Organizations have been using Learning Management Systems (LMS’s) for a long now. But as training requirements started changing, learning stake holders in companies realized that there was something amiss. There was a strong realization of the necessity for a more diverse and robust learning environment. This has led to the emergence of Learning Experience Platforms (LXPs) as growing part of the learning ecosystem. The LXP market itself is now well over $350M in size and is doubling every year.

What is a Learning Experience Platform?

The Learning Experience Platform (LXP) is learning software intended to create more personalized learning experiences and help users uncover new learning opportunities- by combining learning contents from diverse sources, recommending and delivering them with the help of Artificial Intelligence, across digital touch points.

The emergence of Learning Experience Platforms

The mainstay of learning in most corporates is their Learning Management Systems (LMS). While LMS’s serve their main purpose – which is to deliver training content to employees across the company – enterprise training requirements have evolved to better what traditional LMS’s can deliver.

As businesses need to improve their products and services to give their customers a better experience, organizations have had to accommodate customer/learner reaction to existing platforms, including LMS’s.

1. A step towards personalization

The traditional or “old” LMS’s essentially served as a centralized repository or catalog of corporate digital learning assets. Users of these LMS platforms often found it difficult to navigate through great amounts of content to find the required one. Though LMS providers tried to bridge that gap by introducing smart searches and novel querying features – but that didn’t entirely address the core challenge.

Today, with vast variety of content – video, audio, graphical, text-based – available through their respective supported platforms, and with state-of-the-art technologies offered by Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple, it’s much natural for a user to turn to these for learning resources than the corporate LMS. And these new-age platforms make personalized learning quick and highly effective for new age learners who are trying to personalize. Learners, who interact with such platforms in their lives after work, came to expect the same with their corporate learning environments – and that’s what LMS lacked!

2. Extending the boundaries of standards

One more push for the emergence of LXP’s is the standards adopted by modern-day LMS’s – which are SCORM-based. While SCORM is useful, it is limited in what it can do. One of the important goals of any corporate learning platform is to connect learning with on-the-job performance. And SCORM makes it very tough to decide on the effectiveness of courses and their benefits to the learners.

Experience API (xAPI)– the standard embraced by LXPs, on the contrary,offers significantly enhanced capabilities to the platform. When you use xAPI, you can follow diverse parameters both while learning and while perform on the job tasks. And, you can do it on a variety of digital devices.

This allows you to track how learning has affected employee’s performance. For example, with these new xAPI standards, you can now:

• Collect data from different array of sources
• Track learners activity through simulations and VR sessions
• Track how and where your employees learn (what devices they use)
• Assess to see how learners absorb  the course
• And significantly, you can do this using any device – as long as it is connected to the LXP either directly or remotely

All these advantages help you know if the training is truly effective and if it influences the work that people perform, making it easier to calculate ROI.

3. Use of AI Artificial Intelligence

Newer data processing and analytics technologies have pressed the need for enterprise learning solutions to go much beyond “intelligence” presently used by existing LMS’s. And LXP’s do that!

With AI things have become interesting.

Imagine collecting the data about users, their behaviour, performance, and learning, and providing it to an AI data engine. And AI turns it into actionable information, telling you exactly what courses your learner are required to take.

If you give it few 100 profiles, it will “learn” to predict what each learner needs based on patterns. This allows for avoiding possible performance issues by detecting them before they even occur.

Also, Integrations are possible with AI. If you integrate LXP and your Human Resource Management (HRM) system, your Learning Record Store (LRS) or the enterprise Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, and collect the data from all of them, you can find many different trends and patterns. Based on these patterns, the stakeholders can make informed training decisions.

Standard LMS’s don’t do that. And though LMS developers are tryingto work on this, they are still far away from bridging the functionality gap with LXPs. Hence, ever greater push to the emergence of LXPs.

LXP enablers

There have been few distinct enablers for the growth of the LXP’s such as-

• The explosive growth of internet and mobile technologies,
• The growth of generated content,
• Technological Revolution and
• Changes in content distribution

In the next article we will look into these in detail and also look at the key features of Learning Experience Platforms and compare LXP with LMS.

Conclusion:

LXPs take traditional training models a notch further, by not being a curator, repository and dispenser of learning content and learning records, but acting as the pivot of corporate learning technology. The outcome: The delivery of a broad, holistic and deeply personalized learning experience to anyone that uses the platform.