Question of the Week #2: How are you using Learning Paths in your education program?

Hey all - figured I’d get this conversation started by talking about how we’re using Learning Paths at Thought Industries.

Currently, we have two kinds of learning paths:

1. Getting Started/Comprehensives: these learning paths pull together courses you need to get ready to use the platform as a specific type of user (admin, site designer, or course author).
2. Office Hours Topics: We just launched learning paths that combine several office hours recordings into a series of deeper dives into specific topics. You can find these learning paths on the office hours page under “full length recordings” a bit down the page: https://academy.thoughtindustries.com/pages/office-hours.

We’re actually just about to have a planning session to talk about how we want to organize content, so I suspect we’ll have more in the future, and we’d love your input on what you’d like to see.

We use learning paths to help guide our users to full adoption and confidence in our product. So, we lead them on the same path we use in our VILTs to help them learn to navigate and then use our products and to learn best practices along the way. 

We haven’t started using them yet. We are currently working through our content and breaking it up in a way that would work though a learning path.

We use learning paths to handle on boarding for new hires, to give a pathway for career progression or specific training requirements for different roles. They contain a mix of online courses, in-person or VILT courses and even offline assignments.

We haven’t used LPs to define roles or personas, but we’ve successfully implemented them into some of our week long training sessions, to help facilitate engagement with full-day learning, creating milestones, using a variety of content types and breaking up the sessions.

We are planning on using Learning Paths during our new customer Onboarding as well as, for a defined role or persona learning our applications. 

We use learning paths for our “Getting started” material. We’re also looking at creating vertical specific ones to provide a more personalized learning experience!

@saravitale We do exactly the same.  All 36 of our pages belong to Role Based Learning, Feature Essentials, and Solutions.  All 36 pages have a Learning Path called Getting Started and that LP has a ribbon for Getting Started.   The ribbon is pushed to the top of the page as first item, then sorted by Most Recently Created. 

We do not RELEASE much of our content that is in a Learning Path so that you must complete the LP and then you are free to roam about that page catalog where you are.  We do RELEASE the LP of course.  In addition to the LP, there are roughly 10 to 30 other articles/videos on each page and those items are NOT included in the LP.  Each LP has two milestones and no more than 5 to 10 items per LP.

We use learning paths in order to create a course, this way we use courses to create Units in order to modularize our content. This allows more consumable chunks of education and then the larger courses built out as LP’s available for students who want to make the time commitment. 

@grace.filkins I like that idea.  We have one internal customer who is doing something similar.  She took her articles and made them into a LP.  The LP is not only for learning, it’s her whole department playbook.  This increases internal adoption and puts more in one place.  In addition to her playbook, she also has 6 standard LP’s.  These contain courses.  

@grace.filkins this idea sounds great, if I’m following you it’s similar to a tv series, you all add the new “episodes” to the learning path? 

If that is the case, how do you stop users from finishing the learning path before you add the additional course? Ex: The content is broken into 5 courses, you release one each week. The user completes the last course and the learning path shows as “complete”. Are you able to add in a new course when a user has already finished? 

Or is it that all of the content is created upfront so you don’t have the issue of a user completing the LP before all courses are added. 

@AMartin  To the best of my testing, once a user reaches the completion status of a Learning Path, and you define that, then it is done and they will not know that a new episode has been added.  Learning Paths like most content types are not very reusable without a copy and then make the whole LP = to Part 2 or something.  If they do not complete the completion criteria then the LP will just sit in their Started que of the Activity Widget and they still will not know that new content is added without manually telling them.  At some point the journey must end so a completion criteria needs to be defined.  Hope this helps.