“Every drop-off, click or share is a learner shouting their likes and dislikes.” – Lori Niles-Hoffmann
L&D is changing. As workplace learning moves away from long training days away from the job, today’s organisations are now looking at ways to meet the needs of the modern learner. In doing so, many are now adopting a more blended learning approach in their L&D strategy. And while this does not mean that face-to-face learning is in any way redundant, by moving a great chunk of the learning into a digital environment we are instead faced with a new challenge. And it’s something that’s sitting right between us.
I’m talking about the screen.
You see, while the classroom trainer has traditionally always had the ability to adjust his or her approach according to the learners’ immediate reactions, body language is far harder to read when separated by device screens. A classroom trainer might be able to tell just by the sound of someone absently clicking their pen or a vacant stare out of the window that the learners are getting bored. Whereas an eager response to a question or an enthused nod may well be enough to say, “I’m engaged and I’m listening!”
But how can you do this for online training? Is there a way to leverage the learning management system to gain real-time insight into learner engagement with the learning materials?
What is digital body language?
A term first coined by Steve Woods in his book of the same name, digital body language (or DBL) was primarily used in sales and marketing to track and analyse customers’ buying habits in an online environment. Sales and marketing have seen a seismic shift in the way consumers interact with brands and how they go about the buying process. E-commerce, for example, has seen high street retailers shutting stores in their droves for the past few years as savvy buyers conduct research online and make their purchases at the touch of a button. In fact, ONS states that the average weekly value of Internet sales was £1.2 billion in April 2018, most of which was spent in stores without a physical presence.
Sales and marketing aren’t the only sectors having to equip themselves with the right skills to connect with their target audience digitally. A similar thing is happening in L&D. In order to future-proof their learning strategies, L&D practitioners are now having to adapt to the shift to digital learning, which has grown by a staggering 900% in the last 17 years. What’s more, 90% of learners believe that online learning is the same or better than the traditional classroom experience.
Just as the marketing professional must, therefore, be able to interpret every customer click, exit or purchase, so too must the modern L&D practitioner equip themselves with the skills to interpret their learners’ online behaviour in order to get the learning strategy just right.
What can digital body language tell us?
When delivering online training via an LMS or LXP, for example, there are several things you might look at to determine how learners are engaging with the training content. Say, for example, you’ve just uploaded a new module for customer-facing staff to learn how to deal with conflict management. To gain insight into engagement with the new course, you might want to use your LMS features to consider factors such as:
The length of time spent on the learning content
Once learners are logged onto the platform, how long are they spending learning online? Say your analytics show that the average length of time spent watching a 4 minute video is indeed near enough 4 minutes. This indicates that learners are taking the time to watch it in full and are consuming the training content. Or perhaps you see that learners are only spending an average of 2 minutes reading a 10-minute article. This could be a signal to you that either the text is too long; consider using shorter articles to engage the easily-distracted and time-poor modern learner.
It could also indicate that the training content lacks relevance. A great way to see feedback on the article would therefore be to allow users to rate the content. When buying, we often look to peers for recommendations before committing to a purchase, and choosing to commit time to learning is no different. In Thinqi for instance, our ratings feature can provide the user with a clear indication of which resources learners find most relevant and helpful.
This is the content you need to take note of and promote. This is the content that works.
The time of day learners are most active
The modern learner, according to Deloitte, wants learning that’s untethered, on-demand, and available at the point of need to fit their busy lifestyles. Are learners logging in mostly during commuting hours? If so, this is the time you need to reach them – consider sending out mobile notifications at this time. Or maybe there’s a spike in traffic to the learning platform in the late evening, when people have had the chance to unwind, hit the gym, or put the kids to bed.
Knowing exactly when your learners are most active means you’re reaching them at a time when they’re most likely to engage, rather than shouting into the void.
Devices most used to access the learning materials
Insight into how your learners are accessing the learning materials will inform the design of your content. Take a look at the metrics and see how many are accessing via mobile device and how many via desktop. Is mobile usage increasing rapidly? Then start releasing bite-sized chunks of content (short videos, audio clips or articles) so that people can dip in and out of the learning content on-the-go as they please.
Mobile learning slow to catch on? It might not be the right time to roll out all your mobile content at once. Drip-feed according to the peaks in mobile usage and you can adapt your content to suit your learners.
As Lori-Niles Hoffman says in her excellent e-book ‘Data-Driven Learning Design: How to Decode Learner Digital Body Language’, “we can no longer push out content that we believe learners must digest – not when there is evidence that tells us what learners are willing to consume as digital content. Instead, it is time to give learners what they want.”
Engagement with social and collaborative learning
Humans are by nature social beings. Social interactions are critical to our development—from those burbled attempts to repeat our very first words to watching a colleague demonstrate a new task, we constantly learn via “observation, imitation and modeling” (Albert Bandura). Bandura’s social learning theory might not be anything new, but the concept is being used by high-performing organisations that want to harness the power of collaborative learning in the flow of work.
The more people share knowledge, ask questions and engage with each other, the more it will become a cornerstone of organisational culture. But how do you keep track of those social interactions within your learning management system?
In a virtual classroom setting, breakout rooms and class discussions are the obvious solution. Learning materials can be discussed in real-time and activities set within the training session. But what about that all-important discussion around learning outside of synchronous learning environments? It all counts.
Luckily, today’s online platforms allow you to harness collaborative, informal learning and make it centralised in one virtual space to be accessed, engaged with and tracked from anywhere at any time. Creating networks of employees and allowing them to join web based communities of practice pertaining to similar areas of work, themes or disciplines is a good start. For example, you could create a network for employees taking a sales course and be able to see engagement happening on discussion boards and comment threads. Ideally, these should allow free discussion and a safe environment to share ideas throughout the training course, as well as multimedia, solutions and suggestions. Ratings and reviews are not only powerful means of peer recommendation and social proof, but they’re also beneficial to you in determining what learning materials are resonating with people and which ones need revising or removing from the LMS.
Quality of assessment for employee training
Data, analytics and marketing are all increasingly important skills for the modern L&D practitioner and it’s precisely why they’re a key part of the ‘Performance and Impact’ area of the LPI Capability Map, and one of the top priorities again for the Global Sentiment Survey conducted annually by Donald H Taylor.
L&D is becoming more reliant on learning that’s results-driven. Having greater visibility of specific reporting data for online training content can really sharpen your focus when it comes to online learning delivery, allowing you to identify problem areas and refine your questioning within assignments if needed. If your learners are coping well with one particular question but all are failing the same one, this online behaviour is indicative that either you need to incorporate further training on this subject ot there is an issue with the way the question is worded.
In summary…
As learning migrates from classroom to digital, L&D practitioners of today must be ready to accept a changing role in order to stay relevant. No longer can we ‘spoon-feed’ training content within the LMS or give learners what we think they want. Modern learners demand learning that’s empowered and engaging, and to accommodate this we have to do less enforcing and more observing. What are they engaging with? What’s their appetite for learning? How can we meet them at their point of need?
Digital body language in learning is more than just the buzz of a few extra clicks or shares. It’s a seriously useful tool to help us plan, create and release the right content to our learners, in the right format, at the right time.
Your learners are clicking. Listen.
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