Your Digital Learning Experience Pocketbook.: For Learning, Talent and Performance Leaders

Preface & Jargon Buster

The world of Digital Learning can be inspirational. It can also be incredibly frustrating.

It could also be more accurately described as a minefield.

It’s a world where big business can find itself pouring good money into a bottomless pit. It’s a world where vendors make bold, often unfulfilled promises. And it’s a world that can leave your employees devoid of any appetite to improve their capabilities and deliver better results.

Digital Learning Experience is also something that can straddle the boundaries of IT & Tech accountability (Learning Technologies) and People/HR accountability (Employee Experience).

Full disclosure; I’m a Learning Nerd. I’m a lover of Technology and its ability to improve our lives. And I’m an unashamed advocate for every person, team, and business doing their best, and being their best, every day.

For me, this means that when I encounter an environment where so many important things should happen with ease, but don’t, I do everything I can to fix it.

This short eBook is one way I hope to ‘fix’ those frustrating, unfulfilling, costly experiences employees must endure that destroy any motivation they have to develop their capabilities and act as validation for a business culling their investment in Learning and Talent development.

Oh, and before we get into it, I’ve added a simple jargon-buster in the next section. If you’ve been in learning for a while, you’ll know that we all talk different languages when talking about the same thing. So, to save me having to type every single variation of a thing throughout the rest of this book, I’ll use my own preferred terms, but you may call it something different. Take a moment to check it out before getting into the rest of this book. It’ll make everything much easier for all of us…

Jargon Buster

LMS (Learning Management System): The traditional learning platform. Its primary purpose is to host, deploy and track learner activities.

LXP (Learning Experience Platform): A platform prioritising the learner experience, but nowadays holding much of the same functionality as an LMS, but with a better user experience.

LMSXP: A platform that deliberately combines the most desired/used functions of an LMS and LXP. The majority of modern Learning Platforms could fall under this definition.

CMS (Content Management System): A platform prioritising the hosting, management and organisation of content and resources. A lot of LMS/LXP can support this, but it’s not their primary focus.

KMS (Knowledge Management System): A bit like an internal search engine, usually hosting articles, documents and resources that employees can navigate to find answers to common activities/problems they face in their organisation – e.g. The best way to complete X process.

Course, Pathway, Program, Curriculum, Academy, Topic, Subject, Session, Event, Asset, Resource: These are all terms many people use interchangeably. They to refer to:

An individual learning ‘thing’ like a video, E-learning module, or document (Asset/Resource/Event/Session)

A collection of individual ‘things’