I.gardner.gb

Deloitte has announced the launch of Project 120, a $1.4 billion investment that aims to transform how learning and development can be designed and delivered. 

Project 120 (its name inspired by the top speed of thought at 120 meters per second) curates highly personalized learning and development pathways to develop critical technology and leadership skills ahead of future market demands. Through this investment, the audit, consulting, tax and advisory services firm aims to enhance its tech and leadership curricula and expand Deloitte University facilities, including new academic and business collaborations, according to the company press release.

Project 120 allows Deloitte to anticipate the needs of its professionals, clients and the broader market, designing customizable and immersive learning experiences to address needs as they are identified and deploying those trainings at the pace of innovation. It is already delivering more than 1 million hours of training on future applications of technologies like AI, cloud, cyber, data analytics, 5G and quantum computing through the Deloitte Technology Academy.

“Project 120 enables more tailored, relevant and in-the-flow learning for all professionals, building agility now for the business opportunities tomorrow,” says Stephani Long, Deloitte’s chief talent officer. “We’re reimagining learning experiences, and I’m confident our new approach will continue to meet and exceed the evolving needs of our people and our clients.”

Earlier this year, Deloitte leaders collected 150,000 data points from talent surveys, conducted 100 one-on-one interviews with business executives and leveraged a workforce-sensing tool to identify the skills of the future. The results of this research led Deloitte to implement Project 120’s more predictive approach to professional development. 

And the aim is not only to help build better work, but to contribute to the fulfillment of Deloitte employees, according to the company release. For example, Deloitte recently identified higher stress levels among a cohort of executives and, in response, quickly curated a personalized learning experience on processing emotions as data and moving to a place of action. Project 120 is also developing skills valued highly by today’s workforce, such as awareness, attention, acceptance and belonging.

“We feel an immense responsibility to support the growth of our people,” says Anthony Stephan, principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP and Project 120 executive leader. “Project 120 broadens the aperture of professional development from focusing solely on the professional to focusing on the individual, enabling them to thrive holistically in business and in life.”

The post Deloitte announces $1.4 billion investment in Project 120 appeared first on Chief Learning Officer - CLO Media.

This article is available via direct short link at https://aka.ms/TeamsPremium

 

You may have seen the announcement regarding Microsoft Teams Premium at Ignite. If not check out the better way to meet blog by Nicole Herskowitz.

Today, we are excited to share that we are making Microsoft Teams Premium broadly available for preview as a limited trial for our commercial customers through the Microsoft 365 admin center. The features under this offering began rolling out this December and will continue to roll out through January. This article provides information on how to enroll into the trial and configure these features for your users.

Teams Premium makes every meeting from one-on-ones to large meetings, to virtual appointments to webinars, more personalized, intelligent, and secure. With Teams Premium, you can:

• Extend your organization’s brand and company culture across meetings with branding, organization backgrounds, and organization together mode scenes.
• Use AI to make the meetings you attend (and miss) more productive and impactful through live translation for captions to remove language barriers and intelligent recap features that offer smarter recordings with autogenerated chapters, AI-suggested action items, and insights to quickly catch up on missed meetings where your name was mentioned.
• Apply advanced meeting protection such as Watermark, End-to-end encryption for meetings, and Sensitivity labels for meetings with prevent copy/paste of meeting chat to better protect your virtual meetings.
• Deliver a high-quality webinar experience through advanced capabilities to streamline event workflows with registration waitlist and manual approval, facilitate behind-the-scene actions through virtual green room for presenters (separate from attendees) before the event begins, and manage the attendee experience so they only see shared content and participants brought on-screen.
• Manage the end-to-end virtual appointment experience with advanced features like text reminders, custom branded virtual appointments, and a centralized Virtual Appointment dashboard for a quick view into schedules, queues, and analytics to keep track of key usage insights such as no-shows and wait time information per appointment.

If you’d like to get an update about when Teams Premium is generally available, sign up at https://aka.ms/GetTeamsPremiumUpdates

 

So let’s get right into it with a quick how-to video on Teams Premium followed by an easy-to-navigate table of contents and detailed instructions.

 

 

What is the release timeline for the preview as a trial and GA?

• How can I start the trial for my organization?
• Microsoft Teams Premium SKU and Licensing

Premium features to make meetings more Secure

• End-to-end Encryption option for meetings (E2EE)
• Watermark
• Who can record
• Sensitivity labels for meetings with prevent copy option prereq: E5 license

Premium features to make meetings more Personalized

• Meeting templates
• Custom branding
• Custom backgrounds for organizations

Organization together mode scenes

• Custom user policy packages

Premium features to make meetings more Intelligent

• Live translated captions temporarily available as preview for all Microsoft customers
• Intelligent meeting recap features will be not available for the December Preview trial.

Advanced Webinars

• Advanced registration capabilities with waitlist, manual approval, and limit registration date/time
• Virtual Green Room
• Manage what attendees see
• Microsoft eCDN for Teams Live Events

Advanced Virtual Appointments

• Virtual Appointment App
• Virtual Appointment Analytics
• SMS reminders

What is the release timeline for Teams Premium preview and general availability?

Teams Premium preview is now available. IT admins can enroll in the trial through the Microsoft 365 Admin Center and activate a free Teams Premium licensing trial.

General availability of Teams Premium is scheduled for early February 2023. Features in intelligent recap will begin rolling out in in the first half of 2023. Beginning February 2023, customers with existing Microsoft 365 or Office 365 licenses can purchase Teams Premium as an add-on to their existing Microsoft 365 services.

How can I enroll in the preview?

You can enroll your tenant into the preview as a trial through the Microsoft 365 Admin Center by searching Teams Premium in the catalog. Once enrolled and activated, tenant admins will receive limited number of trial licenses good for a duration of 30 days they can assign to users in their organization. Admins can also choose to enroll in the public preview to gain access to Teams Premium features without assigning the trial licenses to end users, such as understanding the configuration options for the capabilities or assessing how they will be used in their environment. If a user is assigned a Teams Premium trial license and the duration has expired, the user will no longer have access to those Teams Premium features. Similar to user license assignment, once the public preview duration has expired IT admins will lose access to these features.

 

Having trouble? Check out the trial licensing FAQ.

What is the license count and duration once the trial is activated?

• The trial will enable the tenant to receive a limited number of licenses that are good for 30 days.

What happens once my trial duration ends?

• Once the duration ends, IT and end users who were assigned Teams Premium licenses will lose access to those features.
• For customers who have a paid subscription of Teams Premium in place, the trial licenses will not need to be reassigned.

Microsoft Teams Premium SKU and Licensing

Microsoft Teams Premium is an add-on offering for organizations across enterprise, small business, and government. Tenant administrators will assign Teams Premium licenses to applicable end users like how they’ve assigned existing Microsoft 365 or add-on licenses. Users using or benefiting from the service should be licensed. For additional licensing information, see Microsoft Teams Premium Licensing.

