Ask just about anyone today to name one thing they learned within the past week and where they learned it, and they’re likely to tell you about a video they watched on YouTube or Tiktok. In our modern digital age, it’s difficult to have a conversation about learning without considering the vastness of the Internet and how it’s shaped learner expectations around workplace training.

In light of all this, there has been a lot of talk about the concept of “learning experience platforms” (LXPs) in recent years. Many Learning and Development (L&D) leaders now seek learning platforms that not only help them deliver training across their enterprises, but also engage their employees through more interactive features and dynamic content suggestions.

Problems arise, however, when an LXP alone is unable to meet an organization’s core learning requirements. Over the years, this led some L&D professionals to implement two platforms for their organizations—both an LXP and a learning management system (LMS). This also proved to be tedious and costly though, and caused many challenges for organizations.

A common difference between an LMS and an LXP is that an LMS is primarily built to distribute training content and often emphasizes course administration, learning program management and compliance, while an LXP focuses more on the learner experience through features like sophisticated content delivery, skills mapping, and personalized career paths.

What sets us apart here at Schoox is that we created our platform with a focus on learners first, as well as an aspiration to build engaging learning experiences that complement and enhance the vital functionalities of an LMS.

Today, Schoox empowers some of the world’s largest enterprises to deliver the training their employees need to succeed, in nearly any language and on any device—and take learning and development to the next level with many of the core functionalities of an LXP embedded right into our award-winning platform.

To further enhance the LXP functionalities of Schoox, we’re thrilled to introduce pre-populated external content channels as a quick and easy way for L&D leaders to share free content resources from YouTube directly within the platform. With just a few clicks, admins or learning managers can opt to make these curated video playlists available to all or select groups of learners.

Some of the best learning resources out there today are easily accessible on the web by anyone with a broadband internet connection. Sites like YouTube democratized learning, and not only is democracy a value we take seriously here in Greece—it’s one we invented. From day one, we designed Schoox to be the best LMS to help businesses of all sizes democratize learning across their entire organizations and give their people the power to drive their own learning journeys forward.

On behalf of everyone here at Schoox, I invite you to follow along here on our blog as we continue on our path toward making learning more rewarding and fun for all.

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Introducing External Content Channels

The best learning programs include a diverse range of content from a variety of sources. And many L&D professionals look to learning experience platforms (LXPs) as a way to provide open content resources, personalized recommendations, and informal learning opportunities to their learners. From day one, Schoox was built as a mobile and social workplace learning platform that meets the requirements you would expect for a learning management system (LMS) as well as the learner-driven capabilities of an LXP.

To further enhance the embedded LXP functionality in Schoox, we’re now offering pre-populated External Content Channels complete with free videos from YouTube that can be used directly in courses and learning programs. With just a few clicks, admins or learning managers can opt to make these videos available to all or select groups of learners, in addition to our many other content solutions.

Q1, Q2, This One’s For You: Schedule and Deliver Reports Every Quarter

Reporting is one of the most useful features of Schoox. Reports eliminate the need to manually track training progress and provide all sorts of information that’s useful to L&D professionals, training managers, and other stakeholders. Admins and managers can select from hundreds of pre-built templates or build their own to include the data most relevant to the audience or question at hand. This could include assessment scores, attendance lists, skill levels, progress toward organizational goals and KPIs, compliance tracking, and more.

Different types of reports can be scheduled in advance to be delivered directly to the inbox of anyone who needs them. To make things even easier, we recently added a new option to have scheduled reports delivered on a quarterly basis. This automates one more workflow for L&D professionals, allowing them to focus on more strategic goals.

Now Playing On-Demand: Offer Academy Content for Purchase

Learning looks different at every organization. For some businesses, learners may not always be internal employees but contract workers, agents, or others who need access to specific training content from outside the organization. In such cases, businesses may opt to offer a library of individual courses available for purchase, similar to on-demand or “pay per view” entertainment.

We recently introduced the Academy Marketplace in Schoox, which allows learners to purchase access to individual courses developed in your academy. Courses available for purchase are displayed on a public listing page with a unique URL, so a Schoox login is not required to view it. That means with a link to the page, anyone from within or outside your organization can easily browse through the available on-demand course offerings. Once they know which course they’d like to purchase, they’ll be directed to create an account in Schoox, complete the transaction, and access the course.

The Academy Marketplace is an ideal way to offer supplemental learning opportunities to employees who are interested or provide secure access to customers, partners, or others who may not be directly employed by your business.

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The post What’s New in Schoox? Ready-to-Go Content Channels, Academy Marketplace, and More appeared first on Schoox - A Learning Management System.

