Tag: Training

Training in the midst of transformation: a look at the impact of the pandemic

 

This Wednesday, June 16 at 6:30 pm, Jean-Marc Tassetto, co-founder and CEO of Coorpacademy, will participate in a roundtable discussion on the impact of the pandemic on the EdTech sector in France. During this round table, co-founders and investors of leading companies in this sector will discuss their vision of the future of education following this pandemic that has disrupted the uses. In anticipation of these discussions, discover this article that set the context of post-COVID digital learning.

Educational technologies, commonly referred to as EdTech, represent digital solutions that are revolutionizing the learning experience, through mobile apps, learning platforms, and other mediums. 2020 has redrawn the contours of learning, adapting to the exceptional measures that have been imposed on us, and thus shaping new uses. To say that learning is changing is an understatement. It is transforming.

We have been told for months: stay home! And for the better good. However, this measure raises a major question: how can we ensure that continuous learning is maintained if we are individually isolated at home? To address this issue, we had to implement solutions and take full advantage of the tools at our disposal. Thus, the use of new technologies, which was already obvious for some, has become indispensable for all. Both for educational institutions, which had to organize themselves to guarantee access to education and for companies, which had to reorganize teams and introduce remote working measures, while ensuring remote team training. The use of digital technology has therefore become vital to meet the challenges created by the pandemic and to ensure the smooth running of organizations despite the constraints of this unprecedented context.

The first lockdown allowed the French population to integrate the new digital uses more permanently and intensely. For institutions, distance learning has been adopted very quickly and for companies, between remote working and online training, the use of digital technology has made considerable progress. We are moving towards an era of digitalized training, where digital tools feed the learner’s experience and reinforce the pedagogy. Farewell to the traditional face-to-face courses and the dusty e-learning: they are reinvented to offer a digital learning experience that better adapts to individuals, their learning styles, their educational content consumption habits, and their life rhythms.

To constantly improve the learning experience and adapt to the world in which we evolve, it is necessary to rethink educational formats and ways of delivering information. It is certain that our attention spans are impacted by the use of digital technology, especially with social networks and the culture of immediacy. Accelerated by the COVID19, the use of digital has increased, shaping new habits, which are the beginnings that will shape the of the future of education and training in companies.

To learn more about this future, don’t miss the roundtable discussion on June 16 at 6:30 p.m. organized by Speedinvest, which will feature the leaders of the EdTech sector in France: 

Jean-Marc Tassetto, co-founder & CEO of Coorpacademy
Pierre Dubuc co-founder & CEO of OpenClassrooms
Charles Gras co-founder of Simbel
Benoit Wirz partners at Brighteye Ventures

Register for free to the round table by clicking here.

Back on track

 

It’s the resumption. Business activities resume, terraces are alive again and the subway is full again. We are finally seeing the end of the crisis, and we cross our fingers while writing this. This unprecedented period arouses excitement but also interrogations about the best way to support employees, as the stakes are crucial.

How can we create the ideal conditions for this resumption? What are the best practices to adopt? What about employee motivation? How will remote working be organized from now on?

For more than a year, we have evolved in an uncertain and worrying climate that has changed the usual reference points for collective and individual interests. We made one while being apart. And this has not been without consequences on the general mood and hope for the future.

While it is now time to reunite gradually and (re)discover our habits, some might find it confusing. Whatever happens, humans get used to everything, and finally, it is returning to normal that might seem abnormal.

The revolution that this crisis has brought to light is mainly that of remote working, leading to hybrid work. And as individuals, this crisis has taught us that adaptation is an essential ability. We know that the world changes, but it is also unpredictable. Training is an effective response to this.

Indeed, without the right support, resumption can be hard, both individually and collectively. That’s why we’ve designed the Back on Track playlist, to answer these questions and ensure that your employees return to the office in the best possible condition.

