What a great week it’s been at DevLearn. We can only hope that week two is just as good. The format is that the middle day of each week is given over to the Expo and Demofest. So, today’s summary will focus on the sessions Ian saw on Thursday and Friday. We hope you get something useful out of the resources here.
1. CLO’s view of L&D strategy post Covid-19: research results with Allen Partridge
Allen presented findings from the 2020 Chief Learning officer report into Learning during the global crisis. Specifically, how L&D departments have so far coped with changing work styles. The main data is captured in the pictures below. Just click to access the gallery. Here is a list of the top level findings:
- Nearly 80% of respondents reported that most or all their L&D employees were able to move to a remote working style
- 86% said their organisation shifted some, most or all of their F2F training to the virtual environment
- Nearly 40% expect to convert classroom training to virtual by the end of 2020
- 65% said that L&D was involved in the process for a shift to remote work
- 84% said that the crisis had reinforced the value L&D brings to an organisation
- Only 64% felt that they were technically prepared for the changes, but 91% said that their team was already appropriately skills for the change
- The change in work style meant that 80% reported increased cross-functional collaboration
- Finally 71% reported an increase in the use of learning platforms
What that tells us is that 2020 has seen a lot of changes in the work L&D does, and those changes could be here to stay. Some of the positive outcomes are that L&D can be central to the shift to remote working styles (not only for remote learning), and through cross-functional collaboration and the use of learning platforms there is a bright future for L&D.
3. Spaced learning: why it’s so good & how to get started with Bianca Baumann & Mike Taylor
Bianca and Mike presented a ‘How to use marketing tools to create great spaced-learning’ 101 session in an informative and practical style. They started out by introducing the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve and the research that demonstrates that spaced learning is effective. For more information about that research, and for items in this review you can look at their presentation online. For a quick summary about how to do email marketing campaigns, read on here.
The premise of spaced learning is not that training is broken into chunks and sent out. Instead it’s a deliberate repetition of already learning information, whether thats done in a classroom or through digital learning. The question is, does it work? The answer is yes. Below is a brief summary of a study done using a history course where people who were given a ‘later’ reminder of content did much better in assessments. What this research also tells us is that retrieval practice such as working on simulations and case studies gets far better results that absorbing information in the form of presentations.
So how do we in the L&D field use tools to create proper spaced learning? The simple recommendation is to use a tool that aggregates the applications we already have, such as Zapier which works really well with Gmail, Outlook, Excel and others to collect user data and prepare it for space distribution. You can also rely on the free versions of marketing tools like Mailchimp AWeber or emma, which have good functionality even in the entry versions. In this case Bianca and Mike recommended Mailer lite as a pretty good tool for spaced repetition through email.
What are the advantages of using email? Well it’s quick and easy to set up and use, it’s inexpensive, can be automated, is mobile friendly, can produce analytics and is adaptive. All this is great, but do people open learning emails when they get so many competing emails, text messages and slack notifications each day? Again, yes.. see the stat below.
Bianca and Mike know their stuff about how to set up and roll out an email drip campaign, there is a brief image of that below. One way to do that in a single application is to use Sparks. For a much more detailed description that we can write here about drip campaigns and how to create a campaign impactful email designs take a closer look at their presentation.
Those were the standout highlights for the second half of week one. Thanks to Allen, Bianca and Mike. Have a great weekend and we’ll see you next week with more summaries.