Today everyone expects the same level of personalized, responsive service with everything they do—including their learning experiences. Fulfilling the need for smarter learning technology in business setting, however, is often considered “easier said than done.” That’s where learning experience platforms (LXPs) enter the picture. 

LXPs are considered the most exciting development in employee learning—and, as a result, are on a fast track to greater popularity among corporations, extended enterprises, and franchise businesses in the next decade. Interest in and demand for LXPs accelerated in 2019, according to Gartner. The LXP market in 2020 was approximately over $508.5 million. The market is expected to surge at a CAGR of 25.3% according to the recent research report.

LXPs are different from learning management systems (LMS.) While an LMS focuses on course administration, learner assessment, and tracking learners’ activities with reports, the purpose of an LXP is to deliver the components of a personalized learner experience through social, collaborative, mobile, and microlearning tools. The systems often utilize machine learning to assess employees’ skills and recommend content.

LXPs are a front-end layer that typically resides on top of an LMS. They integrate with existing internal and external “trusted sources” of knowledge and learning, including LMS and corporate HR systems to present learners with a holistic learning experience. An LXP puts learners at the center of their own professional education experience by tailoring suggestions to their preferences and personalizing all aspects of learning. They also enable L&D teams to be leaner, more agile, and more strategic.

But what if you want both LMS and LXP capabilities in one platform? This is a great question and an ideal goal. One option is to overlay LXP functionality on top of an LMS. This isn’t ideal, however, because there is a fundamental lack of integration between the applications, which means that employees must log into two systems to access the functionality—an outcome they won’t appreciate.

Schoox Delivers Built In LXP Tools

An ideal learning system should deliver the best of both worlds—both administering the L&D program and creating exceptional experiences for learners. Schoox brings the two sides of learning and development together in one platform, thereby, creating a single seamless user experience. 

Here’s a quick look at the capabilities of each and the result from the perfect union of the two. 

Organizations that have already deployed a blended LMS-LXP system are able to easily execute effective employee learning programs that are more experiential and immediate, and that target content for delivery when and where it’s needed. 

These dual-focused learning applications are checking all the boxes of a modern employer learning program—including social, collaborative, mobile, and microlearning. Checkers & Rally’s is a perfect example. 

Checkers & Rally’s Fun, Engaging, and Mobile Microlearning

Checkers & Rally’s learned that teaching the tricks of the trade to its 11,000-strong team members doesn’t always require long lessons. Instead, to learn how to “serve up the perfect fry,” for example, workers simply watch a fun, short video demo on their phones or one of each store’s two iPads. Then they immediately put the new knowledge to work during their shifts. This has made learning more immediate and experiential—and, as a result, more effective. 

The “short video blasts are incredibly popular with our staff,” said Krishawna Henderson, the QSR’s Director of Diversity & Learning Development and manager of its innovative “Crazy Good Learning” program. “The number of employees logging onto the learning platform has doubled year over year, and team members are eager to put into practice what they’ve just learned.”

Learn more about Checkers & Rally’s success and the power of Schoox to support learning programs for front-line workers in our new report, Real-world Learning for Frontline Workers: Top 5 Learning & Development Must-haves for Employees Working on the Go.

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As businesses increasingly realize that their workforce is their greatest asset, employee experience is gaining traction as an important line item in employers’ annual budgets.

But what is employee experience, exactly? Is it just another buzzword for employee engagement? How does an employee’s learning and development journey fit into the experience discussion? And is EX here to stay?

What Is Employee Experience?

The term “employee experience” is the combined sum of experiences an employee has during the recruitment, employment, and post-employment phases of a job. This includes the interactions with others, the policies, procedures, and processes one faces. It also includes the culture of the organization, the total rewards (pay, benefits), the physical environment, and the job itself. 

How Does Employee Experience Differ from Employee Engagement?

The combination of all the factors mentioned above create an experience that ultimately influences the level of engagement an employee feels toward their employer. Engagement is the degree to which an employee is willing and able to be their best at work. Experience is proactive. It’s about shaping what will happen. An employee’s workplace experience drives their level of engagement.

A helpful way to understand the difference between EX and employee engagement is to think of EX as input and employee engagement as output. 

The employer is responsible for the input—the ways employees experience working at a company. The impact of that experience triggers the output, or the naturally occurring benefits of creating a positive EX. 

The Importance of L&D in Employee Experience

Learning and development is one piece of the EX pie. But it is an important piece that can affect every other part of the employee lifecycle. It is no surprise that 94% of employees in LinkedIn’s 2019 Workplace Learning Report said they’d stay at a company longer if it invested in their learning and development. Therefore, if done well, the “outputs” from a learning and development program could lead to improved engagement, performance, retention, and more.