Advanced meeting protection

Advanced meeting protection in Teams Premium helps organizations better protect confidential and sensitive information during meetings. With new meeting option features like end-to-end encryption, watermarking, who can record meeting, and prevent copy/paste for Teams meetings chats, organizations can select the options that fit their meeting most appropriately. Additionally, E5 customers will be able to apply sensitivity labels to Teams meetings.

End-to-end encryption (E2EE) option for Teams meetings

As part of Teams Premium, we are adding an end-to-end encryption (E2EE) option for Teams meetings. EEE2is the encryption of information at its origin and decryption at its intended destination without the ability for intermediate nodes or parties to decrypt. This builds on top of existing core functionality for an end-to-end encryption option for 1:1 VoIP calls. While E2EE may be applicable for a small amount of meeting use cases, it’s important to understand that when E2EE is not used, Teams data exchanged during calls or meetings is still protected with industry standard encryption in transit and at rest. Chat for end-to-end encrypted calls and meetings is protected with Microsoft 365 encryption. For more information on our standard encryption practices, please see Media encryption for Teams.  

When the E2EE option is enabled for a 1:1 calls or meeting, it introduces feature and functionality tradeoffs due to the nature of E2EE. This can impact both the end user experience and IT’s ability to govern that meeting. E2EE communications become non-discoverable for compliance tooling and certain features become unavailable:

• Recording
• Live caption and transcription
• Call transfer (blind, safe, and consult)
• Call Park
• Call Merge
• Call Companion and transfer to another device
• Add participant to make the one-to-one call a group call

 

The presence of these tradeoffs means that an E2EE option should be used for very specific and targeted use cases defined by the customer's IT/security/compliance teams.

How can IT Admins make E2EE for Teams meetings available for their organization?

IT admins can set the E2EE meeting policy for users, groups, or tenant. The settings are available in Teams Admin Center. The following steps can be used to setup E2EE via Teams Admin Center. 

1. Sign into the Teams Admin Center > Enhanced encryption policies.
2. Name the new policy, then for End-to-end meeting encryption, choose users can turn it on, and Save.
3. Once you’ve finished creating the policy, assign the policy to users, groups, or your entire tenant the same way you manage other Teams policies.

 

By default, E2EE isn’t available to users in your tenant. Once you’ve configured the policy, end-to-end encryption is still off by default for users when they schedule a teams meeting. Users need to turn on end-to-end encryption in Meeting Options. For more information, please see End-to-end Encryption for Teams meetings.

 

 

Once IT Admin has set the enhanced encryption policy, do users automatically get E2EE in meetings?
No. After the policy has been enabled, licensed users will see E2EE as a meeting option. To turn on end-to-end encryption, meeting organizer can follow these steps:

1. When scheduling a Teams meeting through Outlook or Teams Calendar, open Meeting Options dialog/webpage
2. Enable end-to-end encryption

 

 

How can the two parties confirm they’re on an end-to-end encrypted meeting?
User will see the encryption indicator on the Teams meeting window. This indicator shows that the meeting is encrypted. If a Teams meeting is successfully end-to-end encrypted, both parties will see the end-to-end encryption indicator on the Teams meeting window. The Teams end-to-end encryption indicator is a shield with a lock. To confirm that end-to-end encryption is working correctly, verify that the same security code appears for both parties in the meeting.

 

Note: Audio, Video, and Video-based screen-sharing are end-to-end encrypted. Apps, Avatars, Filters, Chat, Q&A, and Reactions are not end-to-end encrypted. Meeting size is limited to 50 participants. If the 51st person tries to join an E2EE meeting, they will be blocked from joining.

 

 

Some of the features disabled during an end-to-end encrypted meeting include: Live caption and transcription, Recording, Together mode, Companion mode, Large gallery, Breakout rooms.

Platforms supported for December preview: Desktop and Mobile

Note: Unsupported platforms will be blocked from joining.

Watermark

Watermark provides a solution to protect company's confidential artifacts shared during Teams meetings. There have been frequent cases where screenshots of sensitive data shared during the virtual meetings have leaked.  Watermark adds viewing participant's email id on top of shared screen and/or video feed in the Teams meeting.
 
How can IT Admins make Watermark for Teams meetings available for their organization?
IT admins can set the Watermark policy for users or tenant from Meeting Policies in Teams Admin Center.
Once the Enable Watermark on video feed and/or shared content option is enabled, a preview of the feature will be displayed.

 

 

Once, IT admins enable Watermark in meeting policies, users will see Watermark as a meeting option. To apply Watermark to a meeting, the meeting organizer must enable Apply a watermark to shared content and/or Apply a watermark to everyone’s video feed in the meeting options dialog.

 

 

If meeting organizer enables Watermark for Shared content and Video feed, participants should see the watermark (their own email id) on the shared screen as well as on video feed (camera content). Below is the in-meeting experience with Watermark enabled on shared screen and video feed:

 

 

Platforms supported for Preview: Desktop, mobile, MTR (Microsoft Teams Rooms) Window and Surface hub

 

Feature limitations

• Watermark is not available for all scenarios, including: Recording, PowerPoint Live, Whiteboard, Together mode and Large gallery.
• Users joining from unsupported platforms would only hear the audio with no content shown to them.
• Unsupported platforms:
  o Web, VDI, and MTRW will be an audio only experience.
  o For older clients such as CVI, MTRA, and T2.1, meeting participants will be able to join the meeting with audio/video capability without watermark applied.

Who can record

Who can record meeting option can help meeting organizers easily manage who can record their meetings. Today a Teams meeting can be recorded by the organizers or participants who meet specific criteria. Now, with this new Teams meeting option, organizers can choose who can record when scheduling Teams meetings.

 

When scheduling a Teams meeting from Outlook or Teams, organizers can set up who can record the meeting.

 

Sensitivity labels for meetings with Prevent copy of chat option

In addition to using sensitivity labels to protect documents and emails, you will be able to define and use sensitivity labels to set meeting protection defaults.

 

Meeting settings that can be controlled with a sensitivity label include:

• Who can bypass the lobby
• Allow dial in user to bypass lobby
• Who can present
• Who can record
• Encryption for meeting video and audio
• Automatically record
• Video watermark for screen sharing and camera streams
• Prevent or allow chat
• Prevent or allow copying chat to clipboard. Support for copy prevention for external meeting joiners, and for meeting chats on Safari, Firefox, and Mobile will come in a few months.

Some of the meeting protection options will not change while the meeting is on-going, they will take affect for the next instance after everyone leaves and re-joins.

 

To use sensitivity labels with Teams meetings, the following licensing requirements apply:

• For the compliance admin: The compliance admin will be able to define sensitivity labels for use with Teams meetings only if there’s at least one E5 license and one Teams Premium license in the organization.
• For the end user: End users will be able to use available sensitivity labels when scheduling Teams meetings only if they have both, an E5 license as well as a Teams Premium license.

