How to Get Real Insight From Your LMS

Chief Learning Officers spend copious amounts of time and money on learning management systems – as they should, but there’s one big problem: they can’t measure the precise impact the LMS has on not only training goals but overarching business objectives.

Most learning management systems lack the depth of data insights necessary to measure the ROI of your training programs. If your learning management system lacks the following analytic capabilities, you may need to integrate it with a knowledge engineering platform.

Three Essential Employee Insights to Pull From Your LMS

1. Confidently Held Misinformation (CHM) – This is the most important metric you’ve never heard of (unless you’re a huge nerd and read all of our content). What is it? It’s the precursor to error. The sooner you detect it, the less organizational risk you face. We’ve found that professionals across industries possess varying degrees of CHM. The variation (even among employees who report to the same boss) is astounding. CHM data goes beyond traditional reporting and prioritizes struggle areas based on learner-assessed confidence. Imagine the long-term benefits of focusing on high-risk topics and high-risk employees before lower-risk areas. Imagine the immediate reduction in error and injury.

2. Struggle Heatmaps – Your LMS (and/or its integrated, data-rich learning platform) should provide insight into four particular types of risk: Misinformation, Regression, Understanding, and Systemic. The risk posed by a lack of understanding can be visualized in the form of a struggle heatmap. Your reporting functionality should highlight employees who struggle to master a question or topic after several attempts, even after viewing the correct answer. Actionable analytics like this can be sent directly to managers who can help high-risk employees reach their potential.

3. Misinformation to Mastery – Reporting that compares starting knowledge to ending knowledge should not only provide a visual representation of success but should quantify the monetary ROI of your training program. For example, if you know the average annual cost of a specific problem you’re trying to solve as well as the number of incidents per year directly caused by misinformation, you’ll have an accurate estimate of the financial impact of relevant training content. Employees who can confidently deploy knowledge under pressure are vital to financial success.

These three data insights are just the beginning. Learn how you can integrate your LMS with a data-rich learning platform by contacting us.

One Simple Way Your Organization Can Change the World

Not all learning is intelligent learning. Some learning goes in one ear and out the other. Some learning is tortuously tedious. Intelligent learning is targeted, engaging, memorable, and based in neurobiology. Intelligent learning creates knowledge that can change the world.

The Importance of Knowledge

Knowledge constructs roads and buildings, grows food, fashions clothes and furniture, cures ailing bodies, and designs smart phones and satellites. Virtually every component in the economy – whether it’s trifling or crucial – relies on knowledge and our ability to apply it. Not only does knowledge lead to prosperity, but according to Thomas Jefferson, “…knowledge is power, knowledge is safety, and knowledge is happiness.”

Perhaps this is why the topic of learning is moving to the center stage of public discourse. We instinctively know that it’s the basis of a future society that works for the benefit of our descendants. We should get it right. So far, we haven’t.

This worry is demonstrably critical, for knowledge has brought us this far through the ages. However, the physical, social, and geopolitical circumstances of the 21st century carry unique and daunting problems that humanity has never before faced. It falls upon knowledge to once again give us the ability to adapt to our ever-changing circumstances. Individuals with knowledge stored and integrated within their marvelous brains make adaptation and prosperity possible.

How to Change the World

The Amplifire platform provides organizations with a science-based tool designed for intelligent learning. When all of your employees have access to intelligent and efficient learning tools, your organization can prosper, and eventually, change the world.

Shaking Up Corporate Training – How to Create an Engaging Learning Culture

Some training topics are just boring, and there’s nothing you can do to build intrigue. Right?

Wrong, actually. Even regulatory training can be fun if you develop an engaging learning culture. Imagine the knowledge your employees would gain if they spent more time learning and less time memorizing answers. Successful organizations understand that in order to maximize corporate performance, they must first maximize employee knowledge.

A Stagnant Training Culture Breeds Conformity

Your company may hold a number of corporate training sessions, but that doesn’t mean you have an engaging learning culture. Mandatory training that isn’t focused on employee potential breeds conformity and stagnation

“Most employees dread training. It means time away from their day-to-day jobs in a brightly lit conference room to learn something the way the company wants them to learn it, to meet a specific business need.” -Paul Petrone, Editor, LinkedIn Learning

Organizations with a stagnate training program . . .

• Experience high employee turnover
• Struggle to retain customers
• Lose their competitive edge

An Engaging Learning Culture Empowers Employees

A learning culture encourages and helps employees reach their goals. When employees feel supported, they feel valued. Organizations that transform training into learning see an increase in employee engagement which results in an increase in performance for both the employee and the business. An engaging learning culture motivates employees and spurs creativity, which leads to innovation and streamlined processes.

