Driving Learning Engagement with Community and AI

Sa.

Sam and thank you for joining today's webinar.

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Sam foreign.

And thank you for joining today's webinar. My name is Rhys and I'll be your moderator today. We're gonna kick off today's session in about 20 seconds or so. We've just been waiting so everyone has had a chance to join. Let us know where you're joining from using the chat or the comments, depending on what platform you're watching on. And yeah, tell us something that you'd like to get out of today's webinar. A few bits of housekeeping before we kick off. The session is being recorded and the recording will be emailed to everyone that's registered for the event. I've posted a link to that in the chat as well, and I'll post it again shortly. But if you missed that, then head over to datacount.comwebinars and you should still be able to register. We are also going to have a Q and A towards the end of the session. So if you have any questions that you'd like to ask, then please let us know at any point during the session and I will save them for the Q and A. Brilliant. I think that's everything from me. So now I'll hand you over to your host for today's session. Richie. Richie, please take it away.

Welcome to the Webinar. This is Richie. So today we're going to take a break from our usual data content and instead we're going to focus on learning and development. So running an upskilling program can be tricky. And for data and AI skills, of course, the theory is you buy Data Camp and then everyone in your company is magically great at these things. And while I like to think that datacamp makes it easy to learn, often the hardest part from a corporate learning perspective is getting everyone to stay engaged and actually take the courses, amongst other challenges. So today we're going to discuss some of the issues around running an enterprise upskilling program. And we're going to focus on how to keep people engaged. And there are two big guns in the L and D arsenal for this, namely community and social learning and also using artificial intelligence. So I've got an expert on each of these aspects here today. First of all, we have Edside Zvopuo, the CEO of Acalytica, and he's also a serial entrepreneur. So he founded acalytica to help businesses manage their online communities, and he previously founded MathSG, a mathematics learning platform that was listed as a 2019 Top 40 African EdTech Innovation. So Edside has been recognized as a Bill and Melinda Gates foundation goalkeeper, an African Union expert on emerging tech, and an Archbishop Tutu leadership fellow. Joining us today, we also have Cambria Dumesnil. She's the founder and AI strategist at AI Innovation Lounge. And Cambria also. Well, Cambria founded the AI Innovation Lounge to help L and D teams improve learning programs by making games use of AI. And she got over a decade of experience in workplace learning, knowledge management and process improvement projects. Most recently at Washington State. Cambria is also the host of the AI Learner Lounge podcast. So welcome both of you. Really excited for this chat. So, to kick it off, can you tell me what you see as the main challenges of running a corporate training program? Cambridge, do you want to go first?

Sure. I think one of the main challenges is first getting the buy in and support for it. It takes a lot of leadership support and then employees as well. But once you have that established, it's making sure that you're able to tailor the content for different contexts, different employees, different roles. They all need different things from an upskilling program. And if it's going to be effective, it can't just be an out of the box solution that you're trying to push on everyone. I think the more relevant it is to the learners, the more likely they are to be able to want to go in there and do things and learn. It's going to be relevant to their work, they're going to be able to apply it in a meaningful way. And beyond that, making sure that you're able to show return on investment and that you're investing in the right things.

Those are all great points. I particularly like the point about making sure that it's the right content for each group of employees, not just a one size fits all thing and getting just sort of matching stuff up. It sounds easy, but that's actually like, it's kind of a tricky thing. So I'd love to discuss that more. Edsai, do you have anything to add there? What do you see as the big challenges?

Yeah, so generally LND has been seen as a peripheral activity where it's not in the center or in the strategy of companies. So it's nice to have. That's how it's treated in quite a lot of organizations. So that means that there's not enough emphasis and there is no goal orientation to say let us have this learning intervention because we want Rishi to improve in his selling. So there is like a smart goal to say let's take the sales team, we want them to improve by a certain, say 15% by the end of this period, by the end of the quarter. But you find that it's almost like it's a hobby on the side, you know, and it's treated as a cost center instead of being something that actually improves productivity and has effects on the bottom line of the company. So that's one of the biggest things. And then secondly, you find that with the evolution of learning platforms, a lot of corporates are not evolving fast enough to actually have interoperability where their CRM speaks to their LMS speaks to their external service provider, such that they can have a holistic view of the progress of an employee. So for example, let's say, Richie, I take you on a sales course. I need to link your performance in the course with the actual sales on the ground and have that and be able to analyze it and see if it's actually working, you know. So that's the return on investment that Kambia spoke about.

Yeah, absolutely, yeah. Measuring the success is kind of a tricky thing, but it's very important just to make sure that you do get that executive buy in. Okay, so let's see like what's the best case here? Have you seen any examples of successful training programs and can you tell me like how it's improved the organization that's done that training? We swap the order ed side. Do you want to go first?