Sensitivity labels can be created by Compliance Admins in the Microsoft Purview compliance portal.

 

Please note that if your org uses mandatory labeling for emails, ensure that the mandatory labeling setting for meetings has been explicitly set to None. This step is necessary regardless of whether labels are being used for meetings or not. Mandatory labeling for meetings will be supported very soon.

For instructions to create a sensitivity label, see Configure Teams meetings with protection for highly sensitive data. Once the label is created, Compliance Admins will need to publish it to the intended users.

 

 

To enable Prevent copy of meeting chat with meeting sensitivity label, go to Chat settings and select the Prevent copying chat content to clipboard checkbox.

 

How can end users apply sensitivity labels to meetings?
Meeting organizers can apply a sensitivity label to meeting invites from Outlook or Teams.

 

 

When the meeting starts, any meeting options configured in the label are enforced. Participants from your organization see the label during the Teams meetings. When a label enforces settings, users see a lock and message that explains the settings are applied by a sensitivity label.

 

 

Platforms supported for Meeting Sensitivity label: Desktop (Windows/Mac), Web (Edge/Chrome), mobile (iOS, Android – can only join labeled meeting but not schedule labeled meetings)

 

Platforms supported for Prevent copy/paste of meeting chat: Desktop (Windows/Mac), Web (Edge/Chrome)

 

Unsupported platforms during Preview:

• Scheduling meeting with sensitivity label from Mobile (iOS and Android) or Graph APIs
• Prevent copy/paste support on Safari, Firefox, Mobile

Advanced meeting personalization

Meeting templates (rolling out over the next month)

The all-new custom meeting templates in Teams Premium allow IT Admins to control standard meeting settings plus new security options, such as: Sensitivity label for meetings, Who can bypass lobby, Who can record, End-to-end encryption, and Watermark. With templates, you can create consistent meeting experiences in your organization and help enforce compliance requirements and business rules.

Meeting organizers can select the custom meeting template created by their IT Admin—like a client call, brainstorming meeting, or help desk call—and the options will already be set, reducing the time and thought process around getting the meeting right! This could be especially helpful for organizations that hold highly confidential meetings or external meetings that require specific and consistent meeting options.

How can IT Admins create meeting templates for their organization?
To create a custom meeting template, IT admins can go to Teams Admin Center > Meetings and select Meeting templates.

 

 

For each meeting option in the template, you can define the Default value, Visibility, and Lock status. Once the template has been created, it may take up to 24 hours to be available to your users. For more on how to create a meeting template, see Create a custom meeting template in Microsoft Teams.

 

 

Once the meeting template has been created, navigate to Meeting template policies and create a policy to target specific users instead of everyone in the organization. For example, Executives may be targeted with a Board Meeting template that enables end-to-end encryption for every meeting while HR staff may be targeted with an Hiring Interview template that auto-records interviews for every meeting. To learn more, see Manage meeting templates in Microsoft Teams.

Once the IT admin creates and assigns the custom meeting template, users will see the template in the New Meeting drop down when scheduling a meeting from Teams Calendar or Outlook.

 

Custom branding (coming to the preview trial in January)

Custom branding enables organizations to customize their meeting pre-join, lobby and in-meeting experience with their company's logo and brand imagery. By default, Teams Premium licensed users who have been assigned a meeting customization policy can create branding-enabled meetings. These meetings are branded by default, and anyone who joins the meetings can see the branding (this includes licensed and non-licensed internal, external, and anonymous users).

How can IT Admins make Custom Branding for Teams meetings available for their organization?

IT Admins can set up and manage custom branding by navigating to Meeting customization policies in Teams Admin Center. To begin set up, admins will first need to create a new meeting customization policy or modify the organizational global default policy. Admins can create their customization policy by creating a Meeting Theme.

 

Meeting Themes house the brand assets for your theme. These include:

• Logo: your organization’s logo.
• Custom Image: brand image from your organization.
• Custom Color: your organization's primary or secondary brand color in the meeting experience. Admins can enter the hex code value of your organization's brand color, which will appear on key surfaces of the meeting experience. Note: the final color generated may not match your brand color. This is to support Microsoft accessibility standards.

Custom logo images and custom images must meet Microsoft accessibility contrast rations (4:5:1) and adhere to certain parameters.

 

 

Assigning a Meeting Customization Policy to Users

Meeting Customization Policies can be assigned to one, many, or a pre-defined user group in your tenant. Make sure that these users have a Teams Premium License to use these features.

 

For organization’s that have more than one business unit or department under a different brand identity within the same tenant, admins can create meeting customization policies dedicated to each brand, and assign a department or business unit user group to a specific policy. For more on how to create meeting customization policies for multiple brands within the same tenant, see Custom organization branding for Teams meetings.

 

As a meeting organizer, how can I enable branding for meetings?

If your IT Admin has enabled Meeting Themes for you, you will be able to create custom branded meetings by default. Any meeting attendee that joins your meeting will see your organization’s brand colors and images.

 

 

If you want to disable branding for a meeting, navigate to the Meeting options menu for a meeting instance. Toggle off the meeting option "Meeting theme" to allow organizers to turn off branding. If your IT Administrator has not provided you the ability to turn off Meeting Branding, you will not be able to disable branding.

 

 

Platforms supported for Preview: Desktop, Web, Mobile: Android (Versions 11+ only), iOS

Org-defined Backgrounds

Organizational backgrounds enable IT admins to IT Admins to upload custom background images provided at a tenant level making them visible to users in their org. Organizational backgrounds can support marketing moments, product launches, company-events, culture, and holidays.

How can IT Admins make Org-defined Backgrounds for Teams meetings available for their organization?
If you have a Teams Premium license and your IT Administrator has uploaded Org-defined Background images, you will be able to view, select, and apply the background from Background Settings panel. Once the custom background policy is enabled, IT admins can upload up to 50 custom background images.

 

 

By clicking Save, the uploaded backgrounds are automatically saved and will be visible to end users with a Teams Premium license. For more information, see Custom org defined backgrounds for Teams meetings.

How can users select and apply a meeting background uploaded by IT admins?

Images will appear on end users' interfaces in order of upload. Only users with Teams Premium license will see these images in their Background Settings panel.

 

 

Platforms supported for Preview: Desktop, Web, Mobile: iOS/Android

Organization Together Mode scenes

Custom Together Mode scenes in Microsoft Teams provide an immersive and engaging meeting environment with the following actions:

• Bring people together and encourage them to turn on their video.
• Combine participants digitally into a single virtual scene.
• Place the participants' video streams in pre-determined seats designed and fixed by the scene creator.

How can IT Admins make Org-defined Together Mode scenes for Teams meetings available for their organization?

IT admins can create an organization Together Mode scene in the scene developer using the Microsoft Scene studio. For step by step instructions on scene creation, see Custom Together Mode scenes in Teams. Once the scene is published by the IT admin, users with a Teams Premium license can activate the custom Together Mode scene during a meeting.

