeholder interviews took place, to surface and gather tacit knowledge and build a library of existing resources. An overview was created using an online ‘whiteboard’ (in this case Miro). This method allowed for content pieces to be analysed and searched, making the drawing of connections easier. The learning ecosystem thus emerged organically. I further developed it by synthesising and structuring it using the Bloom’s Taxonomy, creating the three tiers of foundational, essential and advanced.

Involving senior stakeholders alongside SMEs helped adding context to the ecosystem that would help learners understand why they were asked to do things in a certain way and what business, structural and strategic dimensions they had to be aware of when contributing their functional expertise in project contexts.

The final stage of translating the content into the learning platform was made easy thanks to the taxonomy: they provided the all essential learning objective, from which probes (e.g. questions, or prompts) followed logically. Thanks to the carefully catalogued learning resources on the interactive whiteboard, objectives and probes could swiftly be matched with stimuli.

Journey Design

Similar to Service Design, Learning Journey Design is user (or learner) focussed. I take into account the circumstances of the user, their mindset, pain points, gains and jobs-to-be-done. I created initial user needs hypotheses using data from SME and stakeholder interviews, as well as my own experience training and working with cross-functional teams and individuals. The pilot allowed me to test if my hypotheses and assumptions were accurate or not, or if I missed any. This resulted in a learning experience that responds to user needs, while matching the business’ goals to train, increasing operational effectiveness and efficiency.

Would you like to make your digital learning content easier to manage, more tailored to you workforce’s needs, more engaging and more impactful? Start with my considered ecosystem design approach.

Get in touch to get yours.

Book an intro session to learn more