Sure. So I've got two examples. There's one case study that I read about at MIT and there's one that I was involved in. So I read a case study from MIT about bvb, it's a bank in Spain, how they introduced data science to their employees. They literally taught everyone in the bank a bit of data. They didn't teach them to be data scientists, but at least acknowledgement of their contribution to the data pipeline. So if it's a bank teller, they know that their quality of data that they're inputting into the system has an effect on the quality of the model along the way downstream, you know, so that was quite an amazing transformation, digital transformation and data analytics view. And then personally I was involved with General Electric where they were moving away from on prem this hrms like HR systems and they were moving to cloud based on but now the cloud based ones had an emphasis on data analytics, had an emphasis on KPIs that actually lead to strategy. So I work with the EMEA team that is Europe, Middle east and Africa, all the HR people and we went through a whole introduction to data from first principles literally until they were comfortable to work with a cloud system. And most of them have retained their jobs and are thriving. So that's the example that I have that's brilliant.

I particularly like that first example, the idea that a bank's just taking everyone in the company and giving them a level of Data literacy, that's something we're definitely big fans of here at Data Camp. All right, Cambria, do you have any more examples of great corporate training programs?

Yeah, there was one I recently read about. This was pre generative AI before it became really popular, but it was with Volkswagen and their AI upskilling program. So they had started mapped out the different roles and identified the actual skill level that they need, whether that was awareness and literacy, if they need to be developers. And they had a systematic program for that. So for each level progressing upward. And then it wasn't just you're going to a course and you're going to do this. It was a little bit like project based learning where they had different things that they'd actually go in and practice and apply back on the job. And it was bit long term so that it was ongoing and they were able to continually have that information coming and learning and being able to go through the different levels to get to the point that they needed to be at. Instead of just a one time class that you're going to go to and you might forget tomorrow. And then from my personal experience, there's a really great leadership program that I was able to be a part of and it was a cohort based program. And right at Covid, we switched to digital instead of in person, which was a little challenging, but they found a way to make it work. And we had used the different breakout rooms to be able to connect with a little bit more personal level and being able to bring that in and learn all the things that we needed to and apply those back on the.

Job, that's pretty like getting that sort of last mile of being able to apply those skills on the job is so important for any kind of learning program. And like just I've taken the course and now I need to apply. It is. Yeah, there's always the big challenge. So it sounds like that was done very well. All right, so I feel like sometimes it's not clear like what constitutes a workplace learning program. So can you talk about like what assumptions you have about like what happens in workplace learning? Cambria, do you want to go first?

Sure. I think for workplace learning there's really two parts of it. You have the development, which is where you have skills that you have identified that you need to upskill, whether that's AI, if it's data, if it's something else, and then you have the ones that could be performance support, looking at different things that don't necessarily need to be training, even if you get a request for training, you need to be able to have that ability to really do that analysis, to see what's going on, what the problem is and whether training is what you need to do for that. Because then if you can sort out those lower level ones and not put the effort into those, that's where you can really make high impact on the things that are going to matter most. So I think that's important. There's a lot of different approaches for how it's structured, but being able to have the learning and development team have a little bit of authority to do that analysis and come back and say, no, we're not going to do a training on this. This is what we recommend and have those taken seriously. I think is one of the most important things for that.

Yeah. So basically lining up, making sure that the training does match up to some kind of corporate goal and giving the L and D team, like just making sure they're empowered to sort of get those things aligned. That does seem incredibly important. Okay, what, what do you sort of feel are the assumptions about workplace learning?

So you find, I mean, one of the biggest assumptions that's prevalent is that learning only occurs in the learning management system, of which there are two types of learning. There's informal learning and then there's formal learning. And the funny bit is that the informal is actually more than the formal. If you see most software these days, they come with this digital adoption mechanisms. I don't know if you know of companies like WalkMe or what Fix that gives you little snippets as you're learning how to use software. So if I go into datacamp and I'm learning how to use it, it's got these little things that tell me, okay, from here, move to the next, move to the next move. So it means that I'm learning as I'm doing and that is more effective because it's experiential learning as opposed to just being given theory without actually doing. I love Data Camp because I know that you guys are actually very hands on when it comes to coding and stuff like that. So that helps. We have to acknowledge the two different forms, the formal and informal. And this has given rise to platforms like lxps that are called learning experience platforms that use protocols like xapi. The xapi, it's a protocol that you can actually use to track even if someone is watching a YouTube video, they're learning. You know, because YouTube is the biggest classroom in the world anyway. So how can we take different sources and fuse the data such that we have a holistic view of how people are learning. Or it could be self reported. I can come in as an employee and say, I watched this TED talk, I want it acknowledged as learning, you know, so that's what I think is learning in the corporate space.

Absolutely. Definitely. Learning by doing is a thing that we're really keen on here at datacamp. And yeah, it's so important, like so much better than just sort of passive learning. All right, so are there any ways that you think AI can benefit a learning program? Because AI has been like the big story of this year. So everyone's saying it's changing learning and development. But how, how's that the case? Cambridge, this is your sort of specialist subject. You want to tell us about your view on this?