Once the scene is published by the IT Admin, how can licensed users activate it during a meeting?

If the user has a Teams Premium license, they will automatically see the custom Together Mode scenes in the scene gallery. Follow the steps below to activate a custom Together Mode scene during your meeting:

1. From the Gallery drop-down, select Together Mode. The Picker dialog box appears and the scene that is added is available.
2. Select Change scene to change the default scene.
3. From the Scene Gallery, select the scene you want to use for your meeting.
4. Select Apply. Teams installs the app for the user and applies the scene.

Note: Users can't initiate Together Mode from mobile. However, after a user joins a meeting through mobile and Together Mode is turned on from desktop, the mobile users who have turned on the video, will appear in Together Mode on desktop.

 

Custom policy packages

Custom policy packages allow IT Admins to bundle a set of policies for users with similar roles in their organization. To create a custom policy package, sign into Teams Admin Center and navigate to Policy packages. Click Add to create a custom policy package. After entering the name and description for your package, select the type and name of the policies you’d like to include in the package. For more information, see Manage policy packages in Microsoft Teams.

Intelligence

Live translation for captions

Currently, in Teams meetings, you can easily follow along with who’s saying what with speaker-attributed live captions and transcription. But if you are presenting to people who don’t speak the same language, how do you make sure the conversation is seamless? Live translation for captions delivers AI-powered, real-time translations from 40 spoken languages so meeting participants can read captions in their own language. If an organizer has Teams Premium, all meeting attendees can enjoy live translated captions. This helps break down language barriers for your global meetings and calls to be productive and effortless. Learn more about how to enable live translated captions here.

 

Note: Live translation for captions is temporarily available as a preview for all Microsoft Teams customers. After the preview period, to use live translation for captions, users will need require a Teams Premium license.

Supported languages include:

English (US), English (Canada), English (India), English (UK), English (Australia), English (New Zealand), Arabic (Arab Emirates) (Preview), Arabic (Saudi Arabia) (Preview), Chinese (Simplified China), Chinese (Traditional, Hong Kong SAR), Chinese (Traditional, Taiwan) (Preview), Czech (Czechia) (Preview), Danish (Denmark), Dutch (Belgium) (Preview), Dutch (Netherlands), French (Canada), French (France), Finnish (Finland) (Preview), German (Germany), Greek (Greece) (Preview), Hebrew (Israel) (Preview), Hindi (India), Hungarian (Hungary) (Preview), Italian (Italy), Japanese (Japan), Korean (Korea), Norwegian (Norway), Polish (Poland) (Preview), Portuguese (Brazil), Portuguese (Portugal) (Preview), Romanian (Romania) (Preview), Russian (Russia), Slovak (Slovakia) , Spanish (Mexico), Spanish (Spain), Swedish (Sweden), Thai (Thailand), (Turkey) (Preview), Ukrainian (Ukraine), Vietnamese (Vietnam)

Intelligent recap

With intelligent recap features, you get the power of AI to make the meetings you attend (and miss) more productive and impactful. With Teams Premium, you can use intelligent recap features to:

• Follow up on AI suggested action items and owners, so that important tasks are not missed. It’s like having a virtual assistant attend every meeting.
• Create smarter recordings with automatically generated chapters and insights such as when your name was mentioned, when a screen was shared, or when you left a meeting early, to help you discover important moments to quickly catch up.
• Search smarter with suggested speakers that are personalized to you based on who you closely work with, so that you can quickly search through the transcripts by the people you might be most interested in.

Intelligent recap features will not be available for December Preview. Stay up to date on the latest for Intelligent Recap feature availability by signing up to receive Teams Premium updates here. 

Advanced Webinars

Building upon the basic new webinar experience available in Office 365 and Microsoft 365 offerings—registration up to one thousand attendees, co-organizer role, theming, interactivity with Q&A, attendee reporting, and Dynamics 365 marketing integration—with Advanced Webinars in Teams Premium, you get the familiar and secure experience of Teams combined with new host controls and event management controls that make it seamless to connect with any audience.

How can IT Admins enable the new Webinar experience for their organization?
IT Admins can use the new Teams Events Policy (Settings: AllowWebinar and EventAccessType) to control the new webinar experience. Please see the following for PowerShell commands New-CsTeamsEventsPolicy, Set-CsTeamsEventsPolicy, Grant-CsTeamsEventsPolicy, Get-CsTeamsEventsPolicy.

Here are all possible options with existing Teams Meeting Policy and the new Teams Events Policy.

• Current webinar experience: AllowMeetingRegistration: ON, AllowWebinar: OFF
• New webinar experience: AllowMeetingRegistration: ON, AllowWebinar: ON
• No webinar experience: AllowMeetingRegistration: OFF, AllowWebinar: ON

If you currently leverage the flow of adding registration to a meeting by using requiring registration option, this experience will continue to work as is and will not be impacted by this change if AllowMeetingRegistration is ON.

Registration Waitlist and Manual Approval

The registration experience gets even better in Teams Premium with registration waitlist, manual approval, and custom registration start and end times. Enabling the waitlist will keep webinar registration open even after the event has reached the capacity set by the organizer to allow additional people to register and be automatically added to the waitlist. As new spots open, people will be automatically moved to the pending approval state, which enables the organizer to review their registration information and manually approve or reject each of the registrants. In addition, you can customize the registration start and end time to specify when you want registration to start and end, making it easier to plan for and manage your event.

 

As a meeting organizer, how can I add use the advanced registration settings offered with Teams Premium?

Once you navigate to Teams Calendar and select Webinar, a window with two sections on the left-pane will appear.

1. Setup: basic webinar information, presenter bios, and theming.
2. Registration: allows configuration of registration including capacity to set how many can attend an event, whether manual approval of all event registrations is needed, enable a waitlist, and limiting the registration window to a certain date and timeframe.

 

 

Once you complete the sections in Setup, proceed to Registration and customize the registration form with options to enable manual approval of all event registrations, waitlist, and set limits to the registration window.

 

 

As people register, if manual approval is on, they will show up in Attendee status for organizers to Approve/Reject.

 

Virtual Green Room

Similar to when you used to gather with the host and presenters in the physical green room ahead of your event, you will be able to connect and manage all the behind-the-scenes action in the virtual green room. Join together with the host and other presenters in a dedicated space separate from attendees, where you can socialize, monitor chat and Q&A, manage attendee settings, and review content before the event starts. And as attendees wait, they will be greeted with a welcome screen and can use chat and Q&A to engage with presenters and each other.

How can I enable Green Room as the meeting organizer?
Go to Meeting Options > toggle Yes for Enable Green room.

 

 

Below is green room experience for meeting organizer and presenters. When ready to start the meeting, click Start meeting on the top left corner of the meeting stage. For more on how join the meeting as a meeting organizer or presenter, see Meetings, webinars, and live events.

