Synthesis LMS: Version 1 Concept

Hi, this is Chris from Knowledge Architecture. I'm going to introduce you to the concept design for Version one of Synthesis lms, our new integrated learning management system for AEC firms. For years our clients have been using Synthesis Intranet to support learning and development programs by building LMS Lite solutions using intranet, pages, posts, video libraries and guides. We are now advancing beyond LMS Lite by adding new capabilities to synthesis such as courses, learning paths, assignments and transcripts, as well as the proper reporting and analytics functionality to help your firm track the progress of your learners and monitor the health of your learning and development programs. This concept video is the next step in our journey towards co creating a unique and compelling LMS offering with our community that is both AEC specific and also deeply integrated into synthesis. Let's start with courses which are the fundamental building block of Synthesis lms. The course outline on the right shows that this course is called Project Communications and that the course is broken into six lessons and I'm in Lesson one, Introduction to Project Communications. You can see that I have an hour and 15 minutes left in the course and that the course instructors are Ann Johnson, our Director of Architecture, and Jose Gonzalez, a Senior Project Manager at our firm CJP Design. In the upper right you can see that I've self enrolled in the course. The lesson itself is pretty simple, featuring a 10 minute video introducing the subject of Project Communications as well as a brief lesson summary. You can see that the course creator has estimated this Lesson will take 10 minutes to complete. Once I finished watching the video, I can click on Mark as Complete to move to the next lesson. You can see in the course outline that Introduction to Project Communications has been marked as complete and that I'm now in Lesson two, Client Communication Strategies. You can see that my progress in the course has been updated and that this lesson consists of an 18 minute video on client communication strategies as well as a document providing an overview of active listening fundamentals. You can see that this lesson will take an estimated 25 minutes to complete and that once I have watched the video and read the document, I can click on Mark as Complete to go to the next lesson. Team Communication and Collaboration let's look at a couple additional courses. A course can be as simple as a single lesson with a single video, like this course on Services and Markets with Devi Patel, our Director of Business Development in the upper right. You can see that this course has been assigned to me by a Learning center administrator and that this assignment has a due date of April 14th. More on assignments later. This next course called Revit for Managers is quite extensive with seven modules and with each module containing multiple lessons and with a quiz at the end of each module. If I edit the lesson, you'll see that I have a rich text editor for writing lesson content and if I click insert, you'll see that I have a wide variety of tools available to me, including the ability to add images, documents and videos to lessons either by uploading them directly or inserting existing content from your synthesis intranet. You can embed external videos from sites such as YouTube or Vimeo. You can link to intranet content or web content using our navigation block and much more. If you're currently creating and editing intranet pages in synthesis using the page editor, the lesson editor will feel super familiar to you. Courses are created and maintained with our user friendly course builder. You can reorganize the modules and lessons in a course using drag and drop and if I click Add, you'll see that I can easily add new lessons, modules and quizzes. If you are already creating intranet content in synthesis using the Content Outliner, the course builder will feel quite familiar so now that we know a little bit about courses, I'd like to introduce the Learning Center. I'm on the homepage of Synthesis where our employees start their day. You'll be able to link to the Learning center in a variety of ways from your intranet, including quick links on your homepage or by adding links to your intranet navigation. In this case, in the Learning Community. I'm now in the Learning center where your employees will have access to their Learning Dashboard course catalog, learning paths, assignments, and transcripts. Let's start with the Dashboard. The Dashboard helps learners stay on top of their learning journey, including overdue assignments, courses in progress, upcoming assignments, and interesting courses they've added to their queue. In this case, I've added a handful of courses on marketing and business development that looked interesting. I'll scroll up to the top of the page and click on the Course Catalog tab. The course catalog contains all the courses offered through my company's Learning Center. You can see that I can search for courses. I can filter the course catalog by both built in fields as well as custom fields configured by Learning center administrators such as track, skill level, learning path, continuing education credits, and more. This view is grouped by track such as onboarding, project management, and sustainability. As I scroll my course catalog, I can see the range of courses available as well as the estimated time required to complete each course. I mentioned before that employees can self enroll for courses they are interested in, which is great. I also mentioned that Learning center administrators can assign courses, and I just so happen to be one. Let's take a look at assigning a course. We've recently developed a new project Closeout process and want to ensure that all project managers and project coordinators are informed about what's expected of them going forward. I'll search on closeout for the new Project Closeout course and then click the Course Options ellipsis and choose Assign Course. You can see that I have three assignment types to choose from Manual Assignment, which allows me to manually assign the course to one or more employees Smart Assignment, which allows me to automatically assign the course using filters and Global Assignment, which allows me to assign the course to all employees. I'm going to select Smart Assignment and click Next. I'll click into the title filter and select Project Coordinator as well as Project Manager and then close the filter. I could