Benefits of Adopting an Engaging Learning Culture

• Increase in employee engagement and productivity – Satisfied employees take fewer sick days and are more productive.
• Decrease in employee attrition – Employees are happier when they feel valued and know their company is invested in their success.
• Increase in customer satisfaction – There is a direct correlation between employee and customer satisfaction.
• Collaboration and synergy – Projects run smoothly when employees collaborate and share knowledge.
• Attracting top talent – Job seekers look for companies that are innovative and support career growth.
• Ease in succession – Increasing employee knowledge makes it easier to retain top talent and promote from within.

How to Create an Engaging Learning Culture

If learning is not recognized or rewarded in your organization, you have some challenges to overcome before you can shake up your corporate training program. Below are three steps to help you get going.

1. Get Stakeholder Buy-in

Corporate culture comes from the top-down. To change your culture, you need the C-suite’s buy-in.  This can be challenging because they often don’t fully understand what a culture of learning is nor the benefits it brings the organization. Most likely, they think it just entails more training. You’ll need to clearly convey the benefits of developing a culture of learning.

2. Prove Training ROI

You’ll get buy-in if you can prove the ROI of “shaken up” training. In most cases, measuring ROI is difficult because there isn’t a direct correlation between training and outcomes. Sure, you can measure whether employees passed or failed the training, but passing doesn’t mean they mastered the content. (Mastery leads to a change in behavior, which results in a change in outcomes.)

Perhaps, you want to improve customer satisfaction or the number of employee safety incidents. You can measure the effectiveness of learning, by aligning learning objectives with these business goals and tracking the KPIs.

3. Find the Right Learning Platform

Stop relying on passive PowerPoint slides and videos to train your employees. When training is boring, the material is quickly forgotten. Take an active learning approach that engages employees. Active learning improves the learning experience and increases knowledge retention.

No More Boring Topics

Of course, every company must train their employees on “boring topics” – compliance, technology, etc., – but it doesn’t have to be a grueling experience. If you develop an engaging learning culture, your employees will thank you!

Let us know if we can help you, contact us.

The Secret to Better Corporate Learning: Personalized Training

“It’s not good enough for them just to know the answer. They need to be extremely confident in their knowledge.” – Marney Andes, senior director of talent management at Air Methods, a helicopter company providing medical transport

Any talent management professional will tout the importance of better corporate learning, but the aviation industry is especially on board. The relationship between employee confidence and customer satisfaction is never clearer than in matters of life and death.

What does this mean for your organization? Well, the need for better corporate learning across all industries is evident – your financial success and customer satisfaction depend on it.

The Talent Management Idealist

As a talent management professional, you want your employees to continually learn and stay ahead of the competition, but your corporate learning budget is getting out of control, and employees are complaining about “wasting time with training.”

You understand their justified complaints about perfunctory training. The idealist in you knows there’s something better.

The Alternative to Traditional Training: Personalized Training

If you’re an idealist, your hope is not misplaced. There is something better, and it’s called Personalized Training.

Machine learning, a type of artificial intelligence, has recently been applied to corporate e-learning technology with great success. Using predictive algorithms, the software is able to adapt to each employee’s knowledge level, and focus on areas of struggle.

Of the companies that have adopted a personalized training approach to employee development, few have looked back.

How Companies are Using Personalized Training

• Being more selective in hiring
• Shortening the duration – and cost – of onboarding programs
• Improving employee retention
• Saving money in learning and development
• Reducing the number of instructor-led training sessions
• Increasing employee engagement
• Minimizing error
• Increasing efficiency

The list goes on-and-on.

Does Your Organization’s Learning Software Care About Learners?

As you probably know, Tesla gave away all its patents in 2014. Although it may sound like a terrible business decision, Tesla feels it is critical to help electric cars gain traction (forgive me). Sharing best practices is a good way to do that.

At Amplifire, we have quite a few patents, but our e-learning software is also built on thousands of pages of published research. For example, when someone gets a question wrong in our learning platform, we wait a bit to show them the correct answer—and how long we wait varies. We’ve been doing that for years, based on fundamental properties of how people learn.

I just came across this article from 2014, which confirms the importance of variation when it comes to the length of delay before feedback. Yet there are many e-learning software companies that don’t even delay feedback—much less vary the delay to optimize learning.

e-Learning Software Companies Have Great Power . . . And Great Responsibility

This might not seem like a big deal, but it is. You have a responsibility to help your learners, and we have a responsibility to build software that helps your organization accomplish this. The students who use our e-learning software don’t choose it; their professor chooses the book to which we’re linked. The employees who use our software don’t choose it; their management selects it as part of their training solution. The doctors and nurses who use our software don’t choose it; their hospital system executives sign them up.

