Reflections on Learning Technologies Day 2

Stick a fork in me I’m done. I love coming to Learning Technologies, it always reinvigorates my curiosity of how we can use technology to enable and improve our learning offer. But I’m feeling tired and cognitively over stimulated now, so time for a quiet train journey home.

Firstly, thank you to all those who’ve spent time talking with me over the last few days, its such a privilege to be able to interact with so many great passionate and knowledgeable people, both those I know from previous interactions and those I’ve met for the first time these last few days.

Today felt a bit quieter again, and people looked a bit tired too. But there were still some great free talks to get to and some great products and people to talk with too. Many of the theme’s I highlighted from yesterday were still dominating the agendas today as well, but there were a few different spins on some of them, so here’s my takeaways from Day 2 of Learning Technologies.

1. Data driven learning

As I mentioned yesterday, AI is changing how people interact with our learning products, they’re giving us a lot of data about their choices, their responses to questions and stimuli, which at the minute is going uncaptured. I had a great chat with Leon at Valamis who told me the world is heading towards data driven learning. So they’re using xAPIs to capture data and then have it analysed to provide better learning experiences. SCORM isn’t going to cut it when it comes to maximising data collection, its time to move on.

I talked yesterday about how AI is changing interfaces and how learners interact with learning platforms, providing a more natural, richer, form of interaction. These richer interactions create richer data we can harvest if we’ve got the tools to do so.

2. Great learning design never goes out of fashion

Intriguingly I’ve sat in a few talks these last 2 days where the solutions demonstrated haven’t been technologically complex, in fact they’ve been pretty simple. But they’ve all benefitted from great learning design. Yesterday it was Make Real and their branching scenarios and storytelling for compliance training with LSEG, today it was Neil Glenister from Adeptly talking about choose your own adventure stories, role play games and other tools which have been around for a while, but are capable of providing great scenario-based learning experiences. With the inclusion of AI as a dynamic tool for interactions brining flexibility to responses it makes it even more engaging and powerful an experience. But its reassuring to see that under the hood of these great products is great learning design.

There were a few other interesting things which don’t fall into these categories too. Firstly, Sana . I’ve been interested in them and their work for a while and it was great to see how they are using AI to create unique learning experiences with their authoring tool. You can include a range of Ai infused components and interactions into courses made in their authoring tool. Whether that’s a Q&A section midway through which is literally an opportunity to ask questions to an AI teacher, or to be asked questions of and get feedback on your responses. Also the ability to create scenario based assessments which AI grades following a criteria. It’s all very interesting stuff.

There’s also a rise of AI assistants, again changing the interaction between learner and their learning. Shane Coady-Barrett at Thrive was showing me Kiki on their platform. HowNow were showing me their AI Gurus which you can create and set unique custom knowledge basis for too.

I loved the talk by Sponge in the morning, potentially because it was a breath of fresh air that they never mentioned AI at all. But beyond that it was a timely reminder that learning and training isn’t always the answer and their 3E model looks like an interesting tool to experiment with too. They were good at reinforcing that in L&D we tend to see everything as learning or training but we need to think wider than this and show the business that we really understand the whole problem in order to gain buy in for our work.

Finally, I had a great chat with Ben Wynne-Simmons from VEED and got to see some of the cool things that Veed can do. It’s easy editing of video, cutting text from a transcript which AI then cuts the video for you at the right time stamps for example. It could be a great tool for video editing and speed up so much of current post-production times too.