My first Raytheon event – it was the 4th annual – looking at “Innovative Blended Learning”.
Presentations from Raytheon Professional Services, Dixons Carphone, Yorkshire Building Society, Totara, Coca-Cola Enterprises and British Airways looked at a number of topics, including:
- blended learning case studies
- aligning business success with learning and development
- gamification
- mobile learning
- innovations in social learning
- ROI
I wont do a blow-by-blow of the event as, whilst all the presentations were good, I don’t think there was anything really earth shattering or, for me, too much in the realm of ‘oh I really need to try that’.
A few nice things:
- Raytheon’s General Motors case study. Similar app for car sales folks as have won awards for Jaguar/Land Rover and others. However, the technical solution here sounded intriguing – an HTML5 micro-site talking back to the LMS but making use of a CMS for always up-to-date content.
- ‘Learning Journeys’ as a naming convention to articulate paths for people [I’d agree they sound better than plans, paths, etc].
- Need to target learning based on analytics [LinkedIn Learning is of course making much of personalisation via algorithms – the in-house L&D team can add value through understanding the business]. Use data and evaluation to determine needs – not just reaction and evaluation.
- The gamification session was great for setting out a lot of the boundaries and tips, I especially liked the points that gamification is not the same as game-based learning. Yorkshire Building Society also have a neat idea in creating Mandy and Tory as characters for more narrative driven compliance training. Physical badges for open badges were also a nice idea – as a way to get people talking about badges around the company to make them ‘real’.
- The gamification talk had a nice approach to thinking about motivation types with gamification: achievers (badges, leader-boards), explorers (take time, own approach, Easter eggs, etc), socialisers (personalise, play with others), killers (destroy things, push to fail, etc.)
- The session on social learning focused on ESNs [this really got me thinking again about the problem of system proliferation with multiple profiles on different corporate systems. Are badges the way to finally nail this and decrease redundancy between LMS, intranet, etc?] An interesting point was the need to open up to your extended enterprise and external learning providers [doubt many do this?].
Whose Education Is It Anyway? 
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