 

 

While the green room is active, attendees only see the canvas below, informing them that the meeting will start shortly. Attendees will not be able to turn on their video or audio. Other engagement experiences are available if enabled, like chat and Q&A.

 

 

Platforms supported for Preview: Desktop (Windows and Mac), Web (Note: Safari or Firefox will not be supported in the first release), Mobile (iOS and Android) supported.

Note: The Green Room experience for presenters and organizers on Mobile is not supported. Presenters and organizers will need to join from Desktop or Web.

Manage what attendee see

As engagement is key to making any webinar successful, it’s not just about how attendees can engage, but also what will keep them engaged. With the ability to manage what attendees see, you don’t have to worry about distractions in case someone’s video accidentally turns on or keeping focus while multiple profile photos of attendees show up on-screen. You can curate the attendee view so attendees only see shared content and participants you bring on-screen.

 

In the below experience, Daniella will show up on the stage, where as, Charlotte and everyone else in the event, will not be shown on the stage. Presenters will automatically start off on the Off Screen pane, and can then be brought on stage.

 

 

Attendees only see the shared content along with the videos of people who were pushed onto the stage. To request to appear on stage, users should raise their hand.

 

Microsoft eCDN for Teams Live Events

To improve live event experiences within an organization, our Microsoft eCDN (Enterprise Content Delivery Network) will now be included as a part of Teams Premium. With Microsoft eCDN, organizations can seamlessly and securely live stream global meetings, all hands and townhalls, and distribute company-wide trainings using Teams Live Events. As organizations continue to deliver virtual and hybrid large scale events through Teams Live Events, Microsoft eCDN help reduce the load on the corporate network. To learn more, see Introduction to Microsoft eCDN.

How do I activate Microsoft eCDN for my organization?
IT admins can configure eCDN in Teams Admin Center. Navigate to Live events settings and choose Microsoft eCDN from Video distribution providers > SDN provider name drop down.

Advanced Virtual Appointments

With Virtual Appointments capabilities available today in Microsoft 365 and Office 365 offerings, your employees can easily schedule appointments and customers can join in a mobile browser—no need to download an app. And with Teams Premium, you get the following advanced Virtual Appointment capabilities to better manage the end-to-end appointment experience:

• Frictionless and personalized customer experiences that allow external attendees to receive text reminders and custom branded virtual appointments through mobile devices
• Flexible scheduling and streamlined appointment management to enable scheduling administrators to set-up and manage scheduled and on-demand virtual appointments in one location with appointment queuing and custom wait rooms.
• Measure business outcomes and improve customer engagement with rich analytics.

Note: Scheduled queue view and SMS notifications are currently available as part of a preview. Users can continue using these features during the preview period. After the preview, users need a Teams Premium license. To access the on-demand queue during the preview period, users need a Teams Premium trial license.

The Virtual Appointments app provides a dashboard for a quick view into schedules, queues, and analytics and tabs to deep dive into bookings schedule, queue view, analytics, and more. View and monitor all scheduled and on-demand virtual appointments in the Queue View. From here, schedulers can add a new booking, view relevant appointment details, and see appointment statuses throughout the day. They can also send email reminders to assigned staff and attendees and send SMS text notifications to attendees for scheduled appointments. Staff can even join appointments directly from the queue.

 

The Teams Virtual Appointments usage report gives admins an overview of Teams Virtual Appointments activity in your organization. This report provides key metrics such as total number of appointments, appointment duration, lobby wait time, and no shows for appointments created and conducted through multiple scheduling entry points.

 

Customers receive an SMS notification that enables them to easily join their virtual appointment through a mobile web browser and enter a custom waiting room before their appointment is ready.

 

Trial licensing FAQs

I’m not seeing the Teams Premium trial offer in the Admin Center. What can I do?
If you’re not seeing the Teams Premium trial in the Admin Center, click on this link - https://aka.ms/tpdlnk - to be led directly to the correct trial. You’ll be able to access 1 trial license.

I’m only seeing or able to get 1 trial license, how do I get more?
If you’re only able to get 1 trial license, click on this link - https://aka.ms/tpdlnk - one or two more times to get up to 3 trial licenses. For customers who are currently limited to 3 licenses, we’re looking to expand the numbers of trial license numbers available in January.

 

Note:  It can take up to 3 days for SCC to allow management of Sensitivity labels for use with Teams meetings, once T-Pre license has been procured.

 

What’s next? Start your trial today!

Thanks for tuning into our how-to guide for Microsoft Teams Premium. As a next step, we encourage you to head to the Microsoft 365 admin center to start your free 30-day trial today. Below are the most important resources to help you get started. We’d love to hear more from you as you begin using Teams Premium so please drop your comments below!

• Start your free Teams Premium preview from Microsoft 365 Admin Center
• Stay in touch, sign up for updates on Teams Premium general availability 

 

Other links:

• Teams Premium overview Ignite blog 
• Teams Docs overview page 
  • Teams Premium preview blog (this blog) https://aka.ms/TeamsPremium
  • Teams Premium webpage aka.ms/TheBetterWayToMeet

Professor John W. Boudreau – research director at the University of Southern California Business School – urges you to rethink how your human resources (HR) unit recruits, develops and retains crucial talent, that is, people. Boudreau advocates using metrics from the business side to evaluate how talent contributes to your firm and how your people’s needs vary under changing business conditions.

Source

We empower practitioners to tailor learning experiences that fit their own needs to drive change: Participants do not  stop work to learn, every step of the process is embedded in and focused on their daily work.

Typical learning events include:  

“Hackathons”: 2 to 4 days fast-paced context and challenge analysis and idea generation

“Peer learning exercises” : 2 to 4 weeks, on and offline facilitated learning among and between practitioners and international experts, including knowledge sharing, situational analysis and action planning.  

 “Full Learning Cycles”, a nurturing space for learners and leaders over several months to explore and take action together, identifying common challenges, generating and sharing ideas, testing innovative solutions, and implementing action plans.

To learn more about the Geneva Learning Foundation (TGLF), download our brochure, listen to our podcast, view our latest livestreams, subscribe to our insights, and follow us on Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Or introduce yourself to our Partnerships team.

The transport sector is one of the leading carbon emitters, accounting for 25% of global carbon dioxide emissions. It depends primarily upon fossil fuel and, in the past 50 years, has had limited success in reducing its dependency on oil (from 93% in 1971 to 91% in 2018). Because demand for transport is high, global targets that seek to reduce carbon dioxide emissions will need to focus on this sector.

The IEC and ISO publish a new technical report that provides advice on addressing ethical and societal concerns about artificial intelligence

When it comes to online learning one of the real advantages is embedding a range of resources in the environment students are engaged in. This is distinct from the lecturer using some videos in their presentation or providing a range of resources in the reading list. It gives an opportunity to interact with and experience a range of different media, opinions and voices as you are learning.