It’s our responsibility to prepare students for next semester’s classes, where they’ll need to remember everything they previously learned. It’s our responsibility to equip employees with the knowledge they need to succeed. It’s our responsibility to help healthcare providers prevent patient harm.

For someone like me, who’s spent quite a while on the academic side of cognitive science, it’s frustrating to see other e-learning software companies shirk this responsibility. Yeah, it’s easier to build software that just provides the feedback right away. It’s also easier to mass together all the material on one topic. It’s easier to not read all those journal articles than to read them.

But they’re right there! For decades, researchers have been doing for e-learning what Tesla just did for every other electric car maker and battery technology company.

I’m proud to say we’ve taken the time to read the research and construct our e-learning system to harness fundamental properties of cognitive science. After all, we owe it to our learners.

Learn more about Amplifire, the e-learning company that cares about learners.

Fixed Versus Growth Mindset

Mindsets

Learners fall into two camps in their beliefs about intelligence and ability. One group thinks intelligence is fixed for life. People are born smart or born dumb depending on lucky or unlucky genes. The other group believes that intelligence is gained bit by bit through effort and strategy.

These are mindsets. The fixed mindset believes that intelligence is set for life. The growth mindset thinks intelligence can be earned.

The two mindsets lead to different goals and different outcomes. The growth mindset produces people who strive for success, especially in the face of failure. Mistakes are seen as signals from the universe that more work is needed. The growth mindset realizes that failure does not contain a value judgment. For these people, knowledge is the goal to be fought for and won.

The fixed mindset produces the opposite: people who feel caged by the dose of IQ they received. They are performance oriented and fear looking bad. They pass up learning opportunities that might reveal their lack of knowledge. They are far more likely to cheat than people who hold the growth mindset because their goal is not achievement but looking smart.

The Source of a Fixed Mindset

Early in a child’s development, negative messages from parents, teachers, and peers can produce the fixed mindset. Perversely, praise for intelligence also encourages this mindset and is therefore quite handicapping. Although it’s normal and intuitive to encourage children, when a child is told they are smart, the trap of a fixed mindset is being set. Instead, teachers and parents should always reward effort and strategy rather than highlighting the intelligence of the child.

When kids from grade school through college are tested on how mindset affects learning, they show equal intellectual capacity until the tasks become more challenging. Then the fixed mindset reveals itself, and kids performing well to that point begin to give up, take too much time, make excuses, or choose the easiest tasks to work on. This makes sense if you think that capacity is fixed and you don’t want to reveal a deficit. The irony is that the fixed mindset produces a focus on performance and status that ultimately makes its adherents less likely to achieve either. The fixed mindset rarely allows the opportunity to learn from failure because faking it is better than failing.

Changing a fixed mindset

People tend to hang onto their mindsets for life. Mindset is stubborn psychology, deep in the mental schema and worldview of its adherents. There are, however, encouraging experiments showing that the fixed mindset can be transformed into the growth mindset.

First, education about the brain’s plasticity—its ability to grow and change and form new synaptic connections with learning—can convince people that intellectual horsepower comes through the effort of learning and practice.

Second, showing examples of a growth mindset in cultural heroes like Edison, Lincoln, and Einstein can persuade students that it takes hard work over time to get smart and do well. Einstein was a patent clerk who worked on his equations every night for years. Lincoln did his homework with charcoal when pencils were scarce. And Edison famously said that he never failed at any of his experiments leading to the electric light; rather, he discovered 995 ways how not to make a light bulb.

“Most interesting, our research has demonstrated that those who avoid challenge and show impairment in the face of difficulty are initially equal in ability of those who seek challenge and show persistence.” —Carol Dweck, A Social Cognitive Approach to Motivation and Personality

Priming the Brain for Learning

In 2010, psychologists discovered that self-testing using multiple-choice prior to studying, primes the mind for learning and retention. Pre-testing prompts the brain to form an early outline that will be filled in with details as learning progresses.

As shown below, the power of priming has been demonstrated:

The effect of priming through pre-testing on recall.

Using a learning platform that incorporates the Socratic method of asking questions prior to learning results in strong memory recall. However, many people still have concerns about this learning technique:

• What if the incorrect alternatives on a multiple-choice test are remembered more clearly than the correct information?
• How does pre-testing with multiple choice compare to additional study?
• Research reveals that the brain suppresses old information with the learning of new, related information. So, does testing before studying suppress related information that is not on the test?