Yeah, I think for learning and development there's really two distinct ways it can help. The first is with our learning and development workflows and what we're doing in the process for using AI video avatars. If we're going to use ChatGPT to help us outline some content and that's really that quick win that we can get being able to implement in our daily workflow and have those tools that can help us save time and work just a little bit more effectively. And then the other side of that, I think it's still a little new and upcoming, but I think as things evolve it'll become a little bit more popular is with the learning experience itself. So we now have, through the API, we could go into storyline and we can do these adaptive scenarios. We can create chatbots that you can use to have a back and forth conversation to practice some of these more crucial conversations in a safe environment where you're not having to role play with somebody in a virtual classroom anymore and rely on them to really take on that role. Or sometimes it gets laughed about as a joke and they don't take it seriously all the time. But it's more comfortable when you can just click on a conversation at any time. It doesn't have to be in a formal classroom, you can go there when you need it. So right at that moment of need and be able to practice and use those skills and then get feedback too through reflective chatbots. I think that's really where we'll be going. But in the short term, our workflows where we're going to see the biggest benefits right now?

Absolutely. The idea of like chatbot tutors is, is pretty amazing and that's something we're sort of, we're building into Data Camp as we speak. Yeah, so that, that's going to be pretty revolutionary, I think. But also the idea of just saving some time by optimizing workflows, you know, writing a bit less copy or doing things more effectively, that's also pretty cool. Ed said. You have anything to add there?

Yes, definitely. You find that generative AI is actually enabling the unlocking of ideas that we've always had in education but didn't have the means to implement. For example, having a Socratic tutor, like Cambria said, where literally you can have your personalized tutor who can ask you, I don't know if you've seen the implementation that Khan Academy has done in terms of how it asks you question instead of you asking it question. So it's like almost like reverse prompting, you know, and that is amazing because that is the holy grail of learning, you know, Socratic approach to learning, questioning, you know, so that's now possible because of AI and also personalization. We've spoken about personalization for many years. We've tried rules based on adaptive learning in lmss where we say if then, if, then, if then. But obviously it's not scalable. But now with, with the pattern recognition that AI has, it can be done at scale. And very soon we'll be able to reach what is known as evidence based education. Where Richie, if I teach you today, if I teach you a concert, how do I know that you've actually learned? You know, because that evidence based education is where it's the ultimate end all. Yeah, so we're getting there. And yeah, we're. AI is putting us on the track.

Okay, so just collaborate with this idea of evidence based epic education. I've actually not heard that phrase before. So is this, is this just like taking an exam or a certification or is this a different idea?

No, it's, it's beyond the exam. It's a combination of exams, oral experiential learning and stuff like that. So it's a basket of activities that actually say this is the intervention, the learning, and this is the outcome. And we can actually attribute the outcome to the intervention. So there, now that's where you hear there's the emergence of causal AI. Because the problem with generative AI right now is that it doesn't understand what it's doing. It's a predictive model where literally it's predicting the next word. But it has read so many words that it knows with accuracy what word to come next. But the LLM itself does not understand what's going on. But now when we infuse causality, then we're going to be able to have a reasoning algorithm. You get it? So that's the evidence based that we're talking about.

Okay, excellent. Yeah, it's a bright future, I think, for AI. All right, so I'd like to back up to kind of the start of your learning program. When you both mentioned that having a learning program that's aligned to some sort of concept, corporate goals, or some learning goals is very important. So I think when individuals want to learn, they say, like most people say, of course I want to learn while I'm working. I want to get better at my job. The motivation for companies is often a bit less clear because like, say, a lot of them treat learning development as a cost center. So can you just motivate this a bit? Why should companies bother with training programs for their employees? Like, what's the pitch here? Go on, Cambria, do you want to go first?

Sure, I can start. I think when we think about the return on investment for training, we often think in terms of performance. And you're going to save this much money, you're going to have this process streamlined, you're going to be able to do things quicker, better. But I think the real value lies in what the employees get out of it, because when you're investing in them, they that helps show that you really value them as an employee and you're preparing for your future workforce too. So when we look at some of the research that's done on psychosocial type factors in the workforce and different motivators and influencers of workplace culture, learning and development and growth opportunities is one of the top things that come up. So I think that alone can really bring a lot of value to a company.

Okay. So even beyond like the I'm going to be more productive, it's like this is just making it a better workplace to be in. You're going to retain your staff more and all that sort of thing. Okay, that's a very good point. Edside, do you have any other sort of ways to sort of pitch the importance of learning?

