COVID-19 revealed our businesses and organizations weren’t ready to stay at home and fight a global pandemic. We didn’t have the capacity to live from home and keep our economies afloat. Even if businesses wanted to change the way they worked, many didn’t have the capacity to train their employees remotely on new processes.

According to the 2019 Training Industry Report, 68% of all training is delivered in either blended or face-to-face sessions in the United States. Roughly 10% of organizations use face-to-face training almost exclusively.

What happens if you need more robust online training, but you don’t have the time to develop new courses for your LMS or you don’t have any online training software?

Let’s be honest though, you needed an online training system a month ago.

Right now, you need an LXP so your learners can easily and intuitively find the content they need. It’ll also take the stress off your L&D department because it supports third-party content.

With this reality in mind, we’ve put together five tips for LXP deployment in as little as a week.

Choose your site design

All great instructional design decisions come down to one thing — will it help my learner succeed?

Your site design is no different.

Learning experience platforms help learners succeed by providing personalized content. For example, LXPs can highlight popular courses, make personalized recommendations, or push important courses to your users. During site design, you’ll need to think about how you want the learner dashboard to look and which features you want displayed prominently.

Based on your organizational needs, you can also choose to enable e-commerce, notifications, search navigation and content likes. Here’s a few questions to ask yourself when thinking about site design:

• What does your learner, and more importantly, your organization need?
• Do you need to sell courses or push content to relevant users with notifications?
• Should you enable likes to let users know whether a course is popular or not?
• Do users need robust search navigation to be able to learn in the flow of work?
• Can users generate their own content to share on the platform?

You know your organization best so choose features that will align your learning goals with business needs. Don’t worry if you get it wrong because you can always add or subtract features later.

It can be hard to decide what features you need if you’ve never seen them in action, this video shows some of Origin Fractal LXP’s features. 

Jumpstart your LXP content

Many organizations choose LXP deployment because they motivate learners.

Modern learners want three things, according to Deloitte’s research:

1. On-demand learning in the flow of work
2. Bite-sized learning that fits in-between frequent interruptions
3. Collaborative tools to share their knowledge with others

An LXP can meet all of these needs if it includes engaging content. Fortunately, we don’t need to create all of our content in-house. Around the world, universities have been creating Massive Open Online Courses (Moocs).

With an LXP’s open system, you can harness these open courses for your business. You can also import YouTube videos or other third-party learning resources into your LXP. Check out the list of MOOC providers from Class Central if you need more ideas on where to find free learning content, including non-English resources for global organizations.

Enable “live” learning environments

Many organizations with face-to-face training can harness these resources and take them digital.

LXPs can interface with best-in-class video meeting software, such as Zoom or Microsoft Teams. These tools allow learners to receive the benefit of face-to-face training while still working remotely.

Other uses for video software include expert Q&As or user-generated content. Like all content on an LXP, you can choose to make this user-generated content searchable and let the knowledge flow through your organization.

Make a plan to migrate data

Chances are that you have an LMS or other digital training platform. If so, you’ll need to migrate the data stored in your LMS to your LXP.

During roll out, your vendor will migrate all of the metadata associated with your users (i.e. their learning history). This migration ensures you won’t lose any important information about your users, such as course completions.

The migration process can give businesses a great opportunity to evaluate their existing learning materials. You may discover that you can prune some courses or even cut some entirely. If you have compliance requirements, enable tracking on these courses and possibly link them to your HR software to make sure you don’t lose any completion data.

Then, wait for the magic to happen as learners start taking control of their own learning after the LXP deployment.

Plan for an iterative process

Even though users love LXPs, you’ll still need to take your new or curated courses through an iterative design process like Agile.

Instructional Designers often talk about managing Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) because they can add too much content to a course. Just because you can add a large amount of content doesn’t mean you should add a large amount of content.

As your organization continues to use a learning experience platform, you’ll see what types of content perform well. LinkedIn’s 2020 Workplace Learning Report encourages L&D professionals to start thinking about the number of times users access learning modules as a powerful metric instead of tracking completion rates. This metric allows organizations to think more deeply about learner engagement and learner habits, rather than only compliance.

Whichever metric you choose to use, your LXP can continue to be modified until you find the best training program for your business needs.

What are you waiting for?

Working from home has presented all of us with immense challenges. But it’s also an opportunity to learn how to work collaboratively using digital platforms.

Why not take this opportunity to try a Learning Experience Platform? 

Unlike an LMS, there’s no complicated set-up for LXP deployment. You just add users and your content then you’re good to go. You don’t even have to invest in your own content to start since the open system supports third-party content.

Plus, LXPs are learner-centric. Your user will love the intuitive and easy-to-use design. They’ll love it so much that they’ll want to add their own content. Soon, you’ve created a learning culture in your organization.

Try a demo today to find out how our cloud-based Learning Experience Platform, Fractal LXP, can help you take your learners digitally as quickly as possible.