To get back on track, our dedicated playlist contains the following courses:

  • Adapt in all circumstances

Test your adaptability – Coorpacademy
Learning to Learn – Learn Assembly
Boost your learning abilities – Science & Vie

  • Manage effectively

Take a fresh look at your management style – O. Sibony
Making Quick and Effective Decisions – Dunod

  • Work better together

Remote Working: From Theory to Best Practices – E.Eyrolles
Motivating your team – Video Arts
30 Ways to Make More Time – Video Arts

And to discover our entire catalog, click here

Entertain to learn or learn while being entertained? An article from Jean-Marc Tassetto in l’Agefi

 

Time is a scarce resource. Thin line between personal and professional lives, abundance of unsolicited notifications, limited attention span… According to a Josh Bersin for Deloitte study, which described a corporate learner today, ⅔ of respondents complain about not having enough time to do their jobs. From there, it seems a bit unreasonable to think that these will find and allocate some time to train in addition to their daily work…

Because it is massive, ubiquitous, fast to implement, digital learning can help. But it is not enough for you and me to train everyday assiduously. Engagement rates on digital learning platforms are historically low. Engage learners, maintain activity or high course completion rates as well as keeping a high user satisfaction – which can be monitored by the Net Promoter Score – are still big challenges. 

How do we raise then these indicators while keeping in mind that we lack time and that training is still usually something that is mandatory and enforced more than something we really want to do? To bring some elements to answer this question, let’s start from a simple factual observation: what do we regularly do when we have some time to spare? We watch a movie, a TV show or any other form of entertainment: in one word, we have fun!

Tackling the issue the right way

One way to tackle the lack of time issue while delivering training is to consider the Netflix, Disney, Fortnite side. The entertainment companies. To tackle the issue the right way: we don’t want to add fun, engaging and playful features to something boring but we want to start from an engaging format and add learning to it.

From Jean Piaget to Donald Winnicott, from Mélanie Klein to Anna Freud, psychoanalysts, psychologists and pedagogues acknowledge the importance and the impact of the game in learning processes. It seems obvious then that the entertainment field seems to be the right one – engaging, fun, ludic – for learning to be added to it. 

Did you like Bandersnatch, the Black Mirror interactive episode with multiple endings, available on Netflix? Using the same format, why not conceive a course taking a learner through a recruitment interview, where you can use different answers, with multiple endings, with alternative routes, while you actually learn how to conduct a business interview?

Are you playing Escape Games during your corporate events or with your friends? We have developed a digital Escape Game at Coorpacademy for a learner to know better the Coorpacademy platform and its content. And engagement rates showed it was a major success!

Avoiding the ‘pure game’ dimension

Entertainment creates habits, recommendation engines bring a communitarian dimension: it is very clear that the game – and it’s not new – is a very powerful ally to education. According to the study The Future of Entertainment from Havas x Cannes Lion published in May 2019, to the question “Which field should be improved by entertainment?”, 62% of respondents said ‘education’. And to the question “What should entertainment do?”, 88% of respondents answered ‘to educate and empower people’. 

In the end, we need to reapply the digital experience to what scientists and pedagogues know already – while avoiding the trap of going ‘full game’. Entertainment and learning can and should work together. So let’s dream of a course a learner will praise at the coffee machine in the morning, like this exciting movie he or she saw the day before…

This article from Jean-Marc Tassetto, co-founder of Coorpacademy, was originally published in French in the Swiss newspaper l’Agefi. If you want to read it in its original form, it’s here. 

Capturing Learner Data

 

“If somebody describes to you the world of the mid-21st century and it sounds like science fiction, it is probably false. But then if somebody describes to you the world of the mid-21st century and it doesn’t sound like science fiction, it is certainly false. We cannot be sure of the specifics, but change itself is the only certainty”, says futurologist and author Yuval Harari.

Change means disruption – and getting ready for change. And HR leaders need to proactively help people develop, adapt and learn new skills as part of this change if they are serious about retaining their competitive advantage.

This article from Jean-Marc Tassetto, co-founder of Coorpacademy, featured in Training Journal in the September edition – the UK’s most influential Learning & Development publication – looks at how the most advanced learning experience platforms are revolutionising the analytical possibilities for L&D professionals. Allowing them in the end to unlock and consider the full potential of their people: a good thing for business and, most of all, for the future of the employees. Discover the article!