Yeah. So you find that a lot of corporates, without any motivation, they do learning for compliance. If you're in the financial services or health industries, you have no option but to train your people to be compliant with the different legislation that exists. So unfortunately, a sizable chunk of companies are stuck in the compliance phase where they haven't now been aspirational enough to actually climb the ladder and use training for things like cohesion in the workplace, collaboration as a competitive advantage to Say we train our people to be the best. So that has a knock on effect on productivity and even the bottom line because better trained employees can service the client better and that means that you're an attractive business to go to. So even attracting talent because I think nowadays especially the, these Gen Z's and you know, they don't want to go to a place where they can't grow because what's the point, you know. So yeah, so talent attraction is a, is a big thing as well.

Absolutely. And I sort of feel like the compliance training is a very good idea. Like I want my doctor to understand like the HIPAA guidelines and all that sort of stuff and my finance people to not be doing fraud or whatever. But yeah, I do think a lot more companies can be more aspirational about their learning programs. All right, so once you pitch this to whoever's in management, okay, we got the budget. How do you turn these motivations for learning into concrete learning goals for the program Ed side? You want to go first this time.

Yeah. So I think since we've established that a lot of companies are compliance based L and D departments. Right. So to, to jump into the next level where you're actually value adding to the employee and the company as a whole beyond compliance, I think they should do a needs analysis and be able to actually come up with concrete smart goals that are. Because without goal orientation and just say this is learning, you won't get anywhere. Completion rate will be below 5%. I mean you ask the people in the MOOCs, they'll tell you that completion rate is very low because you can't assume that employees are motivated to learn. Right. So it has to be go oriented, it has to be well established to say what problem are we solving, how are we going to solve it, in what time frame? And I think L and D departments should actually borrow from the M and E departments. I don't know, like the monitoring and evaluation. They have done a good job in coming up with frameworks that you can actually use to measure impact and outputs and all that. So yeah. So I believe that goal orientation is important.

Absolutely. Cambri, have you got anything? I don't like how you get these sort of concrete learning goals. Like. Yeah. How do you actually go about it?

Yeah, I think just building on what you said about the needs analysis, I think that's really the key step. Once you have that defined and also looking beyond, we have the course completion and sometimes we'll ask learners if they like the course or how they felt about it. Was it engaging. Did you like the presenter? But moving beyond that to the actual work and how that's impacted, whether that's your ability to be able to take something back and apply it and now you're able to do things quicker or now you're performing, there's a lower error ratio. Being able to have those specific ones is how you're going to see how effective the course is in addition to being able to see how engaged learners are with it. I think it's a combination of the both of those, and that's where we're really going to see how effective our programs are and give us something to strive towards too, because when we have that endpoint in mind, then we can design around getting to that goal as we release our programs.

Okay, it seems like this idea of a needs analysis is pretty important. Can you just expand on what that involves? Is it just surveying employees to say what you need to learn about or what happens there?

You want me to answer that one?

Yeah, yeah, go on.

Yeah. It really starts by deciding what the problem is. And then sometimes it's survey, sometimes it's looking at actual performance metrics, having conversations, interviews with employees and their supervisors as well, to find out what's really going on, what could be improved, and then really honing it down. I mentioned before, training is not always the answer. So that's where you get into defining all the different things that can influence us. Whether it's just having awareness or an expectation that this is how you're supposed to be perform, or having the resources to be able to do that too. That's where we'll really discover what the issues are and then we can address those and identify the specific skills too. Where there's gaps and design around that.

There'S actually interesting the idea that maybe training isn't always the answer and probably you're going to get more credibility for you as a learning person if you say, okay, actually training isn't the solution here, or focus our efforts on cases where training is important. All right, so just moving on to the next phase then. So you figured out your learning goals, you've got a program up and running. I think the next hurdle is often that people like, okay, you've bought in some courses or a training platform. And then people like, well, what is this? So how do you get people to actually adopt your. Your training program or start participating? Ed side, you want to go?

Sure. Thank you. So you find, like I said previously, like in the moocs, in the big moocs, you find that completion Rate is super low. It's like 5% plus minus. That was the research that was done a few years ago. I don't know if it has changed now. So adoption. The thing that has been working in different companies is gamification. But unfortunately gamification is actually science in itself. It's not a hard science. It's a science that requires an art. So I don't know what you'd call. You'd need a da Vinci for that. We can transcend between art and science because it has to be shaped around people's behaviors. Because in some instances you find that maybe gamifying it and giving people rewards in terms of money, maybe that is not even a motivator. Maybe people want meaningful relationships. Maybe people want to be given a holiday, maybe people want a certificate. So actually understanding what is it that makes our people tick and then deciding around that, then that actually makes sense. It shouldn't be because Richie says that if you do points in this way, therefore it's. It's a one size fits all in all organizations of which that doesn't work.

Yeah.

That'S actually terrifying that you said the completion rates of some of these big online courses like 5%, it's like 60% at data camp. I think course completion. So I think competitors are doing something wrong there. But yeah, I do agree with that idea that a bit of gamification does help. Maybe the other thing is like people not being aware of the training or whether they're supposed to participate.