add additional filters using employee fields like Office or Years with Firm to narrow down this assignment, but I'm just going to assign it to all Project coordinators and project managers and click Next. Finally, I can assign a due date. 30 days from now is fine with me, so I'll click Assign Course. Nice. The Project closeout course has been assigned to all project coordinators and project managers and they've just received email notifications informing them of the assignment and its due date and it will also appear on their dashboards in the upcoming assignments block. Okay, so now that we've introduced the course catalog and assignments, let's talk about learning paths. You can see that we have 22 learning paths in our learning center. So what's a learning path? A learning path is a collection of courses around a broader topic which can either be self enrolled in by users or assigned by learning center administrators. It's kind of like a playlist. And like a playlist, courses can belong to more than one learning path. For example, we have a learning path in our onboarding track called General Onboarding, which contains seven courses. We also have a learning path called Project Manager onboarding, which contains 10 courses, the same seven courses as general onboarding, plus three more targeted at project managers new to the firm. You can see that we have seven learning paths around project management, including Project Management Fundamentals, Advanced Project Management and Project Management for Healthcare, Higher Ed and Multifamily Housing. We have eight learning paths around design, including Design Excellence at CJP Design and Design Fundamentals, Learning paths for Healthcare, Higher ed, retail and K12, as well as Technology Learning Paths, Sustainability Learning Paths and Marketing and BD Learning Paths let's explore the Project Management Fundamentals Learning Path. The Learning Path starts with a short description explaining the learning objectives for the Learning path as well as the target audience. You can see that there are eight courses in the Project Fundamentals learning path, including six courses from the Project Management track, Project Initiation, Project Communications, Staffing and Resource Planning, Project Execution, Financial Management, and Project Closeout, as well as a course called Revit for Managers from the Technology track and Marketing for Project Managers from the Marketing and Business Development track. On the right, I can see the instructors for this learning path, which is automatically generated from the instructors in each course and a main contact for the Learning path. I'll click Enroll on the upper right and now I'm enrolled. You can see that the status of all eight courses is set to not started as I make my way through the learning path, Synthesis will help you keep track of your progress in each course as well as your overall progress. For example, let's flash ahead a couple weeks and you can see that I've completed two courses, have one in progress, and have yet to start five. You can see that my progress tracker on the right is helping me know where I stand. Learning Paths can also be assigned by a Learning center administrator. When the Learning path is assigned, you'll see that the due dates are also assigned for each course and can be assigned to be due all at once or the due dates can be phased over time. In this example, one course due a week for eight weeks. Now that we've seen the basics of learning paths, let's take a look at the Assignments tab. The Assignments tab will let your employees see all of their active assignments, including due dates, status, progress, the date of the assignment, who it was assigned by, and whether or not the course offers continuing education credits. In addition to active assignments, your employees will also be able to review completed assignments and on the Transcript tab, your employees will be able to review their entire learning history, including both self enrolled courses and assigned courses. In addition, courses taken outside of Synthesis can be manually added to transcripts. In this example, you can you can see a course on Design Thinking Fundamentals taken through idou, as well as a course on creating Psychologically safe teams provided by LinkedIn Learning. I'll come back to tracking the completion of external courses via Synthesis LMS a bit later in the video. Now that we've seen the basic end user functionality of Synthesis lms, let's touch briefly on two additional tabs which will be available to Learning center administrators, Activity and users. We'll start with Activity. The Activity tab will provide insights into high level trends of learning Activity in Synthesis LMS in this example, I'm looking at a chart of completed courses each week in our Learning center over the last 30 days. If I scroll down the page, I can see all of the activity over the last 30 days in granular detail, such as users completing courses, completing lessons, viewing content, enrolling in courses, submitting feedback, and completing quizzes. I will be able to filter the Activity tab in a range of different ways, including by user activity type or course. Let's take a look at the Users tab. Like the Activity tab, the Users tab will provide both high level insights into User activity and Synthesis lms. In this example, the number of users completing courses each week over the last 30 days, As well as detailed information about each particular user. Now that we've explored the basic components of Synthesis lms, let's take a look at how your LMS content will integrate with your Synthesis intranet. Starting with Search, I'm going to search my Synthesis intranet on work sharing, and you can see that my search suggestions include a mix of LMS and intranet content, including LMS lessons, Intranet posts, a video from an LMS lesson, an external link from a Zendesk Help center article, an intranet page, an LMS course, and an intranet document. I'll click on the first suggestion, which is a lesson from our Revit for Managers course. Boom. You can see that I'm able to get the information I need from a course regardless of whether or not I'm enrolled in the course or or that it was assigned to me. I didn't have to go out to a standalone LMS and search that separately. Or think about whether my intranet or my LMS was more likely to have the resources I needed, which means that I'm more likely to be able to use the rich resources of our LMS content to help me do my job more effectively. And now that I'm in the lms, I