Capturing Learner Data

Jean-Marc Tassetto looks at how the most advanced learning experience platforms have revolutionised the analytical possbilitiés for L&D professionals.

It’s no secret that the global workplace is going through a huge transformation. The arrival of automation, connectivity and artificial intelligence is seeing employees increasingly work alongside complet – not always transparent – technological processes.

As futurologist and author Yuval Harari says, the only thing we can be certain of is that our future in uncertain: “If somebody describes to you the world of the mid-21st century and it sounds like science fiction, it is probably false. But then if somebody describes to you the world of the mid-21st century and it doesn’t sound like science fiction, it is certainly false; We cannot be sure of the specifics, but change itself is the only certainty.”

Change means disruption – and getting ready for change. According to a recent survey by global analysts PwC, for example, 80% of CEOs said securing the right skills for the new digital economy is one of their biggest challenges.

The same survey found that 74% of employees are ready to learn new skills or retain to be employable in the future. 

But HR leaders still need to proactively help people develop, adapt and learn new skills as part of this change if they are serious about retaining their competitive advantage. 

But despite all this context of disruption, there is a positive outlook for humans in the job market. By 2022, says the World Economic Forum, emerging occupations are set to increase from 16% to 27% of the employee base of large firms globally, while job roles currently hit by technological obsolescence are set to decrease from 31% to 21%. THe body estimates that 75 million current jobs roles may be displaced by the shift in the division of labour between humans, machines and algorithms – meanwhile 133 million new job roles may emerge at the same time. 

Jobs going? Yes, but jobs are coming. 

In other words, robots are being added to the workplace but so are people – with new and different skills. US staffing giant ManpowerGroup, for example, has stated that it is reskilling people from declining industries such as textiles for jobs in high-growth industries such as cyber security, advanced manufacturing and autonomous driving. 

Growth is also forecast in frontline and customer-facing roles – which all necessitate interpersonal skills such as communication, negotiation, leadership, persuasion, complex problem-solving and adaptability. 

With talent shortages at a 12-year high and new skills emerging as the world gets more connected, companies are also realising they can’t source the skills they want at short notice. ManpowerGroup found that a staggering 84% of organisations expect to be upskilling their workforce by 2020. What would that look like in practice? The World Economic Forum estimates the average employee will need 101 days of retraining and upskilling in the period up to 2022. 

This is no small ask for HR and L&D departments. And while there is unlikely to be a jobs apocalypse in the future, if organisations don’t take the right steps now there will be a drought of skilled talent, which will have a detrimental impact on the bottom line. What we can be sure of is that technological change will necessitate employees continuing the L&D process throughout their careers, requiring strategic lifelong learning plans.

Where is the hard ROI training data?

Supporting such plans will put pressure on organisations to provide comprehensive and imaginative L&D opportunities to fully support us through these changes. That’s not great news at a time when training budgets are being squeezed and the C-suite is demanding to know its return on training investment. So having the right metrics and guidance to show proof of ROI back to stakeholders is now more crucial than ever. Let’s review how important that is. At the Learning Technologies exhibition and conference in February this year, independent HR analyst firm Fosway revealed the first preliminary results of its annual digital learning realities research, and the verdict was not positive: “By not providing hard evidence of how learning is adding value on an individual, team or organisational level, practitioners are missing a huge opportunity to gain recognition of their contribution to the organisation and much-needed investment for future learning,” warned the organisation’s director of research, David Perring. 

Perring went on to detail how only 14% of the UK HR community can say with confidence they are effectively measuring the impact of learning, while around half are doing so, but poorly, and a third are not measuring impact at all. No wonder, when asked to describe the L&D industry’s progress in measuring learning impact, this analyst responded with just one word: “terribly.”

Help may finally be at hand

The good news is that a way of mapping training investment to measurable bottom-line results may be about to become available at last. That’s in the shape of the learning experience platforms (LEPs), recently formalised as a new market category by Gartner, which have started to become increasingly common in L&D work in the past few years. 

