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

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.

Is Your LMS Underperforming For Your Healthcare System?

Transforming Healthcare Training

Despite all of the time and money spent on healthcare training, it can be ineffective, a waste of time, not memorable, and create an illusion of knowledge where none may exist.

But it doesn’t have to be.

There are new learning technologies that make knowledge stick and easier to recall. Learning systems that eliminate misinformation that leads to patient harm.

Take our quiz below and see how well your LMS system is performing.

Quiz:

1. Does your LMS contain analytics demonstrating clinician learning gains?
2. Does your current LMS tell you specifically which of your physicians and nurses carry inaccurate information or maintain incorrect practices that pose risks to patients?
3. Does your LMS validate each learner’s mastery of a topic and monitor, maintain and report on their knowledge over time?
4. Does your current LMS provide ROI projections and measure efficacy on the courses it delivers?
5. Which of the following statements best describes your current LMS (choose one):
   a. Our LMS is a human resource system that monitors the completion of mandatory training by staff.
   b. Our LMS provides our learners with a broad range of clinical and non-clinical courses to maintain their competency and track their completion of mandatory training.
   c. Our LMS is driven by organizational performance goals and provides evidence of physician and staff knowledge and actionable data to managers to help their physicians and staff deliver on those performance goals.

Results:

If you answered “no” to any questions 1-4, or answered (a) or (b) to question 5, your LMS is underperforming.

Amplifire Heatmaps – A Quick Orientation

You can think of the heatmap as a visual proxy for the pattern of neurons that represent information in the minds of clinicians. Furthermore, think of confidence as the precursor to the decision making that leads to behavior. When you are confident, you act. When you are confident yet wrong, a mistake becomes far more likely.

The Amplifire algorithm is based in the cognitive psychology of learning and memory and adapts to each learner. If a learner is confident and correct on a question, they never see it again. If they are confident and wrong, the system will show them concise explanations and ask them the question again later in the module. Everyone gets to confident and correct along their own unique path.

After Amplifire

The algorithm does not allow a learner to escape until all confidently held misinformation and uncertainty are eliminated. The heatmap on the right represents a state of mastery. Is it permanent? Sadly, no.

CHM is made up of neurons that are connected in a strong pattern, and this pattern will return. Regression is a topic we consider elsewhere, but suffice to say that our analysis of over a million learners in Amplifire indicates that about 75% CHM is permanently eliminated but 25% CHM returns within a month. Amplifire refreshers are designed to reduce regression over time. CHM can be tamed, but the brain’s architecture and processes mean that a 100% instantaneous fix does not appear possible.

Despite this reality, 100% confident and correct across all topics is indeed possible, as we regularly see that state in our refresher heatmaps. Like most things, it just takes some work to get there.

10 Tips for Engaging and Aligning Physicians

30%. $2.4 trillion. 12 minutes. 1.8 million.

What do those numbers have in common? The answer is physicians:

• 30% of resources spent on healthcare have no impact on patient care, according to the Dartmouth Atlas Study.
• $2.4 trillion, or 80% of the annual US healthcare spend, is allocated based on decisions made by physicians.
• 12 minutes is the average amount of time that a typical physician spends per patient.
• 1.8 million scientific academic articles are published annually, and only half are read by anyone other than the author and the journal editor.

Getting and keeping physicians’ attention is critical, and very challenging. Influencing their decisions is even harder. Regardless, aligning physicians to make decisions that reduce variation and achieve the “Triple Aim” of delivering high quality, cost-effective care that meets patients’ expectations is a challenge every hospital or health system is faced with.

Most health systems know the challenge of physician alignment, but struggle to meaningfully engage their physicians. Most have physician liaison programs, web portals, forums with the chief medical officer, medical staff newsletters, and meetings, which provide part of the solution. What is often missing, however, is a scalable and sustainable way to keep physicians engaged.

Technology has the potential to serve as the spine of physician alignment because of its mobility, flexibility, personalization, dynamic modality, and immediacy. Used in combination with a well thought out strategy and effective engagement methods, technology offers a cost-effective, highly-scalable way to enable effective engagement and alignment.

But before you ask a physician to look at a mobile phone, download an app, read an email, open a file, attend a meeting, or change anything they’re doing, realize that there is a secret handshake among them, a password or algorithm that holds the key to getting and keeping their attention and making them open-minded to doing something differently.

Call it empathy, but we’ve learned through trial-and-error that there are 10 questions that physicians ask themselves before deciding to invest their limited time and attention:

1. Is it brief? Driven by throughput targets and other time-based pressures, a physician’s or provider’s day is lived in 12 minute increments. Make sure what you’re asking them to do isn’t too time consuming.

2. Is it credible? Whoever is asking for their time and attention must be a credible, recognized expert on the topic being addressed.

3. Is it current? The massive scope and rapid turnover of information that drives physician decisions requires that you understand the shortening shelf-life of what is considered current.

4. Is it engaging?  If it’s true that physicians don’t have time to read, engage their other senses and use tools and methods to get and keep their attention. And remember, there is no better indication that a physician is engaged than when he or she is typing or talking. Ask yourself what will inspire him or her to do either.

5. Is it practical? If something asking for physicians’ time and attention is not action-able, and therefore not practical or relevant, it will be dismissed. Physicians don’t have time for theory.

6. Is it convenient? Don’t make them come to you. Make it easy for them to engage within their hectic and demanding day.

7. Is there too much?  There are nearly 6,000 medical “apps”, 40,000 medical journals, 1 million medical blogs, and 12 million medical websites all vying for physicians’ attention. Hence, less is more.

8. Is it important? When everything is important, nothing is important. Physicians are desensitized to urgency, so understand what they consider to be urgent and why.

9. Is it transparent? Physicians are adept at percieving hidden agendas. Tell them what you want and why.

10. Is it safe? When they invest their time and attention, they want to know that their interests are protected—their reputation, personal information, and financial security.

Integrating these tactics into your engagement strategy will help align physicians in achieving the “Triple Aim” of healthcare.

Reducing nurse onboarding time by over 25%

Amplifire reduces misinformation and onboarding time for new nurses.

• Reduced misinformation
• Reduced onboarding orientation time by over 25%
• Decreased cost of orientation
• Lowered insurance premiums

One of the largest Integrated Delivery Networks (IDN) in the U.S.¹ was struggling with onboarding nurses, errors, and liability.

Orientation was extremely time consuming and estimated costs to train a nurse, including the expense associated with turnover, exceeded $15,000. Making matters worse, training required nurse mentors to teach and verify the skills of new hires, while at the same time caring for a full load of patients. This “on-the-job” method of teaching and validating knowledge led to the dissemination of inconsistent knowledge and misinformation.

The client needed to:

• Reduce the time to competency during nurse orientation
• Facilitate a process that clearly identified issues
• Balance requirements with rapid learning and user friendliness
• Demonstrate improved clinical outcomes
• Create an emotional connection to competency development

Amplifire reduced onboarding orientation for new hires by more than 25% and had the additional benefit of reducing risk insurance premiums when its insurer found a significantly less exposure to employee errors and legal costs.

1. The Amplifire health alliance never releases identifiable healthcare data.