Maybe.

Kamari, can you talk about how do you just get people started? How do you make sure that everyone knows what they're supposed to be doing?

Yeah, I think a communication strategy for that is really important and change management too a little bit. So being able to define how you're going to bring awareness to that, whether that's through email campaigns, something on the intranet and in those messaging, make sure that you're clear on the why, why they should be taking this and what value it's going to bring. Those different incentives that they have, being able to bring that into the messaging so that they're aware of that and then beyond communications, making sure that they have the time to be able to do that, whether that's. Maybe you suggest to their supervisors that they set aside an hour a week to work on this or four hours, whatever that is. Having that dedicated will help give them the ability to be able to go on and do that once they have that motivation.

I love the idea of setting aside time explicitly for learning because so often it's like, well, yeah, we want you to learn, but yeah, you do it in your evenings or weekends. So yeah, that's definitely a worst case scenario, I think.

You know, Richie, can I chip in quickly talking about time and just human behavior. The secret sauce to the success of Facebook, Tik Tok and all of this social media is that they didn't try and teach us things that we didn't know. All they did was amplify what we already doing. Because people by nature, they like gossiping, people like bragging, showing off, sharing, communicating, those are like fundamental human needs. Right. So if we can use the same type of thinking to say people are already doing their job, how can we amplify what they're doing and put in an LND element within their workflow such that they don't have to create new time because we all have 24 hours in a day and it's already packed. So if you're asking me for more time, then I think you're being greedy.

Absolutely. So I guess something, you've got to take something away to free up people's time in order to make sure they've got time for learning. Yeah, absolutely. So in the case of things like data science, artificial intelligence, it can be a bit intimidating. I think a lot of people, if they don't have that sort of technical background, they get hesitant, they're a bit afraid to start learning. But do you, I guess first of all, do you have any tips for how you can make people less afraid of trying these things? So actually, yeah, exactly. Do you want to go first on this one?

No, I think, I think Cambria is more qualified.

Okay, yeah, go on. Do you wanna.

Yeah, I think it really starts with being able to have that growth mindset and wanting to experiment, realizing that you're not always going to be perfect starting out as you're learning, but being willing to do that, that's really the first step. Even if you just go into chat GPT and ask a question, that's the nice thing about these large language models is it can be simple. You can say, explain it to me like I'm five. You start to develop those initial concepts and then you can move forward like with data camp and do those different things to learn coding and still have a little bit of fallback too. If you need to talk to that chatbot, maybe clarify something that you're learning. I think that's where we see really a combination of those two. That's where we can get that motivation and decrease some of the fear a little bit and reduce that barrier to enter for people.

So by making use of AI, which is sort of inherently non judgmental, do you think that can help get people over their fear of just getting started?

I think so, yeah.

Yeah, yeah. And the reason why I was like, Cambria is the best, I mean, have you seen her LinkedIn posts where she simplifies stuff, she puts in this visual, easy to read stuff. I mean, your work is amazing and you simplify it so much that anyone who is not even in the data space will be able to read your stuff. So good work there.

Thank you.

Yes, definitely. Very cool stuff. Yeah. Please follow Gambia on LinkedIn. All right, so I guess the other thing, so as well as making use of AI is the idea of having some sort of a social aspect. I know cohort learning has become a bit of a buzzy topic in the last year or two. So do you think it makes a difference to getting like the adoption levels, like how many people will get started if you do put them in a group? I guess as you, you've run an online community before. Do you want to talk about how that works?

Yes. No, definitely. Because what generative AI is doing is that it's filling in the gaps where the human community was failing. So we've got an online platform called madsg. It was a Q and it's a Q. A platform where people come in, ask questions and the community answers. But before generative AI, it would take days for people to get answers. But now We've integrated with OpenAI and we can actually give instant answers. And then it's easier for people now to come in and interact with the answer that the AI has given. But already there is a sid, there is a conversation starter already, and you can even fill in the gaps because it has already answered comprehensively. Now it's just a matter of adding a bit of information to that. And then it has also allowed us to even experiment to say, okay, let's have a causal approach to learning to say, are we actually teaching people when people come ask? So what we've done is you can go onto the platform, you ask a question, you get an answer from the AI immediately. And then from that we generate a three question quiz and then test you. So basically we're saying the trigger is your question, right? That is you crying out to say, please help me with this question. And then our intervention, our solution is to give you an answer through AI. And after you've given you a solution, we test to see if our solution actually worked. So if you get Two out of three. That means that our solution worked. So we're actually seeing, proving if we're teaching using AI and everything is AI generated, we don't even need tutors to be able to do that.

That's really interesting. So I guess it sounds like it's a community. There's a mix of people and bots, in fact. Okay. We're living in the future. All right, excellent. So I guess I have another question around the idea of cohorts. So is it better to have a cohort where everyone's sort of the same skill level, or is it better to have some people who are beginners and experts together? I don't know whether either of you have an opinion on this.