This is not to absent the educator – a course is more than just a bunch of resources. But rather it allows the educator to concentrate on the areas where they add value such as explanation, support, discussion. Since the days of learning objects we have been arguing that there really is little point in every maths lecturer teaching calculus (or pick a similar well understood subject). And we have since developed OER repositories, and seen some success with open textbooks, particularly in North America.

But the tendency is still to create content from scratch, and I would argue that this is driven in main by the lecture focused model of higher ed. Creating your own lectures is what it means to be a lecturer, so if we use the lecture as the base model for online education, we transfer across the same mentality.

The online pivot may change some of this (or it may reinforce it). OpenLearn, the OU’s OER site, saw almost a doubling in traffic during the pandemic. This may be mostly individual learners, but there will be some educators in that 24 million also, hoping to learn from or reuse content. Many HEIs are now caught in something of an economic bind – they are deeply rooted in the face to face model, but know that in the long term they need to develop a robust hybrid model. These operate on different economic models, and so bridging the gap between the present and the desired future is tricky to negotiate. The original economic argument for learning objects, shared content, reuse and adaptation may come in to play here as a means of achieving this shift.

But even ignoring the bigger picture, and the various OER arguments, creating an online course allows educators to embed videos, podcasts, blogs, and interactive tools creating a richer environment. There is an argument around cognitive load for not overdoing this, but also one around engagement for not repeating the same approach. So, with this opportunity at hand, why replicate the limitations of the lecture model?

For over two years we have increasingly seen this term in social and mainstream media — Do Your Own Research (DYOR).

“The words imply a fundamental distrust in authority, and thus a shift to complete self-reliance. In the case of crypto, where there may be rewards but there are definitely massive risks, you should want to rely on your own judgment rather than someone else’s, who might be paid for their endorsement or simply be a fool.” —Ross Dawson 2021-05-31

Ross warns us that that not trusting experts could lead to massive trust issues in society and, “How this plays out will be a fundamental factor in shaping our future society”. I agree.

For the most part, the lack of trust has been brought on by the institutions and those within their hierarchies. Let’s just look at this pandemic and the medical guidance put forth by experts. This has been my sensemaking experience and my journey of doing my own research.

02 March 2020 — For my own understanding of the COVID-19 disease I start with centres of networked expertise — WHO, CDC, Public Health Agency of Canada. I trust these sources, and if you meet people who don’t, then avoid close contact with them.

05 September 2020 — I see information from the WHO and CDC as lagging indicators, and no longer my first stop to find out what is happening now. I am also starting to understand that public health experts and epidemiologists, while both medical professionals, can have widely diverging perspectives on this pandemic.

28 November 2020 — To understand our current situation we need to move to the edge or find others who are there already. As Kurt Vonnegut wrote — “I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over; on the edge you find things you can’t see from the center.” On the edges the answers may not be clear, but they are less obscured than in the centre. People on the edge mostly do not work for the likes of WHO, CDC, or PHAC.

15 March 2021 — This pandemic has shown the abject failure in communications from many of our institutions and authorities around the world. First they have to get out of their ‘ivory towers’ and meet people where they are. Leadership by walking around — physically or virtually —is necessary in our connected world. If our experts are not helping society make better decisions about health care, then what are they doing?

21 December 2021 — Only in the past month have public health authorities in Canada acknowledged that SARS-CoV-2 is primarily spread through the air, after more than a year of prevaricating by ‘Droplet Dogmatics’ in face of the evidence.

27 December 2021 — The past 20 months have witnessed a global crisis in leadership. We will not distribute vaccines to poor countries because we are letting the market lead our pandemic responses. Public health officials have held on to droplet dogmatism in spite overwhelming evidence that the SARS-CoV-2 virus is airborne. Schools have been kept open while many children have not been able to get vaccinated. This pandemic has become a crisis in network leadership.

31 March 2022 — Twitter has kept me informed through this pandemic. I have been informed by subject matter networks of experts who share their knowledge with the public on Twitter. Learning in the complex domain requires different ways of organizing and conversing. Twitter will never be the journal of reference, but it may be the best first point of contact during a crisis.

06 April 2022 —As a society, we learned nothing from the influenza pandemic of 1918. For example, there are no monuments to the medical heroes of that pandemic anywhere in the world. It was as if society had suffered collective amnesia. Today’s situation may be partially due to society’s inability to talk about and learn from the influenza pandemic.

07 April 2022 — This pandemic has been managed in most cases from a perspective of making small adjustments and conserving resources. It has not worked. There was no global shut-down and half measures were the order of the day. Over two years later and locally we have the highest rates of infections and deaths since the pandemic was declared.

01 May 2022 — We are in an information war — one that pits logic and emotion against each other.

If I had listened to the institutional experts on how to deal with this pandemic I would have been misinformed and even disinformed. Instead I found a network of experts who shared their research expertise and made it accessible to the general public, mostly on Twitter. Did it take effort? Yes. Was it time-consuming? Yes. Did I have a choice? Not in my opinion. Avoiding the potential effects of long-covid has made it worthwhile so far.

I was not alone in my search for good data and better insights. My Twitter pandemic list still provides valuable and timely information. Others, such as NB Citizen Covid Updates (a medical librarian) have stepped up to collate and curate actionable insights for the average person. Perhaps ‘how this plays out’ will be more engaged citizens. I certainly hope so.

“I suggest that the leaders will be found among the aggressively intelligent citizenry, liberated from many tasks and obligations by technology freely shared; using data, information and knowledge acquired from open source databases, produced from the multiples of billions of dollars of public money invested through research councils, universities, social agencies, and public institutions.” —Peter Levesque 2004

Quality assurance is a potential Achilles heel for the government’s implementation of the lifelong loan entitlement – Nick Mount thinks a new mindset could help.

The post Learning design is the key to assuring the quality of modular provision appeared first on Wonkhe.

I am a simple person and usually try to explain things in three steps. They’re easy to remember and share. Here is a round up of all previous posts that share three steps to do something to improve your course design and development.

