Podcast 17: What’s hot in learning?

Welcome to a question of gamification a podcast where gamification expert and competence answers your questions. Welcome to a Question of Gamification. My name is An Coppens. I'm the show host for this show and also the CEO and founder of Gamification Nation. Today's question of gamification is, what is hot in learning? And I guess we should also cover what is 'not' as a sort of balanced approach to answering questions. My interest in learning A lot of our work in gamification covers learning because my background has been in learning and development, instructional design, training. I've been an in house trainer and in house, L&D manager. I've also been an external provider and external trainer, a workshop host and instructional designer, both inside and outside of companies. So it shouldn't come as any surprise that I keep up to date with what's happening and that a lot of my connections are also in this space. It's also where we started Gamification Nation was with ultimately learning related gamification projects. It's also why I have a learning gamification framework, and a book coming out in the space of learning gamification, based on the practical experiences, I've faced implementing gamification for learning in organizations large and small. Chatbots So back to the question of the week, what is hot in learning? Well, one of the hottest topics is chatbots. We see tutor bots or learner bots popping up a lot more. And some of the large consultancy companies have successfully implemented chatbots that basically find the relevant information for you, based on the questions you asked a bot. Some are machine learning based bots, which will search for information and learn to present the good material, others are just simple bots with connections to the whole database of learning material that a company may have. Chatbots function very much like your search feature in some sense. They basically act as the Finder of all of these great materials that people may be looking for. Sometimes, these are only set to work on an internal platform, other times, they can also search online like YouTube, TedX, you name it, any learning related resources that they can get their hands on. So that's one thing. So that's definitely hot. I don't see it changing anytime soon. To make the most out of a chatbot, however, it does need to be relevant and come up with relevant information for your users. If it still doesn't answer the question the user is trying to answer, it will just be annoying. It may serve as a database or a bank of questions of what people are asking or looking for. That's one thing. But if it still doesn't answer those questions, it will soon be seen as another useless tool that L&D has pushed on us and nobody is using. If however, you are a company with a large learning database and you have the trouble of many questions relating to 'where can I find this' or 'I need a course on X and I can't find that', that's when a chatbot can be really helpful. Currently, in most organisations, chatbots are in written chat format, so they won't be accessible through voice on most occasions. But for the future, that is where we are headed, where we ask our Alexa or Siri to find those things. And the voice-enabled bot then goes off and looks wherever we wanted it to look. So the tech is there. how good the tech is, is a bit debatable, depending on the company, depending on how you program that to work, it will have more or less good functionality. What I would recommend if you are embarking on a chatbot project is to make sure that it also has a little bit of adaptivity and machine learning attached so that it can find the best and better recommendations for your users. If you can include user recognition in it, and you can link it to an adaptive platform, you're on a winner. And that brings me nicely to the next what's ho...