Oh, yeah, I could just.

It's a tricky question.

Obviously. It's, it's a, it's a, it's a complex question. But just from the experience I saw in Finland, in the Finland schools, they do a project based approach where you find. It's almost like think of a hackathon maybe in a hackathon you have people who have varying skills. Some are good developers, some are data analysts, some are PR people, but they make up a team, a project team, so that them as a cohort makes sense because they are going to complement each other. Everyone is going to learn from each other, as opposed to having everyone with the same skill. It might help going if it's a structured learning process, but from a learning and holistic learning perspective, it's actually lacking. So yeah, the Finland example is, is. Is it supports the idea of different skills in a cohort.

Okay. So having some people who are maybe a bit more advanced, they can act as mentors for the people who are a bit more novice. Okay. All right. So once you've got people actually adopting your learning program, how do you make sure that they are. They remain engaged, they keep their learning habits. I know we've talked already about making sure that there's some time set aside for learning, but once the sort of the initial enthusiasm for learning wears off, how do you encourage people to build learning habits? Gordon Cambridge. Do you want to take this?

Sure, yeah. I think if we get into behavioral science, looking at nudges, that's probably one of the most effective ones. Just being able to push them just a little bit, whether that's through an email challenge that you send out or a design where you're checking in with them. It could be technological where they get a reminder popping up on their phone that they should go in and do this and incentivizing that as well. So we talked a little bit about gamification. That's one way to do it. Can also build that into the work itself. So having recognition programs through the work and recognizing the accomplishments that people make, I think that's a really important aspect of that.

Yeah, I do like the idea of just nudging people, giving them a little notification, reminding them to do things. Okay, do you have any other sort of tips for this?

Yeah, so. So one thing also is that the exco, that is the senior people in the, in the company should also have a total buy in into the learning and development activities. Because if they are the champions of learning and development, then it's going to filter down and becomes the culture of the, of the organization. And also what I've seen other organizations doing is that they allow their people to, to share their learnings, to share their experiences internally and externally and to even allow them to do, to go to conferences and speak about their work, to write papers about their work such that they become subject matter experts around it. So it means that there is a. Almost there's something for them personally if we, even if they stay with the company or not, you know, so that's. Yeah, it's a strategy that I've seen working.

Okay, so get people to talk about what they've learned and then sort of pass things on. That seems pretty cool. And I mean, I like talking about data while doing this job, so that seems like a great idea. Are there any other sort of social aspects to the learning that you think can help improve engagement and get people motivated? Yeah. Ed, do you want to go first on this one?

I think, I think the big one is the, is the nudges that Cambria spoke about. As long as there's antagonism with people's actual behaviors, that thing is deemed to be a failure. So it has to be aligned to people's aspirations, the way people do stuff and all that. That's why it's important for data sources to augment surveys and stuff like that, the data collection methods with the logs as well. Because you can actually tell more from what someone is doing as opposed to some. How someone answers a survey. Because it has been proven that people lie in surveys, actually. But if you actually go in and see their behavior, you see the time spent on certain activities, how they are doing stuff, what they're doing, then you can actually use that plus the surveys to come up with a holistic picture and also have a proper intervention that is customized to them, basically.

So this is really like make use of the admin tools in your learning platform. Track who, like, see like who's who, your champions and who's doing a lot. See who's slacking off and not doing anything at all. That does seem incredibly important. Are there any developments in AI that can help here? Like how can AI be used to keep people engaged? Learning Cambria, I think is definitely one for you.

Yeah, I think when you fuse AI with social learning, I think that's where we're really going to see the impacts. As an individual, AI can help keep me engaged because I can create my own career development plans, I can find out what I need to learn, who to connect with, different sources. But when we look at it in a community perspective, it becomes a part of that. And thinking about a community I'm a part of for AI and learning about that, we have a slack channel and within that there's an AI bot that can help us pull information. But we still have our individual conversations in there and the teams are empowered too to really lead the learning effort. So there are different learning sessions that individuals in the community will put on and their areas expertise to share that with others. And then the AI in that sense is really just there in a support role, but it's the individuals coming together and having that community and learning from each other, putting out different challenges. There was recently a 30 day prompting challenge and that was really interesting to see everybody get on board. This is within the AIX community that Rachel woods has. There's just different things like that that we can build in and not just. So it's not just AI, it's not just social learning. We have a combination of the two and I think that's really where we're going to see the value at.

I like the idea of combining the two together to see that that's where you get the most power. The thing you mentioned there, just the idea of having a slack channel where people can communicate with each other, what's going on, that just seemed like a really simple social intervention. It's like, oh yeah, this is probably going to help drive engagement. Excellent. So just in terms of communicating with learners, do you have any more tips like that beyond the sort of slack channel? Like how can you. Yeah, how can you make sure that all the learners know what's going on and they're staying engaged? Yeah, yeah, go on.