Highly user centric in their delivery model and usability, it’s maybe less well understood that the most advances of this class of edtech software has also revolutionised the analytical L&D palette; 

The advanced LEPs in question track learner behaviour and use that data to test what works and what doesn’t, based on a powerful new way of collecting such data – the Experience API or xAPI standard. That’s a really significant step forward because, until very recently, learning analytics only existed in a very basic way. That was because learning management systems (LMSs) managed access and tracked participation of learners, namely the attendee list – but little else. There may in addition be information on e-learning content downloads, task completions and module completion, but the data was thin to say the least. 

xAPI and activity streams

The gamechanger here in these modern LEPs is the new interface, as xAPI allows us to record any learning experience, including informal learning, providing a much richer picture of an individual’s learning path. The Experience API also prevents data from remaining in the confines of your siloed LMS, as it succeeds the older de facto e-learning standard SCORM (the sharable content object reference model) and is capable of correlating job performance data with training data in order to assess training effectiveness.

Let’s make that a bit more concrete. If you look at someone’s Facebook wall, what you are looking at is a series of activity stream statements; and activity streams are gaining traction as a useful way to capture a person’s activity, both on social networks and in the enterprise.

xAPI uses the same format to capture learning experience data, and as we start to aggregate these streams across an enterprise, or even across an entire industry one day, we can start to identify the training paths that lead to the most successful or problematic outcomes, and so what determines the effectiveness of our whole training programme. 

Doing that would enable organisations to glean new insight into what a learner has successfully learned, how they gained this knowledge and which learning approach they chose to follow. This provides opportunities for strong diagnostic values and advance performance indicators, such as curiosity, or resilience – both hugely valuable people metrics. And, of course, this will ultimately aid the workplace learner as he or she becomes aware of what their own data says about their progress and experience, so as to ensure long-term employability. 

This transformative potential of these new indicators is even greater if you consider that World Economic Forum identified reskilling and upskilling of the current workforce as the number-one strategy companies need to embrace in light of our continuing transformation into a knowledge economy. Knowledge, in the Google age, is easily acquired – while curiosity on the other hand seems less ubiquitous, and many commentators believe we need to boost employee curiosity as well as builder greater resilience and adaptability to change. 

In conclusion

Summing up, the demands of the modern workplace mean we now need to move to a far more learner centric model, where classroom training is supported by virtual training, available on demand, wherever and whenever the learner wants to access it. Such learner centric approaches and leading edge xAPI-enabled technology are proven to work – and most importantly, secure high levels of user engagement. 

Together with the benefits this new generation of LEP-derived behavioural learning analytics could bring, this puts training back at the centre stage in business. Exactly where it needs to be to satisfy the growing and diverse skills requirements of a digital future. 

The result: HR and training professionals can finally use multiple data sources to consider the full potential of their people for specific roles within the organisation and business outcomes. And this has got to be a good thing – for the business and, most of all, for the future of the employees.

Jean-Marc Tassetto is co-founder of Coorpacademy and a former head of Google France; Find out more at coorpacademy.com

 

When Struggle Helps You Learn: The Mechanisms Behind Productive Failure

 

Here is the first in our new series of articles focused on learning research and innovation, in association with the EPFL’s (Federal Institute of Technology of Lausanne, Switzerland) LEARN Center.

The author of this contribution is Dr Jessica Dehler Zufferey, Executive Director at the Center for Learning Sciences (LEARN) at the EPFL, and a former R&D director at Coorpacademy.

Innovation in Learning Science and Educational Technologies are at the top of our agenda at Coorpacademy – as we see them as critical to our mission to continuously improve the learning experience on our platform, making it even more personalized, flexible and enjoyable for learners.

Can the best learning only happen in a culture where errors are not just accepted but are seen as valuable occasions to improve skills?

When learning a new topic on the Coorpacademy platform, learners always have the choice to engage with questions first or to see the learning material first.

Intuitively one would expect that someone with high prior knowledge on the topic should start with questions, while someone with no or low prior knowledge should start with the instructional content before going on to answering questions. But is this actually true? Research on a method called ‘Productive Failure’ arrives at the opposite conclusion.

How does it work?