In three elegantly crafted experiments Robert Bjork and Jeri Little discovered the following:

Pre-testing is a Better Use of Time – Testing before study is a far better use of time than extending the time of study. Even though a majority of answers will be wrong on a pretest, it is beneficial when it comes to later study. This can be seen in the previous graphic with pre-testing as the first green bar and extended study time as the orange bar.

Pre-testing is Better Than Memorizing – Testing before study is better than memorizing facts before study. Compare the two green bars.

Pre-testing Creates Memory Trace – Multiple-choice pretests improve not only the learning of information on the pretest, but also related information that was not on the pretest (see the two blue bars). It is likely that this stems from the fact that learners must analyze the alternatives with great care to decide on the correct answer. Even though they have no previous knowledge, they still search their memory for any related clues and associations that might give them an edge in determining which of the alternatives is correct. This process leaves them with a memory trace of related information that they will be exposed to again during future study.

“Even when a multiple-choice pretest takes time away from study, it appears to make subsequent study more effective than other activities that pre-expose students to the information.” — Little & Bjork, UCLA

Pre-testing Does Not Increase Misinformation – This was a concern because it was thought that incorrect alternatives on a multiple-choice test might be mistaken for correct information and later remembered as such. Bjork and Little discovered that this fear can be laid to rest. Pre-testing does not lead to misinformation.

A New Kind of Learning Platform

Amplifire’s learning platform primes the mind through self-testing. It begins with learners assessing their current knowledge, even though they may never have studied the material. Furthermore, the platform gives learners the ability to answer with low confidence or honest ignorance—something no other platform offers. The judgements of learning generated by such introspection lead to greater contemplation of the material, focused attention, and associations in the brain’s hierarchy of existing knowledge—key elements for rapid learning and long-term retention.

How Efficient are Your Organization’s Learning Tools?

People are conservative; they like the old ways. It’s no surprise that we use learning techniques that go back hundreds of years.

Recent research reveals far more efficient methods of learning. Efficiency in learning involves three key variables: Retention, Time spent learning, and Time to mastery.

Retention and Time Spent Learning

Time is money. Organizations lose money when employees dedicate time to learning only to forget the information. The learning efficiency for that knowledge is zero. In an ideal world, employees should retain important information for 1-12 months. The “Forgetting Curve” shows how information is forgotten overtime, as studied by the German psychologist, Hermann Ebbinghaus.

Time to Mastery

Beyond retention, there is a more permanent and productive knowledge state known as mastery – a combination of confidence and correctness. When your employees achieve mastery, your organization reaps the rewards in the form of increased efficiency and revenue growth.

Mastery is achieved only when all misinformation is absent. Amplifire’s research has shown that employees confidently hold large amounts of misinformation (25-35%) – that no amount of traditional learning can wipe from their minds. Amplifire calls this Confidently Held Misinformation.

Is Your Organization’s Learning Strategy Efficient?

Learning Efficiency = (time spent learning) X (retention over time) X (costs)

If you’ve been spending time and money on inefficient learning, it’s time to consider other options.

Amplifire’s algorithm is tuned to the different ways forgetting occurs overtime – as discovered through 700 million learner interactions. For example, when misinformation is repaired by Amplifire, the system calculates its reappearance at different times in the future. It sends micro-bursts of focused learning at the time information is being forgotten.

It’s really that smart.

Which is the Better Motivator for Performance – Fear or Confidence?

A March 19 study in JAMA Internal Medicine reported that a Harvard-led study found that patient mortality rates drop when The Joint Commission (TJC) is physically in the hospital. This is kind of a Deus Ex Machina claim; their mere presence saves lives. But let’s explore this issue because it’s important.

Specifically, the study of 1,984 patients admitted to hospitals between 2008-2012 found that patients admitted during an unannounced Joint Commission survey had lower 30-day mortality rates than those patients admitted three weeks before or after the unannounced survey. The JAMA study’s authors said the most probable reason for the decrease in mortality during survey weeks is the “heightened scrutiny during visits” and the physical presence of surveyors, similar to how the Hawthorne effect contributes to better hand hygiene compliance.

Why is this study important? At first glance, it looks like it touts The Joint Commission as the long arm of the law and that hospital staff fall in line and take the best care of patients when being off their game could get them in trouble. In other words, the fear inspired by Joint Commission surveyors brings out the best in hospital staff.

Really? So what are we to do with this finding? Are we to extend greater superpowers to The Joint Commission to instil more fear, more continuously in hospital staff so that patients are safer? To do so would require a constant TJC presence in hospitals. How is that possible? More surveyors? More frequent unannounced surveyors, or 24/7 drone surveying? Deputized hospital staff to serve as whistleblowers? More real-time access to quality and safety data by TJC to monitor when things may be going wrong and swoop in with tasers?