Yeah. I think that could be part of the broader communication strategy that you create from the get go and identifying what the key messages are, who needs to deliver them. Even though we have AI now That can create these. We could have video avatars. Sometimes it is best to hear it from a human. Especially when we think about change management. It's always the upper leaders that we want to have that buy in from, and then the individual supervisor for that support. And I think having that's really important for it.

Absolutely. You guys are laughing. Edza, do you want to add to that? Are there any other tips you have for communicating with your learners?

Yeah, I think basically on the social side of things, because communication is embedded within the social as well. AI is now taking learners from being commoners to being the bourgeoisie. You know, if you go back in history, during the Victorian age or something like that, you find that the only people that had tutors were the rich people. The poor kids went to school, you know, they were mass educated. But now. So it means that we are all now kings and queens now because we have personal tutors who we can converse with, who we can lay all our fears and aspirations without judgment and get feedback and suggestions and stuff like that. So I believe that there's a social mobility that's associated with generative AI. And we've just seen the beginning because right now a lot of the AI that we're seeing is just rappers around OpenAI or BAD and stuff like that, of which the real use cases are coming. They are yet to come. Right. Right now we're just scratching the surface because we're still in awe of this amazing technology.

Yeah, I do think it's gonna be interesting in the next year or two once the magic sort of wears off and this just becomes commonplace. You're like, oh, well, I just expect that there's going to be some AI there. Like what happens next when.

When the bitcoin people who came to AI moved on to the next thing.

Yes, absolutely. All right, so before we finish, we should talk about success again. So I suppose you finished running your learning program. How do you know if it's successful? Yeah, Cambria.

Yeah, I think an evaluation is really a way to look at that and looking at what your original learning goals were, were you successful in accomplishing that? The Kirkpatrick model is a really popular common one with learning and development. So you first look at the reaction. What did the learner think about the training? What did they think about the facilitator? Do they feel like they learned a lot and then it gets into the actual learning itself with those knowledge checks and testing the skills of employees, and then the behavior and results are really where we're going to see the actual Learning goals that we're looking to see if those were met. And beyond Kirkpatrick, there's other ones out there too, like learning transfer evaluation model, where we start to look at the actual outcomes on society and the business organization as a whole. And it does take more time to evaluate at that level. But that's where we're really going to be able to prove the return on investment for learning and development when we take the time to do those type of evaluations.

Oh man. Yeah. So I can imagine how once you're trying to work out, well, did someone taking a course then affects boards of society. There's like there's a few steps in there. So it's going to be kind of tricky to measure. But it is your original point about, well, you need to me, you need to go back to the goals at the start of the learning program to see, well, did you actually meet those goals? That's a incredibly important thing. Again, goes about, oh, you got to do planning, you got to have goals before you begin. Got to do all this properly. Okay. Inside you have anything to add on, like how you go about measuring success?

Yeah, I think Cumbria said it, you have to set your goals before you start and then that use that as a yardstick to measure. So there are frameworks like the kill Patrick she's mentioned. Then there's something in the monitoring and evaluation space that I've mentioned before called the theory of change, where you say it's almost like a business model canvas for learning, literally, you know, so it's almost like an extrapolation of the business model canvas but on an L and D space. So I hope someone is going to come up with a one pager for us to be able to use with blocks as well like the business model canvas. So the theory of change says that we believe that if we take these people to the sales costs, we're going to increase our sales by so much. Those are the outputs and then the long term outcomes are going to be something that is catalytic and societal, as Cambria mentioned.

Okay.

I do like the idea that you should have a long term impact. And that kind of goes back to like what happens after the learning program ends. Like how do you make sure that people go away and use the skills they've learned? Have they. How do you make sure they apply them on the job? So how do you think about this handover process, this sort of ongoing, I guess, learning maintenance? Yeah, Cambria, do you want to go?

Yeah, I think a good way to start with it is giving the Learner ownership of that transfer. So in the training or program, having them create an action plan for how they're going to apply it, think about different challenges that might come up and discuss some of those things so they can be prepared and making sure supervisors are too. And once I get back on the job, a space that I've been exploring a little bit in and applying is with microlearning for reinforcement. So sending out different challenges to remind them to do skills. It could be sending a video or it could be even a learning activity where they go in and they're asked to do something. And then you keep that social connection with the community that you have. So it could be weekly, it could be a monthly. Just checking in to see how are you applying these, what did you struggle with? Which one of the challenges were easiest for you? What did you like? What did you think about it? And continuing to have that social element back on the job with the transfer, I think is where we're going to find that it helps provide some support beyond just what the individual supervisor can. And us as Lind, we're really removed at that point usually, so we don't have a lot of influence over how that continues long term. But when we put little frameworks in like this, that's how we can help. Have a little bit more control over that and provide that support.