Initially developed in Singapore by Manu Kapur, now professor at ETH Zurich, and now established worldwide, Productive Failure emphasises the positive nature of the learner challenge. When learning new content, learners benefit from an initial phase of creative and conceptual brainstorming before turning towards the content, information, and explanation. If you want to learn something about data science, for example, you should first play with some data, invent some measures you could apply, and experiment with what you can come up with. The quality of the ideas you generate is not that important since even wrong ideas can create the productive failure effect. For Kapur, productive failure ‘is the preparation for learning’, not the learning per se.

What impact does it have?

Literature on the approach shows that not only will your conceptual understanding be better if you ‘fail first’, but your interest and motivation for the topic will be increased. A valuable side effect is also to train persistence. The number of ideas generated is also higher when failing first, so the method also stimulates creativity.

Why does it work?

The cognitive learning mechanisms behind the productive failure effect are actually quite well understood. First, any cognitive activation is beneficial for learning as it puts the brain in ‘active mode’. Second, all learning is situated and by developing their own ideas learners are creating the context in which to situate any upcoming learning. Third, by developing ideas before the instructional part, learners create a feeling for the types of problems that are similar so they are more likely to apply the to be learned content in future situations, and so improve performance as a result of learning.

What does it mean for you as a lifelong learner?

Whenever you start learning a new subject, do not go straight towards the instructional content in the belief that you need to begin by getting some basic understanding. Rather, profit from this initial ‘naïve’ phase and develop various ideas, right or wrong – and only then, once engaged, turn towards the content and enjoy learning.

Author first article Learning Research and Innovation

Behind the scenes… Changing your life successfully: interview with Jean-Marc Tassetto, co-founder of Coorpacademy, on BFM Business (French TV)

 

 

BFM Business (French Television Channel dedicated to business news) was interviewing Jean-Marc Tassetto, co-founder of Coorpacademy and former Managing Director of Google France on Tuesday February 26th. The show was anchored by Stéphanie Coleau, journalist for BFM Business.

The video is in French but you can find the transcript in English below:

Stéphanie Coleau: “Every night, in After Business, we discover the personality of a CEO and how they became entrepreneurs. Where did they get their inspiration? What gives them the desire to make a difference. Tonight, I’m with Jean-Marc Tassetto. Good evening!

Jean-Marc Tassetto: “Good evening!”

Stéphanie Coleau: “You’re the former CEO of SFR, more recently the former Managing Director for Google in France, and you decided a few years ago to leave everything to create your own startup, a corporate digital learning startup called Coorpacademy. Why this change? It’s pretty rare to see a big boss leave everything for a small structure…

Jean-Marc Tassetto: “I left everything for a small company but for a major project. The major project is the transformation of education; in this case continuous training and learning. In this end, it’s taking part in the skills revolution. We’re now facing the 4th Industrial Revolution which transforms all organizations – such as this beautiful TV studio which is completely digitalized for example. The revolution impacts all organizations but also individuals who are facing new stakes and new skills. So I wanted, with my two business partners Arnauld Mitre and Frédérick Bénichou, to launch a digital training platform project.”

Stéphanie Coleau: “How do you decide to leave Google for example? What happens inside your head at this moment?”

Jean-Marc Tassetto: “A lot of recklessness, a lot of envy, meetings like always. With this feeling that, deep down, everything converges. The teacher’s son that I am, the former teacher, the manager facing the mediocre skills of the bad understanding of what’s really going on, a meeting in California with a Stanford professor, Peter Norvig, who told me that he gave a lecture to more than 165,000 students – so the discovery of massive open online courses – and a lot of discussions with Arnauld and Frédérick on what we could do to impact and transform continuous training and learning. Everything happened at the same time. I had this feeling that I had to do it. A real impulse.”

Stéphanie Coleau: “I welcomed here a few days ago Guillaume Poitrinal, former CEO of Unibail-Rodamco who left to create Woodeum. He told me: “There was a moment where I was not learning anything, where everything became too comfortable, there were no contradictions anymore, no challenges. Is this what you felt?”