The abiding question is whether fear is a sustainable motivator for performance. This study would suggest that fear works. But if you’re like me, when I’m in a state of fear, I seek the comfort of authority, I don’t trust my own judgment, I don’t use my peripheral vision, and I get frustrated by the sense of oppression. So, the REAL question from this study isn’t how we get more Joint Commission in healthcare; it’s how do we liberate healthcare from The Joint Commission to perform well without fear.

An antonym of fear is confidence. Today’s physicians and healthcare professionals have every reason to be afraid and every reason to lack confidence. Every decision made for patients is scrutinized by payers, regulators, and risk underwriters, with harsh consequences. Professional judgment is being codified into guidelines and standards of care because rogue physicians may go “off book” when caring for patients. Metrics are imposed on physicians that are supposed to represent “quality”, and performance against them is publicly reported, not to mention financial penalties levied on those whose numbers don’t measure up. In other words, doctor, we don’t trust you.

But just because you are confident doesn’t mean you’re correct. Just as being correct isn’t of great value if you don’t act on it with confidence. The answer would seem to be that physicians and staff being Confident AND Correct is the best way to ensure performance. In an industry that is utterly dependent on knowledge, being Confident and Correct when making care decisions is the best alternative to an oppressive Draconian system of regulatory oversight and fear-based motivation.

Prolific advances over the last 25 years in the brain science of how people learn and remember now make it possible to embed knowledge in people and commit it to long-term memory, at scale, without relying on extraordinary teachers available 24/7 or an oversight process that scares people into learning and remembering. I am not suggesting that physicians are infallible or that they know more than they do. In fact, in our work using Amplifire in healthcare so far, most physicians are confident and incorrect about 25-35% of what they need to know, and that needs to be and can be corrected.

Correcting misinformation is ultimately what The Joint Commission’s job is. But the JAMA article’s suggestion that beefing up The Joint Commission’s presence in hospitals to keep staff motivated to do the right things right more often is neither scalable nor sustainable. Offering hospitals and physicians a scalable way to stay current and continuously fend off misinformation so that physicians are both confident and correct is the best pathway to improving healthcare performance.

In the 1991 film called Defending Your Life, Albert Brooks plays a recently deceased man who is in a celestial weigh station where people defend the quality of their lives on earth as a way to make the case that they are worthy of advancing to the next level of existence in the universe. Brooks’ defense attorney Rip Torn explains to Brooks that, “the point of this whole thing is to keep getting smarter, to keep growing, to use as much of your brain as possible. Fear is like a giant fog, it just sits on your brain and blocks everything—real feelings, true happiness, real joy, they can’t get through that fog. But if you lift it, buddy, you’re in for the ride of your life.”

58th Annual Psychonomic Society Meeting

Question: Can software that harnesses cognitive psychology research improve real‐world learning?

Answer: Yes

Experiment 1:

Preparing for the MCAT (N = 1,578) In preparation for the Medical College Admission Test (MCAT), a popular test prep company’s learners studied topics in the Amplifire platform over the course of several weeks. In the same time span, they took practice tests that each covered some of those topics.

Analysis: Within each learner, we compared the proportion correct when Amplifire on a topic was used before a test on that topic versus when Amplifire on a topic was used after a test on that topic. We then averaged those proportions across learners to determine the overall impact of Amplifire.

Finding: Across topics, the proportion correct on tests was an average of 7.4% higher when Amplifire was used before the test (vs. after).

Caveat: The order of Amplifire modules and simulated exams suggested by the test prep company could have biased the results.

Additional Analysis: Each question in Amplifire has an underlying learning objective,which is shared with one or more items on the practice tests. We used that relationship to evaluate the effect of Amplifire before vs after the test.

Experiment 2: 

Preparing for the MBE (N = 3,352) In preparation for the multi‐state bar exam (MBE), a popular test‐prep company’s learners studied topics in the Amplifire platform.

On each MBE topic, each learner mastered 0% to 100% of the material in Amplifire, as well as using several other study methods.

Analysis: Within each learner, we correlated the proportion of a topic mastered in Amplifire with the proportion correct on that topic on a simulated MBE. We then averaged those correlations acoss learners to determine the overall impact of Amplifire.

Learners (N = 1,253) who did not use the platform or who mastered 100% of every topic were excluded (no variance Æ no correlation).

Finding: When learners used Amplifire before they learned something, they were 4.9% more likely to answer a related test question correctly than if they used Amplifire after p < .001).

Implication: Mastering all of the material should increase a learner’s proportion correct by 3.6% (vs. mastering none).