Absolutely. I do like the idea of creating an action plan. So you write down, okay, this is how I'm actually going to make use of these new skills. That's brilliant.

Yeah. I think to add on culture, culture is everything. So if the organization is a learning organization and encourages learning, then there will be continuity because there will be the emphasis of learning is not a once off thing, it's a lifelong thing, you know, so they are always going to be new technologies, they're always going to be new information. So people have to keep on, on the journey. Right. And also the idea of that informal learning being incorporated such that people feel they're always progressing at any given time, regardless of whether they're enrolled in a formal course or not, you know, so it's just a learning culture that I think is a driver.

Absolutely. The idea of like having a culture, a learning culture, does seem incredibly important. And I guess that's something that needs to be built up over time. There's like, give me a lot of different aspects of that. In fact, that feels like a whole separate webinar in itself. Maybe, maybe we, we can't go too deeply into that in the last few minutes. All right. So before we wrap up, like, what are you most excited about in the world of learning development at the moment? Ed Zel, you go first this time.

No, I'm, I'm excited because over the years we, there are things that we've wished for, you know, and generative AI, the pervasiveness of it, as in it cuts across the whole of society, just allows us to experiment and try things, and it also lowers the barrier of entry because now you don't need to, to know how to code in Python for, for you to use an LLM, you know, so you can use your natural language. But then I think that natural language is actually a gateway to you learning how to code, because now you want more control, you want to be able to do more things. Definitely. I think it makes learning even easier. The world is now our oyster. We can try whatever we want and we can be anything we want to be.

That's wonderful. Yeah, Generative AI is amazing. And particularly writing code, I'm like, it's brilliant. Even sometimes I'm a very Swiss. Like, I've done a lot of coding over time. I still use it, but then sometimes I'm like, it generates code. I'm like, I wouldn't have written it like that. So, yeah, you have to learn to be able to read the code to make use of it. All right, Cambria, what are you most excited about at the moment?

I think I'm most excited to see where this is going to evolve right now. We're still very early with it. We don't have a whole lot of adopters. LinkedIn and other social medias would make you think that everyone's using it right now, but that's really not the case. And a lot of it is just content generation. Make the course outline, make me an article on this. And once we get past that, we get a little bit more comfortable with these tools and we understand what our role is, working with them, how we can fuse our knowledge to create something. That's where we're going to really see the bigger impact and being able to actually integrate these into the learning experience and for learning and development, really optimize our workflow so that we could focus more on the needs analysis and the evaluation and different things that are going to. They're often overlooked because we don't have the time to do them, but they're one of the most crucial elements for learning and development. So we'll now have that time to be able to do that.

Absolutely. It's a brave new world. It's Going to be a lot of exciting things coming through in the next year or two. All right. Do you have any final advice for anyone running a corporate training program? Canberra, do you want to go this time?

Sure. I think my advice is just to not think of learning and development as training. There's a whole lot of different opportunities out there to be able to help your employees develop, whether that's tuition reimbursement, working with a company like Data Camp, so you're not reinventing the wheel or having these social cohorts. It could be elearning, still going to always be a part, but just thinking about all the different components that are there and creating that learning and development strategy to know what the key skills are that you're targeting and why, how do they apply in the context of your work and then designing the solutions around that.

Absolutely. That's great advice. And edsai, you've got some final advice?

Yes. I mean, I'll go back to the BVB case where they managed to train everybody in the company, some data analytics of sorts, depending on what proficiency they had, but at least everybody had an appreciation of that. So that shows that in a normal company, people would have thought that maybe data science is for numerical people, but that shows that those boundaries can be transcended. So that's where now Data Camp and Richie come in and they can actually offer you these courses and be able to teach everybody in the organization. And once everybody understands the idea of data, then even the data quality that's coming out, even the, the products that's coming out and the experimentation coming out, everything is a catalytic effect by just letting people try out new things, not just data, but other. Other subjects as well.

Absolutely. I like that. Yeah, go big. Get everyone in the organization training on something. And yeah, data skills are for everyone. I love that. So a great way to finish. Now, we're a bit short on audience questions, so everyone in the audience, you're a bit quiet, you've got a minute or two to ask questions for edsay and Cambria. In the meantime, someone say, next week is chat GPT week here at Data Camp. So we've got three sessions, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday on how to make better use of Chat GPT. Before that, I've got a webinar tomorrow on making use of pivot charts. So if you're an Excel fan, then please do come along to that. Go to datacamp.comwebinars to sign up for any of those. And beyond that, I think we're. We're kind of coming up to time now. So all leaves me to say thank you once again, Cabria. Thank you, Edai. I hope and thank you. Yeah, it was just a really great session. I I thoroughly enjoyed that conversation.

Conversation.

Thank you to Reese for moderating. Thank you to everyone who showed up today. I hope to see you all again in future webinars. All right. Thank you very much. Bye.

Thank you.