Jean-Marc Tassetto: “Theres’s indeed this rush of adrenalin. In large corporations, I thought to myself that too many people had the power to say no. Sometimes, it takes 4 month or 6 month cycles to just take a decision, with a lot of people that need to be involved in the process. It’s a bit of a mood killer when you want to make a difference, when you want to be an intrapreneur or an entrepreneur. When you launch your own project, you have this adrenalin rush – I have to admit that I was also panicking a bit on the first day. You’re facing your laptop, your Powerpoint, your smartphone, and it’s on!

Stéphanie Coleau: “How did that first day go?”

Jean-Marc Tassetto: “I panicked. It never happened to me before. I was more than 50, I had two business partners extremely excited about the project – we’re very complementary. Despite all that, you’re all alone on the first day. On the second day, you have your first taste of freedom. On the third, the adrenalin rush, and nothing will make you look back because you’re creating a real project with people you love supporting you. And then it was on!”

Stéphanie Coleau: “And you’re the only one in charge.”

Jean-Marc Tassetto: “Well, the only one, with business partners, with coworkers, with bankers, with clients. But yes, you’re becoming an entrepreneur, with an autonomy level that is probably higher than the one I had in large corporations.”

Stéphanie Coleau: “What made you start Coorpacademy? You’re the son of a teacher, is this a return to your roots in the end?”

Jean-Marc Tassetto: “It’s not really a return to my roots, it’s more a projection into the future. The 4th Industrial Revolution is transforming organizations, so we need to rethink training. We need to rethink everything. We need to rethink pedagogical processes, tools, integrated experiences between contents and platforms. We need to massify and scale fast. So no, it’s more a projection into the future, with the certainty that, facing the uncertainties, training and learning will remain critical factors of personal evolution, personal fulfillment and employability. It’s more the need to lead an impactful project.”

Stéphanie Coleau: “Is it the meeting with a Stanford professor that triggered this desire?

Jean-Marc Tassetto: “It was a triggering factor that made me think to myself: “it’s possible.” But it was particularly the meeting with Arnauld and Frédérick that made me want to do it. We met in a small office in January 2013 and we told ourselves: “do we take the plunge?” Frédérick a serial web-entrepreneur, Arnauld was working with me at Google, and we told to ourselves: “if we take the leap, it’s to do something ambitious. This is the Google mentality with the moon shots, the big bets: if we do something, we might as well do something ambitious and impactful. Then we decided to jump in, and I don’t think any of us had any regrets for the past 6 years.” 

Stéphanie Coleau: “What does Coorpacademy represent today?”

Jean-Marc Tassetto: “Coorpacademy, it’s now more than 800 000 learners, including 40% outside Europe. It represents 71 coworkers and we’re very proud of the quality of our team, of these young people who wanted to participate in this adventure, these people who wanted to give meaning to their professional projects and who decided to get involved with us. But Coorpacademy also represents more that 40 content partners, more than 1,000 courses on the platform, and is acquiring a European leadership in the workplace, which is our playground. All this create even more ambition for the future.”

Stéphanie Coleau: “Speaking of which, what is your ambition today? You worked in large corporations, you’ve created your own company, what do you want today? What is your ambition?

Jean-Marc Tassetto: “Our ambition is to become the European leader of Corporate Digital Learning. There’s a big move in the US, with major players such as LinkedIn Learning – it’s something, it’s Microsoft. Jack Ma, in China, said he was leaving Alibaba’s operations to focus on – guess what – education. We think there’s a geo-strategical space to take. Are there any European giants? We would like to be the European giant of Corporate Digital Training. 

Stéphanie Coleau: “What do you like the most about being an entrepreneur? To be free?”

Jean-Marc Tassetto : “I come from Marketing, and I learn my job at Danon. I’ve always wanted to put the customer – in this case the learner – first, at the heart of everything. I’ve also always loved going from the strategic vision to the operations. Just thinking is not really interesting. At Coorpacademy we have a vision that we share, we feed ourselves with the field, with our contradictions, with our complementarities, and then we apply all this, we do the work. And seeing that customers take part in this project, partner with us, seeing that there’s a high engagement rate within our learners, that they finish and pass the courses: this is a tremendous delight!”

Stéphanie Coleau: “Thank you so much, Jean-Marc Tassetto!”

Jean-Marc Tassetto: “Thank you!”

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