Enterprise Learning Management System - The possibilities

Enterprises have spent tremendous efforts into building learning management systems, evaluation applications, performance management and employee management systems over the past decades. These have brought in significant improvements in learning, productivity and streamlining processes.

 It is now time to unleash the power inherent in these various systems and applications, often disparate and silo-ed. It’s now time to make sense of what happens in one system, to power the information residing in another, so that the right learning can happen for the right person in the right way. It’s now time to make this happen and be firmly on the road to mapping all this to business impact: increase in sales, improvement in margins, adherence to safety, and so on.

Here's a closer look at why an integrated enterprise learning solution is important

Srijan is enabling one of the world's leading manufacturers and marketers of quality cosmetics to do this by helping them take baby steps into the world of xAPI and microlearning. Srijan started off with handling performance issues and integrations to enable better productivity, and then embarked on developing proofs of concept related to xAPI. Here’s how the journey is shaping up.

Improving the LMS performance

The Company has a number of brands and each brand has its own set of products. A few years ago, the Company had decided to build its own learning management system (LMS), as it had very specific requirements and were looking for an open source system that would be flexible, customizable and scalable enough to meet the learning requirements across the enterprise. So Drupal was chosen as the backend. The frontend was built in ReactJS. Srijan was brought in to first deliver support on the LMSs. Srijan handled performance issues and is currently enabling the migration from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8.

Integrations to the LMS

The Company was moving from an H5P content authoring platform to Articulate facing challenges with authoring content and then uploading it to the Drupal LMS. Srijan helped them with the transition by building modules for Drupal to consume and render Articulate content. Srijan worked on integrating Articulate, a content authoring tool, to the Drupal backend and then having it appropriately render on ReactJS. Now the authors can work in Articulate and not have to worry about uploading to the LMS and have intense testing to see if the content is getting rendered correctly or now.

Integrating a Learning Record Store with Drupal

The Learning Record Store is at the heart of an xAPI setup. It stores the data about learning and achievement for each employee. When a user interacts on the LMS, the interactions can be captured via the xAPI protocol and stored in the LRS. Srijan completed a POC for this as well for the Company.

Some of the interactions being captured include:

1. User interacted with the content
2. User experience content
3. User passed
4. User failed

Some of the more complex interactions that can be captured involve the following:

1. User mutes a video
2. User skips a video
3. User read part of the content etc

Integration of Articulate Content in Drupal with LRS

Articulate already supports xAPI, so once the content authored in Articulate is exported into Drupal, the content is rendered with the xAPI-driven data capturing in place. This is then pulled into the LRS. Srijan developed this POC to demonstrate how the LRS would get populated with interactions on Articulate content.

Creating a Microlearning Platform

The Company has data about an employee of two different systems. One is the LMS, and the other is the evaluation system. Both have Drupal as the backend and the frontend built in ReactJS. There is a middleware Java layer. The Company operates in various countries of the world, and has several Regions managing these countries. Each brand in a region has its own LMS, and each region has its own evaluation system.

So far, an employee gets evaluated by her supervisor and that information is stored in the Evaluation system. And it may or may not get translated into training specific to the employee’s performance. For example, if her evaluation report says she needs to improve her Communication skills, she could be asked to go through the Communication module again. Or be put into another Communication offline training.

However, in such a system, there is little attention on what her real learning needs are. It could be that she is very good with some parts of Communication, and not so much with other parts. Figuring out which parts, and then designing the right learning module for her becomes key in these ways:

• The employee doesn’t have to waste time learning things she already is well versed with
• The employee can be asked to simply get her learning for the specific areas, through snackable content like short videos, interactive quizzes, animations, etc.

How do we get to this?

Create a quiz to identify the proficiency level of the employee on the learning platform. This can be done by pulling out questions from various proficiency levels. People who do well with the questions, can be given questions from higher proficiency. This identifies the specific area the employee needs training on.  

The e-learning authoring team can then look at the existing content and create snackable pieces of content that will work well for this employee. It could be a short video, a small example, an animation, a flash card, and so on. This content is made available on the learning platform which serves content in micro formats. Hence it is called a micro learning platform

The platform can then have the algorithms in place to see how this content is being consumed. For example:

• Did the employee complete the module?
• Did she view the video fully? If she viewed it in mute, then an alert can go to her to remind her to view it with speakers on.  
• Did she view the graphic?

And so on.

Once the module has been completed, the trainer can evaluate her again and see if the proficiency level has improved.

All this information is being captured and stored in the LRS. This can be used to get insights to what she has learnt, how well has she learnt it.

Srijan has built a microlearning platform as a POC for the Company to see how all this works. It is also built using the Drupal-ReactJS stack. Once this is approved, it can be scaled up, and eventually integrated with the LMS. 

The Road Ahead

The next POCs that Srijan will do involve creating the reports in and out of the LRS. Once there is enough data in the LRS, Srijan will also be working on creating advanced reports about the learning performance.

The analytics can give insights for each user, brand, region and group. So there’s information about who consumed what kind of learning, and this can be scaled up across the enterprise. Map this to data around business impact, for example, sales. And you would be able to showcase this on a dashboard using xAPI pulling data from LRSs and the ERP system tracking sales numbers for each region/brand.

The Company can also get analytics about the learning content being produced. For example, if there’s a module that people are dropping off from mid-way, what could be the reason? If a video is being watched on mute by nearly all viewers, is there a problem with its audio? The content authoring team can thus identify which pieces need modification, so better consumption can take place among learners.

We've been working closely with global enterprises to modernize their learning ecosystems, whether it's by upgrading existing systems or intertwining them with emerging technologies like xAPI, chatbots, VR and more.

Wish to drive greater ROI from your enterprise learning systems? Let's start the conversation and explore how Srijan can help.