can review other lessons in this course or even enroll in it. Let's try another search. This time I'll ask a question. Should I use Work Sharing or central files and hit enter to show all search results. Synthesis Next Generation Search has created an AI generated search summary to answer my question and listed the top sources of Synthesis Intranet and LMS content for this question, including a video from an LMS course and an LMS lesson on coordination and collaboration. If I expand the Search summary section on work sharing benefits, you'll see that it is citing a video from the LMS course Revit for managers as a source and if I click on that video, I'll be taken to the exact spot in the video which Synthesis used to source the answer. Cool, right? Beyond the obvious learning and development benefits of Synthesis LMS, we One of the key reasons we're so excited about building it is integrating such high quality sources of firm wide knowledge into Synthesis Search Next we'll take a look at course blocks. This is the Revit landing page on our Synthesis intranet, which contains a navigation block with links to key resources, an employee block with our main points of contact for all Revit related questions, and a posts block showing recent posts using the Revit hashtag. I've also inserted a new block called Revit Courses using the new course block which will be released with Synthesis lms. The course block will work like other smart and basic blocks in synthesis, meaning that you can either display courses based on filters like I am in this example, or you can manually select courses to display. The course block is a great way to put your firm's best content in front of your users and encourage continuous learning and development. Let's check out how the employee profiles and directories integrate with Synthesis lms. I'm on the employee profile for Dorothy Michaels, a Project Manager here at CJP Design. You can see that her profile contains basic biographical information, education skills and licenses, as well as contact information and her project history with the firm. If I continue scrolling, I'll see her most recently completed courses Project Financial Management, Staffing Projects and Resource Planning and Revit for Managers with the option to see all of her completed courses. Nice. And in the employee directory, I can use the new completed courses field as a column or a filter. To help me find the right person for my project or proposal. Let's wrap up the Intranet integration section by touching on posts and branding. Here is a draft of a post that M. Davidson is writing to announce our new course on Revit for managers. You can see that she outlined the high level overview of the course here and also inserted a link to the LMS course which generated a helpful link preview. Intranet posts are a great way to promote your new learning and development resources. And finally, Synthesis LMS will share the same branding elements that you've established in your style editor for your intranet, such as font, textiles and colors to ensure a seamless look and feel between your learning center and your intranet. We've covered a lot of ground in the last 20 minutes, discussing both LMS basics as well as intranet integration. In the remaining minutes, I Want to touch on three items Briefly, Version one Scope, release date and pricing and what you can do now to Prepare for synthesis LMS. Let's start with the version 1 scope. We began the Synthesis LMS project last year by immersing ourselves in over 50 listening sessions with our AEC clients to understand both their existing learning and development workflows and technology, as well as their hopes and dreams for a better future. In addition, we also ran a Synthesis Idea Lab with our entire client community to tap into the collective wisdom of all of our clients. Here's what we heard over the course of our client research, we observed four core desired learning and development workflows Workflow one we call Live Course becomes an On Demand course It starts when someone creates and schedules a live course. Now, just so we're aligned on terminology, when I say live I mean either an in person and or virtual session which is attended synchronously by your employees. And when I say course, I mean any type of learning event from a training to a lunch and learn. Okay, so once that live course has been created and scheduled, it then gets promoted, generally via the intranet, email and staff meetings. That course is either assigned and or opened up for registration. The course is then delivered, you track attendance and then the course is completed. In the vast majority of cases, a recording of that course is then used to create an on demand course which can be consumed by future learners or referenced by folks who already attended it. That on demand course gets promoted, you assign that on demand course and or open it up for self enrollment. The on demand course is then delivered, completed, added to each learner's transcript. Continuing education credits are provided where appropriate and that completed course is displayed on employee profiles and directories. I'm guessing this sounds pretty familiar, right? The second workflow we're calling Live Course only, no On Demand option. The big difference obviously is that this course type is not recorded and is not available on demand. The most common example of this we've uncovered is leadership development programs which are typically very high touch, have a small cohort of learners and are usually only offered once a year or every two years. That said, our community has expressed the desire to still be able to add these types of courses to users. Transcripts, provide continuing education credits where appropriate and display completed courses in employee profiles and directories. The third workflow, on Demand course only with no live option, is basically the opposite of the last one. In this case, the course is only offered on demand, which is becoming more and more common, especially for technology or process based training or as a prerequisite for live training. And like Workflows one and two, you want to be able to add these courses to a learner's transcript, provide continuing education credits where appropriate, and display completed courses in employee profiles and directories. This final workflow On Demand external course with Course Wrapper is identical to the previous one with one key the course is created and delivered by an external provider. Many of your firms are using external learning