Build a learning management system, but will they come?

Good post on the E-learning 24/7 blog looking at how to market a new learning system - I particularly like the rule - Don't call it a learning management system.

What I would add to this post is this: for any system to gain any kind of traction you need to be aware of the barriers to engagement, especially if you previously had an underused LMS.

Factor in the fact that any system is there to enable and facilitate learning so really must have the user at the heart of it. To do this, you need to ensure that you do your homework.

1. Research the potential users - what do they ewant, how would they use such a system and how did previous iterations fail. Segment user types to get as full a picture as you can - this should be ongoing
2. Research the stakeholders - what are the business goals for this system, what will success look like and how will this be measured.
3. Create user personas - imaginary (but based on reality) profiles of typical user types which look at overview of who that person is job role, tasks etc, look at user goals fro LMS and look at business goals - what that person is trying to achieve in their role. Also provide some general info - hobbies, online activity etc
4. Design the system but include users in the process - take users from the research as they are likely to be more enagaged
5. Design . . . test . . . build  . . . test . . . and keep challenging your assumptions. And ensure you socialise your developments to your users so they get sight of developments and can provide a useful feedback loop.

Context and the 4 Cs of corporate learning

Great post over at VMG looking at the 4 Cs of corporate learning: control, content, collaboration, context.

Particularly worth noting what John Hathaway has to say about context . . . and I quote in full here:

Providing context for the learner has become the most important element in a growing majority of learning and performance initiatives. Unfortunately, it’s also the one at which learning professionals usually do the worst job. I see examples every day of companies with LMSs and portals overflowing with content and learners who have no idea where to start.

In the internal corporate training world we approach this problem by doing things like aligning content to job roles and competency models. Maybe this is a good place to start when we control those job roles and hire to those competencies, but this gets shaky in the partner world and totally breaks down when we’re talking about customers.

Taxonomies, user generated tags, ratings, reviews, personalized recommendations: all of these things help, but few of these features appear in the systems currently used to manage learning. (Or, if they appear, it’s often in a bolted-on, check-the-box kind of implementation rather than truly integrated throughout the system.)

Providing this element of context needs to be a major focus for innovation in the learning and performance improvement world. There are some early consumer-focused Web 3.0 products that are starting to point the way. I’m pretty excited by how we can take those ideas and apply them to learning.

I'm sure this chimes with many organisations - there is plenty of content, much of which has been produced at a price, which employees simply do not know is there and do not know how to access it.

We had a great example in our business. The IS team kept a list of free software available to the business - which included really useful tools - but did not publicise this fact. Once we learned of the list we put on one of our informal training sessions about the list and followed up with a post on our internal blog.