General E-Learning Course Design Tips

• A Successful Training Program Answers These Three Questions
• Three Ways to Motivate Your Online Learners
• Three Ways to Save Time & Money in E-learning
• Three Ways to Create Engaging Courses that Aren’t Boring
• Three Ways to Make Your E-Learning Content Meaningful
• 3 Reasons Why We Have Interactive E-Learning
• Are You Using These 3 Ways to Identify the Objectives of Your Online Training Program?
• 3 Things to Consider When Building Interactive E-Learning
• 3 Reasons Why Linear E-Learning May Be the Best Solution
• 3 Things to Consider When Building Your E-Learning Courses
• The 3 Essential Questions Every Learner Wants Answered

Production Tips for E-Learning Course Design

• Three Ways to Use Theme Colors in E-Learning Courses
• Three Things to Do Before Building Your E-Learning Course
• 3 E-learning Tips Before You Start Your E-Learning Project?
• Three E-Learning Tips to Help Build Better Courses
• Three Ways to Use Hotspots in Your E-Learning Courses
• Three Ways to Guide Learners Through Your Course
• How to Avoid These Three Pain Points for Online Learning
• Build Branched E-Learning Scenarios in Three Simple Steps
• 3 Things to Know When Getting Started with E-Learning
• 3 Reasons to Use Animated GIFs in E-learning
• 3 Super Easy Ways to Build E-Learning Templates
• 3 Rules When Selecting Fonts for Your Online Training Course
• 3 Graphic Design Principles for Instructional Design Success
• These 3 Tips Can Change Your Compliance E-learning Forever

PowerPoint Tips for E-Learning

• 3 Tips When Converting PowerPoint to E-Learning
• Here are 3 Free PowerPoint Templates for Online Training Courses
• 3 PowerPoint Shortcuts I Always Have at My Finger Tips
• 3 Tutorials to Help You Get More Out of PowerPoint’s Image Editing

Professional Development

• A Three-Step Process for Becoming an E-Learning Pro
• Three Good E-Learning Books to Finish Off the Summer
• A Three-Step Process to Build Your Skills the Right Way
• A Three-Step Process to Create Hand Drawn Custom Characters
• Three Common E-Learning Design Issues & How to Avoid Them
• 3 Ways to Make Static Content Interactive
• 3 Production Tips for E-learning Developers
• 3 Ways to Save Your Training Job
• 3 Ways to Improve Your E-learning Design Skills

---

Download the fully revised, free 63-page ebook: The Insider's Guide to Becoming a Rapid E-Learning Pro 

Free E-Learning Resources

Want to learn more? Check out these articles and free resources in the community.	Here’s a great job board for e-learning, instructional design, and training jobs	Participate in the weekly e-learning challenges to sharpen your skills
Get your free PowerPoint templates and free graphics & stock images.	Lots of cool e-learning examples to check out and find inspiration.	Getting Started? This e-learning 101 series and the free e-books will help.

Following on from the last post about group work, I’m continuing my series (2 posts constitutes a series, right?) on trying to counter the negative views of online learning by highlighting positive aspects. In this post I want to look at an element that is, in my view, often overlooked – the ability to structure learning that is asynchronous in delivery but retains aspects of interactivity, collaboration and community.

Much of face to face learning is based around the often unquestioned assumption of synchronous delivery. A student has to be present at a set time for a lecture, seminar, lab session, or exam. Traditional distance learning (largely print based) started from an assumption of asynchronous study (with some synchronous events such as tutorials and summer schools). This has then followed through into the design of early online education. The online pivot in contrast was largely defined by the need to replicate the synchronous model online.

It is interesting (to me anyway) that we used to talk of Asynchronous Learning Networks (ALNs), and a lot of early elearning literature was focused on the asynchronous nature of online learning. This was partly a product of the limitations of the technology (you couldn’t do reliable video chat back in 1998), but also speaks to some of that early desire to rethink what education would look like online. The advent of reliable video streaming has meant people have become lazy and just shifted existing practice online.

It might not be overstating things to say that asynchronous vs synchronous is a more significant consideration than face to face vs online. And this gets to one of the issues with the criticisms of online learning, the lecture deficit model, which is simply attempting to replicate the synchronous model. Before we look at blending the two (which is probably optimal), let’s consider how asynchronous online education is realised.

It makes use of extensive (if not exclusively) online material – VLE content, videos, blogs, podcasts, etc, often creating a rich mix of media and sources. It will use text based forum discussions, which may be split into different levels – for example ones for whole cohort discussion, tutor groups, specific group work projects, etc. Blogs, wikis, and other tools can be used for co-creation and commenting.

None of that is rocket science of course, but it does require a higher degree of intentional learning design than the conventional lecture series. See for example, the considerations around group work I mentioned in the last post. But asynchronous delivery offers a number of distinct advantages over the synchronous model, for instance:

• Increased student flexibility – not being required to be present at exact times allows greater flexibility for students, which becomes increasingly important as more of the student body are working, caring or have other commitments. Even the use of lecture capture which allows a degree of asynchronous study is valued by students for improving note taking, independence and self-pacing.
• Greater student control – related to the above, asynchronous study allows students to spend as long or as little as they need on certain subjects.
• Time to interact – asynchronous discussion gives students time to construct and research answers, making interaction more productive for many.
• Increased curriculum flexibility – one of the limiting factors in multidisciplinary study is the tyranny of the timetable. This is under-appreciated I feel. We can’t combine many combinations of subjects because the logistics of creating timetables for lectures becomes exponentially complex. Asynchronous study does not have this limitation, so for instance on our Open degree, students can combine over 250 different modules to create their own degree. You can’t do that with synchronous based study.

I am over-simplifying things here to make a point – it is not really asynchronous vs synchronous. In reality it is usually a blend – lots of on campus education is asynchronous already, for instance reading lists, lecture capture, VLE content. And a lot of asynchronous online content has synchronous (or semi-synchronous) elements, for example online tutorials, guest speakers, assessment.

This is all sensible design and making the best use of each medium. The point here is rather that online learning offers a greater opportunity to implement effective asynchronous learning, and that has a number of advantages. So we shouldn’t just replicate the synchronous model online and disregard those opportunities.

Recent spread of the COVID-19 forces governments around the world to temporarily close educational institutions. In this paper, we evaluated learning engagement, level of satisfaction and anxiety of e-book bas...

By Ben Sweetman

Way back in the 1930s, John Dewey wrote that “learning is to teaching as buying is to selling” ¹. It is not enough to say that we’ve taught something, we need to know that someone has learned it.

100 years on, much has changed but many things haven’t. In this article, I will share how we’ve rethought learning for the digital age. The result is Total Learning, a new approach which we believe to be the most effective way to learn.

Let’s start with how we got here. There were three key design choices that shaped Total Learning.

1. Design something better

In my 10 years at QA, we’ve always committed to creating the best experience in the market. Before Covid, that investment was typically in improving the classroom experience – better buildings, better trainers, better tech and even better coffee!

The pandemic and digital revolution has forced us to rethink the definition of “best”.

In a hybrid working world, how will people want to learn? How will employers quantify the benefit of that learning to the organisation? What is the role of digital – and the role of instructor-led learning? This is not just about splitting a course in half and putting some of the content online. This is our quest to find a better way to learn.

2. Do the research

We followed Steve Blank’s orders: “Get out of the building!”

Well, sort of. We couldn’t actually leave the building for most of 2020, but the spirit was the same. We opened Teams and we talked to our customers and our learners.

We asked them what causes them pain and the problems we needed to solve better for them.

They also told us that digital learning and live learning both have their place, but there was something missing. They said they wanted the best of both worlds.

They told us that they instinctively believe in the power of learning, but that in the past it has been too hard to prove the impact of that learning.

