By Roberta Gogos, VP Marketing, Fuse
In discussions with many learning leaders, we’ve discovered that many Chief Learning Officers and Heads of L&D feel LMS-driven, compliance-focused and course-centric learning lacks a connection with business and performance outcomes. Finding knowledge you can actually apply on the job through an LMS can often be a challenge, which is particularly frustrating when all a learner wants to do is get an answer to a question in the flow of work. Who wants to wade through compliance or time-consuming courses (that take you out of flow!) when we’re all used to Googling our way to enlightenment?
Compliance definitely has its place of course. As David Perring (Director of Research at Fosway) mentioned in a recently recorded discussion about advanced theories surrounding learning in the flow of work with Fuse Founder and President Steve Dineen, there has to be a ying and a yang. It means that it’s essential to find a good balance between what we might call ‘out of flow learning’ (think course-based learning, certifications, compliance) and learning in the flow of work.
It’s completely possible, and a lot of companies are striking the balance by using Fuse. They are taking as much as 80% of learning content out of their LMS platforms to make it available in-flow on Fuse, which has been shown to drastically reduce costs and improve business performance in the process. Keep reading as I explain this further, discussing how to get more out of your LMS with Fuse.
Like I mentioned, we have a lot of clients that use Fuse alongside an LMS. Fuse acts as a central experience layer (or “one-stop-shop”) of learning content and knowledge, and the LMS is primarily used for compliance training and learning completion records. Most of the clients using Fuse alongside their LMS have chosen to move all non-compliance content into Fuse.
There are quite a few reasons, and I’ll try to break these down concisely so that you can see the immediate benefit. Here are 10 ways Fuse is helping companies to get more out of their LMS platforms.
1. We’re helping your workforce find the knowledge they need to do their jobs - in the flow of work. We understand that a good learning and development strategy balances out formal, course-based learning and knowledge, and one that will support both reskilling and upskilling. So, keep your compliance-based courses in your LMS if you like, and move your go-to knowledge into Fuse, where your workforce can find it really easily because, quite frankly, our search is awesome (more on this in point three) and we make sure your content is relevant and targeted.
2. What’s Fuse doing with that knowledge from your LMS? We’re giving it to our AI-driven Knowledge Intelligence Engine. Moving knowledge from your LMS and/or creating content in Fuse allows our Knowledge Intelligence Engine to begin to tag and ‘understand’ to make it more easily discoverable, and to build a corporate brain of knowledge that is really relevant to your company. We’ve written a great post called L&D and the AI Bucket List that describes exactly how the Knowledge Intelligence Engine does this.
3. Our search will blow your LMS out of the water. A lot of the prep work that the Knowledge Intelligence Engine does in Fuse is the basis for what is nothing short of a supercharged search engine. Our search intelligence uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) to break down a user’s queries to understand them. Ultimately, it’s empowering administrators and learners to create powerful, personalised feeds of knowledge designed to meet learning needs at an exact moment in time. One more reason to move your knowledge into Fuse.
4. If you moved your videos, even the course-based ones, into Fuse, they’d become much, much more useful. When videos are stored on Fuse they are automatically transcribed using our Knowledge Intelligence Engine. It means you’ve got complete accessibility, and the ability to jump to a word or even a phrase in the video. Why endure the search in your LMS only to have to watch the whole video, when you can use the power of Fuse to get exactly the snippet of knowledge you need, when you need it? Fuse can also create and search transcripts in 49 languages, converting comments and conversations to enable multilingual conversations to happen seamlessly, in-platform.
5. You can let your LMS focus on consumption for compliance, while Fuse takes care of making knowledge available and applying it in context and on the job. Fuse has out-of-the-box comprehension and observational assessment tools to set tasks and capture evidence that demonstrates a learner’s comprehension of a subject (not just the consumption of the content for compliance purposes.)
6. You can leave in your LMS formal, professionally produced training used for compliance-based purposes. Compliance, by nature, may have to adhere to strict regulatory requirements in line with legal guidelines - and your LMS is probably well versed in tracking this. It leaves you free to use Fuse as a platform to encourage informal learning in the flow of work. This may also include user-generated content in the form of users sharing their tacit knowledge in the form of short videos. In fact, we positively encourage this, and as our case study from customer Avon shows, 75% user-generated content is achieving great results.
7. You can also leave compliance reporting and record keeping to your LMS, and use Fuse to generate real-time reports across learning completion and engagement. You can also get a lot more granular when you separate compliance reporting from knowledge reporting. Our users can get as granular as they like in tracking, measuring and making actionable insights to identify trends in how people are engaging with learning.
8. Without the confusion between out-of-flow, compliance-based learning, and learning in the flow of work, you can apply analytics to how people actually consume knowledge and learn in the flow of work so that you can improve it, and accelerate company performance off the back of it. With our Universal Analytics, companies can track interactions - be that content views, engagement, social, or assessment data - there is access to a range of dashboards containing actionable insights across 330+ data points. Based on this information, you can make changes to learning design.
9. With your knowledge-driven learning positioned in the flow of work in Fuse, you can begin to make use of Intelligent recommendation feeds. For all content the Fuse knowledge intelligence indexes, it creates multiple facets or tags including author, length, source, file type, and community. All of these will be used to increase the personalisation and relevance of learning feeds to each audience and person within it.
10. You can finally stop trying to make your LMS consolidate all the different knowledge sources that your company needs, because let’s face it, your LMS probably isn’t very good at that (and you’re probably tired of creating workarounds to make it do this.) If you put Fuse up to the task however, you can bring third party content (such as LinkedIn libraries) right into Fuse. The Knowledge Intelligence Engine can run over third party content that sits on the Fuse platform, accessing all the knowledge and using intelligent search to help find what learners need. It means that it instantly expands all the available knowledge for an organisation, and that users are more likely to get the best possible answer to a query from the biggest pool of knowledge. Beyond this, it means that you’re getting better value from your third-party content library investment.
Of course, it’s also worth noting that some of our clients have chosen to move their compliance training into Fuse as well to enable cost-savings by centralising onto one platform. Fuse has LMS functionality built natively into the platform, and clients are able to create learning plans of content and assign them to dynamic audiences with deadlines. Recurring learning can also automate the certification of employees, while completion of Fuse learning plans, and courses, can be captured and available in reporting and analytics.
If you’d like to discuss how you may be able to get more out of your LMS with Fuse, or how you may benefit from moving your compliance training into Fuse, get in touch today.