providers now, be it LinkedIn Learning, PSMJ, Bimpure to augment your staff and develop your people. What we unearthed in our design process was an approach we're calling a course wrapper which allows you to have the best of both worlds to curate external courses and offer and or assign them via Synthesis LMS and also track progress of those assignments, add completed courses to a universal transcript, provide continuing education credits where appropriate, and display the completed courses and employee profiles and directories. Let's take a look at an example of a course wrapper. I created a course Wrapper for this LinkedIn learning course on psychological safety with Amy Edmondson. In this example, I simply took a screenshot of the introductory video of the course and linked it to the LinkedIn learning course. I created a lesson summary Based on the LinkedIn learning course description, used their course duration to create an estimated time to complete, and added Amy as the course instructor and I can also assign this course to my users. Easy. It can be offered in the course catalog, included in learning paths, added to transcripts. As we saw earlier exposed in Search, and so on, external courses wrapped in synthesis courses can act just like any other synthesis course, which is why we think this is going to be a powerful technique to curate, promote, assign and track valuable external learning resources for your firm. When we stacked all four of these workflows together, we immediately noticed a few things. Two of the workflows involved live courses, three of the workflows involved on demand courses, and all four courses involved the back end activities of managing universal transcripts, continuing education credits and profiles and directories. Because of this analysis and further validation with clients, we have prioritized functionality supporting on demand courses and learning management backend activities for synthesis LMS version 1 because it will address both the biggest opportunities and the biggest pain points clients have shared with us. That said, even though we won't be offering live courses through Synthesis LMS in version one, you'll still be able to credit live course attendees on their transcripts, track continuing education credits for live courses, and display courses completed live on employee profiles and directories. Everything you have Seen in the LMS Basics and Intranet Integration sections of this concept video will be included in version 1 of synthesis LMS. So that's the scope for version 1. Let's talk about release date and pricing. Our goal is to have a public beta of Synthesis LMS version 1 available in 2025. As far as pricing for Synthesis LMS goes, it will be included in your Synthesis Intranet subscription at no additional cost. And you might be thinking why? We see Synthesis LMS as the third leg in the stool in our long term vision for synthesis, along with our intranet and enterprise search capabilities. And we want to bring this integrated and powerful knowledge management platform to as many AEC firms as we can. Now that we've covered the Synthesis LMS release date and pricing, we'll wrap up this video with some thoughts on things you can do now. To prepare for Synthesis lms, we have two general recommendations. Number one, stage your LMS content using guides, and number two, migrate your videos to Synthesis Native Video. Let's start with staging your LMS content using Guides. At the beginning of this video, I shared this course on Project Communications, which has six lessons. Well, I think it's clear by now that in many ways Synthesis courses are basically supercharged synthesis guides. So they are the most natural tool to use to start staging content for Synthesis lms. So if I'm planning to offer a Project Communications course in Synthesis LMS down the road, I could start by building it as a guide in my intranet today. Guides use the same underlying page editor that we'll be using to build the lesson editor, and you can see how each of the individual guide pages could translate into individual lessons. We'll be offering different tools and processes to help you create courses from guides when Synthesis LMS is released. Okay, so that's one option. Creating one guide per course. This probably makes sense for multiple lesson courses like this one, but what about courses with only one lesson, like the Services and Markets course we looked at before? In this case, you may wish to create a guide for a collection of related courses or tracks. In this case, onboarding. And when Synthesis LMS becomes available, you can turn each of these guide pages into individual synthesis courses. Okay, let's talk about migrating videos to Synthesis Native Video. So why are we recommending this? Two main reasons. Search and integrated analytics. First, in June of this year, we'll be releasing an update which will add captions, transcripts and chapters, along with several other enhancements to Synthesis Native Video. Synthesis Native video captions and transcripts will be automatically created using AI and if your firm has opted into our community AI program, they will be created using our AEC specific transcription model. In addition, the contents of Synthesis Native videos will be searchable via video transcripts as well as via intranet search. And when Synthesis Next Generation Search is released, video text will also be available to be used as a source for AI generated search summaries. Just to be clear, Synthesis Search will only be able to search the content of videos uploaded directly to synthesis. Videos hosted on third party platforms like Vimeo and Microsoft Stream will only be searchable based on video title when it is released later this spring. Synthesis Content Optimization will have analytics on video views, finishes and percentage watched. Again, these analytics will only be available for videos uploaded directly to synthesis. The activity analytics I showed earlier in this video will be much more useful for courses which utilize Synthesis native video. If you're currently hosting videos and video libraries today, which you'd like to turn into synthesis courses down the road, you can feel assured that you'll be able to embed those library videos directly in synthesis courses. So to summarize two general stage your LMS content using guides and migrate videos to Synthesis Native video. So that's it for our deep dive into the concept design for synthesis LMS version 1. Please feel free to reach out with any comments, ideas or questions and happy learning.