With so much focus on experience as it relates to both learning and employees, it is important to highlight their differences and how they intersect. 

• Learning experience is just one part of the overall employee experience.
• A learning experience is not the same as a learning experience platform (LXP). However, an LXP greatly improves the learning experience, and as a result, part of the employee experience.
• Improved engagement, performance, and retention are all outcomes of an employee’s learning experience that affect the overall employee experience.

The Future of EX

It may be the latest buzzword, but employee experience is here to stay. In Josh Bersin’s recent article on his report, HR Technology 2021: The Definitive Guide, he describes the changes in the HR Tech market as “shattering.” He says there has been a complete inside-out shift that focuses entirely on employees, not on HR. 

The report provides insights on trends that all speak to a future dependent upon employee experience. Employers would benefit from paying attention to these trends to remain competitive and to attract—and keep—great talent. 

A few of these trends include:

• The arrival of employee listening tools that are “revolutionizing the world of employee voice” that help employers identify experts in their company or when employees are overworked
• “Experience databases” to manage all of the feedback data mentioned above
• Easily integrated platforms focused on managing all aspects of employee health and wellbeing
• Even new systems that are challenging LXPs

What are you doing to design the best employee experience at your company? If you’re not sure where to start, consider modernizing your learning and development program. 

Download our free buyer’s guide, Navigating Today’s Changing Learning Platform Landscape: A Guide for Choosing a Next-Generation LMS to learn how Schoox delivers an engaging learner experience and learning management functionality all within one system.

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What Is an LXP? How Is it Different from an LMS?

LXPs are a front-end layer that typically reside on top of an LMS. They are used to enhance an individual learner’s engagement. They accomplish this through greater personalization and a larger amount of formal and informal content, such as TED Talks, YouTube videos, Harvard Business Review articles, and massive open online courses (MOOCs). These systems employ machine learning to assess employees’ skills and recommend content.

Interest in and demand for learning experience platforms (LXPs) accelerated  in 2019, according to Gartner. Learning management systems (LMS) traditionally focus on scheduling, registering, and tracking learners’ activities. LXPs go a step further by delivering personalized learning paths, channels, and collections of learning materials. This allows learners to organize, access, and share relevant resources, while discovering more avenues of learning.  

The Benefits of an LXP

Today, many CLOs and L&D leaders understand that the processes and systems they’ve relied on in the past no longer support their strategic vision for employee learning. 

Event-based learning, instructor-led training, and systems that are rigid and static are incompatible with their priorities. Examples of these priorities include building a culture of learning, expanding learning opportunities across the workforce, and supporting business growth and success.

An approach to learning that does support these priorities has been the introduction of LXPs. Organizations that have been pioneering this trend have seen several benefits. 

• Learning is more experiential and immediate
• Content is delivered when and where it’s needed
• Learning and development teams are leaner, more agile, and more strategic

The Challenges of an LXP

LXPs do have their challenges, however. One, for example, is a lack of integration. An LXP provides certain features that are missing from legacy LMS platforms. An inability to integrate means that employees would have to log into yet another system to access these features.

Certainly, LXPs have carved out a category in the overall learning technology space. But there’s a growing consensus that they create an additional (even unnecessary) layer. Some feel that the LMS should carry the responsibility of innovating and incorporating the features and benefits that make a next generation learning platform.

Moving Forward: Choose a Learning Platform with Both

Yes, the innovation of an LXP may be flawed in its effort to provide a point solution, but it is still the right innovation. 

Additionally, it might not be clear that there are learning platform vendors out there that have known that learner experience needed more work in the LMS.

As a result, vendors have been working toward strengthening the LXP functionality in their LMS. Yet, legacy systems and an obligation to choose a brand-name vendor have left many in the dark to these new disrupters.

There is a better option than trying to implement an LXP as an added layer to an LMS. It is to choose a learning platform that includes both. This will enable you to:

• Have the important learner experience functionality you need
• And, reinforce your learning programs with a better content strategy  

It’s helpful to remember that the LXP evolution has been driven largely by the customized conveniences of today. Employees are living in a world where everyone has access to whatever we need or want. And we can find it whenever we need or want it—from on-demand movie viewing to food delivery, and so on.

To deliver high-quality employee learning experiences, the platforms you select need to mirror this same level of personalization and immediacy.

Download our free Buyer’s Guide, Navigating Today’s Changing Learning Platform Landscape: A Guide for Choosing a Next-Generation LMS to learn how Schoox delivers an engaging learner experience and learning management functionality all within one system.

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