Ideation Phase To Meet The Needs

This is the documentation of ideation for Acronis training program. We are going to improve the training experience of Acronis Product as they have only 3 trainers who deliver training to more than 6000 learners each year but no way to ensure learning is taking place effectively.

For ideation process we tried to brainstorm individually first to list out all the features which each of us found useful. Everyone among us was supposed to write down at least 4 features, which should be constructive and meaningful tagging it with a keyword. At this stage we didn’t worry about the feasibility of ideas and focus on being creative.

Then we combined the brainstorming each of us together based on the features which were common in all of our ideas. We also voted on each of the feature which we thought were essential to make a good training and identified 5 main features which we thought were essential in the next phase where we will ideate again individually.

Based on ideas each 5 of us came there were some similarities and after further discussion we narrowed it down to 2 ideas:

Idea 1

Pain Points we identified from our interviews and research:

1. Hard for trainers to manage learners. They have recorded course online but needs to hold webinars for addressing doubts and also have to manually keep track of all of them.
2. Learners are very busy. Course needs to be very short or learners will not take it.
3. No way to assess skills. They assign learners to watch video and follow the instructor along the video, they record and submit but no way to know as 3 trainers can’t go over so many videos.
4. No way for continuous improvement. No time to get feedback on how to improve it and course is 1 time in short duration so not much time for evaluation of what works better.
5. No way to handle retraining as right now they need to take same course as others so no personalization as they can’t afford managing anything complex, only 3 trainers.

Centralized Learning Platform where trainers can manage learners progress and it informs the trainers about the opportunities for continuous improvement of the training. The course will be broken down into modules each targeting specific knowledge components and learners can opt in on which module they want to learn.

It targets the pain point by:

1. Trainers can manage all learners progress in one place. The platforms tells the trainers who need their help the most.
2. It hands down the power of customization and flexibility to the learners so they can decide what they want to learn and when they want to learn.
3. Tasks can be tracked inside the learning system and trainers can reach out to anyone who is lagging behind or find it challenging.
4. As everything is tagged with a knowledge component the parts where learners perform poorly or give negative feedback will show up for the trainer to improve on. Tagging the instruction and assessment also ensures alignment.
5. For retraining the learners can just have a short pre test to recall what they already know till now so they only learn what is new and parts they forgot.

Idea 2

Now, let’s introduce Mike, who is a new learner of Acronis products, and he is going to take the training next week. His colleague told him that usually, training would last for four days, and 5 hours webinar per day. Then, Mike feels that he is under a great deal of pressure because 1) he also had other urgent tasks recently so he can’t do 5-hour training continuously without interruption. 2) He feels overwhelming due to the amount of the content. There are 20 hours learning in total. The training seems to be hard. He started to worry about whether he could pass the final quiz and get the certificate. Not only Mike, many learners of Acronis faced those challenges. So, How might we help Mike to balance the training time and other work? How might we give Mike the confidence and help him to take control of his learning?

A new training system of Acronis will customize the learning path for Mike, and split his learning schedule into two parts, a-synchronized and synchronized. He can learn the conceptual knowledge, watch demo videos, and practice at his own pace. The synchronized webinar will be only for 1–2 hours. Moreover, there will be a dashboard for Mike to track his overall schedule and progress. The whole learning experience will be more learner-centered, not the five-hour webinar Mike needs to follow, but a flexible and customized learning schedule Mike could control.

So, with the new training system of Acronis, there will be no interruption and no extensive webinar anymore.

Conclusion

These are first drafts of the two initial ideas we came up with and will iterate over them over the period of next one month and also add new ideas here.