Learning is the Product 4/5: Learner Centricity mindset — or how to get away from “sage on stage” mode

This is the fourth of a series based on my Edtech Next Summit 2023 Talk in Germany. I talked about what makes our Learning products unique and shared some insights I gathered from my times as a teacher, then Head of Learning Content at OpenClassrooms and finally as Head of Learning & Community at Tomorrow University.

Building a great Learning Experience is a multi-handed piece

In many organizations, Learning Experts are asked to build training and learning products by “getting some content and making it nice for learning”. So they google stuffs and read books and watch videos and tend to put together a nice experience based on that. The result is often time-consuming, biased and incomplete. It’s also mostly content-based, in an era where learning experience is all about quality human interactions.

In some others (luckier) contexts, Learning Experts are provided with SMEs i.e. Subject Matter Experts. If they get lucky (i.e. provide the right collaboration frame and have the budget for it), they co-design with the SMEs i.e work together on the design, experience and content based on a joint fruitful collaboration where both expertises (Subject and Learning Science) are put together.

Even in these latter situations (you see me coming, I guess), one critical group is often forgotten: the learners! Yep,

we genuinely want to help them, we hope they buy, we build FOR them but we rarely build WITH them.

Sounds illogical, no?

User Centricity is a hot topic for all products, yet in learning products it is in a lot of contexts a hard pill to swallow, as hundred of years of a mode where “intellectuals are teaching the rest of us” made us think that we actually “know best” for others.

Academies, Schools & Universities have built curriculums in closed academics offices for years, and the fancy open spaces of Edtech don’t prevent us from building learning products the same way. Designing FOR yet WITHOUT our learners is a mistake.

In the first articles, I mentioned already a few tools to perform discovery with our learners, here I’d like to focus on building learner-centric mindset & systems for your teams.

Feedback Loops on what matters

In teams where Product & Learning are spread across different (may they be remote) tables, I tend to observe that defining the WHAT we are getting feedback on is often messy.

As Product Designers and Managers want to make sure the experience is fluid on the interfaces, Learning Designers need to know if the content and activities/interactions are working fine. Yet, they have a hard time to align these needs and often have isolated feedback systems. (I’ll keep for a dedicated article tricks to collaborate together Learning+Product and how they can go up to merge in some context).

Deciding as a team what are the key elements we need feedback on and what makes an experience critical or successful is crucial to make sure we spend time on the right things.

As you want feedback loops to be short, recurring and actionable, you need to ask as a team: what’s the smallest meaningful atom of our learning experience for our learners? And therefore, where does it make sense to get feedback on?

Maybe it’s a chapter of a module, maybe it’s a module itself, maybe it’s a week of your program, maybe every 5 uses of your tool.

To figure that out, you might look at periodicity of usage, at when your learners could stop learning for a lil break and figure outwhen a sense of achievement arise.

The less effort, the more feedback

Once you get your smallest meaningful atom, you want to make sure the feedback is comprehensive for you while still being effortless for your learner.

Too often, we get to see the unfamous end-of-training form sent by email a few days after the training end of 10 to 20 questions (or more!) and then we hear “we almost got no response, they don’t care!” or even worse “it’s probably good enough if they don’t take the time to complain”. 🤣 We all have been there. And it sucks.

If you want to get feedback often and quantitatively representative of your users, you want to make sure:

• the feedback question is short and concise (and ideally just one!)
• answer options are already there (tags, ratings, multi-choices you name it)
• space for more options/blank field/additional thoughts is offered (that’s the gold mine)
• the feedback is on the flow of the learner on the same interfaces they use to learn

At Tomorrow, these simple guidelines definitely brought us from 5 responses to our Google Forms post-training (the happiest and the angriest) to everyday dozens of specific feedback that could be act upon in less than an hour.

Feedback gathering is just the start: how to spread and use the data

Ok so you now have your optimized feedback flow and you are receiving tons of feedback.

The worst that could happen (been there, done that) is that you get feedback but have no system in place to share them and leverage them.

Why is it terrible? It’s frustrating for the teams ; it’s frustrating for the learners — and these latter would stop providing feedback in the long run if they don’t get answers — it’s harmful for your product.

A few ideas to spread your gathered feedback to your teams:

• provide access to analytics to everyone in the company
• reduce the barrier to their usage by providing trainings to these analytics tools
• implement a Feedback from Learners monthly instance with all teams representatives
• dedicate time during all-hands to share learner feedback
• build a dedicated Slack for feedback with recurrent reporting that digest the numerous messages

Feedback keeps coming…when congruent actions are taken

OK so here we are, your team receive tons of feedback, have easy ways to access that feedback. Then what? How do you make sure everyone busy day-to-day can take accountability for these feedback? How do you make sure the feedback are filtered as — spoiler alert- not all of them are to be taken into account.

From my experience, what we realized was that:

• Feedback is strategic: we needed to have a target for quality and incrementation as a strategic goal for the teams if we wanted them to leverage the feedback received ;
• We needed dedicated time: from one day a month of “quick fix guerilla” to quarterly innovation 2-days all-team workshops — it was never a 5 minutes-between-two-tasks job ;
• Visibility to the learners smoothen everything: wether we implemented or not the ideas and feedback, having regular communications (for instance in a newsletter or on the app itself) of our thinking process and of our continuous discovery topics connected to feedback made the learners feel highly supported and encouraged them to give us some more!

🧐 To sum up, here are a few questions to ask ourselves as part of our journey to build a learner-centric approach:

• What’s the smallest meaningful atom of your learning experience where it makes sense to get feedback on?
• How do you build the most effortless feedback loop for your learners?
• How you convey and share the data to your teams?
• How do you respond to feedback and communicate advancements?

Please let me know what you think about these thoughts and how you might have used them already in your current organisation or product!

Wondering who I am? Check out my site or connect on LinkedIn!