Founder Sally Burns has been running a content creation business for some years, helping female founders and experts to create beautifully crafted content for their own audiences via the LearnWorlds platform. Sally’s vision to scale this up required a learning platform that emphasises collaboration and connection over completion and content monetisation (which excludes most of…
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Numerous research studies show that effective learning in organisations comes from three areas: experiential learning (real-world tasks) making up the bulk; social learning (interactions with others) following in second place; and structured, formal education in last place and making up just a small percentage of how we learn. This is why LMS products, traditionally focussed…
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The final project at my last role involved extracting seven years of learner data for 80,000 learners from an LMS that was being decommissioned. The shock of our vendor’s £150,000 quote to both extract and host 3TB of learner data led me to explore a robotic process automation (RPA) solution using a low cost browser…
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This article was originally posted to LinkedIn during April 2023. About five years ago at Brightwave, we worked on a chatbot prototype for The Samaritans. The chatbot was a learning simulation tool, with the chatbot acting out the part of Bella, a bullied teenager. The training was for listening volunteers who were increasingly supporting people…
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People have been trying to find educational uses for blockchain for many years now. I try to carve out a little time every year to see if any research projects have matured into industry products but it’s never a productive search. There are always dedicated practitioners (mostly academics) running proof of concepts, and many more…
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I recently completed the Designing a Feminist Chatbot course on FutureLearn. As a starter course it has a lot going for it, covering areas such as different chatbot uses, how chatbots can become biased, user centred design (UCD) principles, persona creation, conversation design, storyboarding and prototyping. Having studied UCD at degree level and worked on…
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Towards the end of 2020 our Head of Learning Design asked me to do a short presentation to her design team about where I thought the main disruptions to the Learning & Development technology market would come from in the year ahead. Usually we would look at startups, niche suppliers or parallel industries to identify…
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Adaptive learning uses competence, behavioural and demographic data to tailor a digital learning experience around each learners unique needs. There’s a lot of hype around this area which might have you thinking its all about Artificial Intelligence (AI), but that’s not the case and there are two types of adaptive learning approaches: AI-based and Rule-based.…
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I spent two days last week at the Learning Technologies 2017 exhibition, working on the LEO stand (below). This annual event is split over two floors, with a paid conference upstairs and free exhibition downstairs. The stand was really busy for both days and the whole team came away absolutely exhausted, but I did manage…
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There has been lots in the news this past year about social media bias and echo chambers, which started gaining prominence when algorithms started meddling in your news feed. The major web companies collect a huge amount of data about you and in doing so are building a detailed profile comprising demographic data, likes and purchases and other…
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