This meant we had to design for outcomes, not just for convenience. What does the organisation want to achieve from learning? Does the training support learning? Does the learning clearly lead to the outcome?

3. Do the hard thing

• Content-centric design is easy – you follow the syllabus, you make the content.

• Learner-centric design is hard – you have to think about what the learner needs.

Being learner-centric meant we used the same approach we used when transforming our apprenticeship model last year. We designed backwards from the outcome that the learner wants.

Outcomes cannot be an afterthought just because they come last.

It would be easier to stop after the live event and leave it to the learner. That would make our life easy, but it would make their life hard.

Apply it

For our learners and clients, we found that the link between productivity and learning was too weak. We designed the Apply phase of Total Learning to provide a scaffolding to make it easier for learners to put new skills into practice. And to prove it.

We realised that anything that was “marked” by us would feel too much like coursework. The motivation needed to be felt between the learner and their manager. We reframed our role as educators, which is to provide learners with the resources and the structure to enable them. It’s a big design decision to say “less is more”, but in this case it’s clearly the right choice.

Exams

Don Norman, author of “The Design of Everyday Things” ² wrote that “we should eliminate the term 'human error'” – it is the designer’s fault. In education, it’s too easy to say it’s the learner who fails an exam, it must be their fault.

If the learner’s goal is to pass the exam, we should design every step of the journey to support that goal for them. This includes designing the learning experience to develop a deeper understanding of the topic AND to reduce the unnecessary anxiety caused by exams.

It’s also why we’ve included the Exam Pass Pledge in Total Learning. It’s a statement of intent.

Outcomes > Learning > Training

I’ll finish where I started with John Dewey. We are not just moving from teaching to learning.

With Total Learning, we are going beyond learning and into outcomes, and that is uncharted territory for our industry.

Find out more about QA

---

¹ Paraphrased from John Dewey, How We Think, 1933

² Don Norman, The Design of Everyday Things (Revised Edition), 2013

Map of the Internet 2021 visualizes the most popular websites in the style of an old historical map, created by Martin Vargic at Halcyon Maps. The sizes of the Internet “countries” on the map are based on the their relative web traffic, and clustered by type of website.

After a better part of a year of work, I am excited to show you a brand new Map of the Internet, up to date for the year 2021.

Inspired by design of historical maps, this project aims to concisely, but still comprehensively visualize the current state of the World Wide Web, and document the largest and most popular websites over the period of 2020-2021, along with their countless aspects and features.

This work was originally inspired by the “Map of Online Communities“ by Randall Munroe, and further by my own maps of the internet 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0 previously published in 2014-2015.

The Internet has come a LONG WAY since Randall Munroe’s original design I posted about in 2008.

From Martin Vargic:

Compared to any previous iteration of the Map of the Internet, this new version is many times more detailed and informative. It includes several thousand of some of the most popular websites, represented as distinct "countries", which are grouped together with others of similar type or category, forming dozens of distinct clusters, regions and continents that stretch throughout the map, such as "news sites", "search engines", "social networks", "e-commerce", "adult entertainment", "file sharing", "software companies" and so much more. In the center of it all can be found ISPs and web browsers, which form the core and backbone of the internet as we know it, while the far south is the domain of the mysterious "dark web".

Color schemes of websites are based on the dominant colors of their user interface or logo. To add further detail and provide deeper insight, many features and services provided by these websites, their sections and content categories, as well as distinct content creators, are labeled as cities and towns (which number at well over 10 thousand). Website founders and CEOs are represented as capital cities, while hundreds of the most popular users of social networks and celebrities can be found in the realms of Youtube, Facebook, or Twitter. Mountains, hills, seas and valleys represent a wide variety of aspects of the internet, its culture and computer science overall, while almost a hundred of some of the most important internet and computing pioneers are also featured on the map in the names of underwater ridges.

By Cindy Nebel

“Do adults learn differently?”

This has been a fundamental question that I have been asked time and time again. Much of what we know about learning and memory comes from research on students – college students (1,2), middle school students (3), etc. – but usually individuals who are in the formal education part of life. To generalize from these studies to someone mid-career, perhaps with grown children, who is choosing to engage in self-study; to say that we understand how you think because we know how teenagers think… is that reasonable?

This week I’m exploring the difference between pedagogy (the method and practice of teaching to children) and andragogy (the method and practice of teaching to adults). In particular, I’m going to analyze Knowles’ well-known framework for adult education (4) and compare it to what we know from the cognitive science literature about how people learn.

Let’s start with Knowles’ framework. Here are the components that Knowles claims make for successful adult education and how they differ from the instruction of children:

• Need to Know

  • Pedagogy: Learners only need to know what it takes to pass the class, not to apply it to their lives.

  • Andragogy: Learners need to know WHY they need to know the information.

• Self-Concept

  • Pedagogy: The learner is dependent.

  • Andragogy: The learner is a self-directed human who learns more when they have some control over their learning and don’t just sit back and wait to be taught.

• Role of Experience

  • Pedagogy: The learner’s experience doesn’t matter, only the teacher’s or textbook writer’s.

  • Andragogy: Adults have so much more experience in life that adults are much more diverse than students and therefore learn more from experiential (hands-on, active) learning techniques.

• Readiness to Learn

  • Pedagogy: Learners will be ready to learn if they want to pass the class.

  • Andragogy: Adults need just-in-time learning so that they are learning things they can use right away.

• Orientation to Learning

  • Pedagogy: Learners see their role as acquiring subject matter.

  • Andragogy: Adults see the purpose of learning as acquiring information about a task or problem-at-hand.

• Motivation to Learn

  • Pedagogy: Learners’ motivation is purely extrinsic – grades and approval are all that matter.

  • Andragogy: While adults do have some extrinsic motivation regarding promotions and the like, they also have intrinsic motivation to simply “be better”.

While the above are my words, they are very close to what is written in Knowles (1989). And, if I’m being honest, I’m really glad I wasn’t teaching in the pedagogical era that Knowles is referring to. This seems like a pretty pessimistic way of looking at education and a negative way of looking at our students!

So here’s my analysis of the difference between pedagogy and andragogy…

• Need to Know: Even though students “have” to be in class, they will still learn more if they understand why they are learning the material – that is, how it applies to their own lives. This is based on principles of elaboration and concrete examples.

• Self-Concept: Children and adults alike are self-directed beings and children will also learn more if they are invested in the learning and view themselves as having choice – one of the fundamental aspects of human motivation from social learning theory.

• Role of Experience: Regardless of age, the learner’s experience is paramount to learning. Whether educators are connection to learners via their experience with the cultural norms of childhood or on the basis of their organizational life experience, it is crucial to meet learners where they are in order to build on their existing knowledge… and children have existing knowledge.

• Readiness to Learn: Again, while students “have” to be in class, that doesn’t automatically make them “ready to learn”. As with adults, students will be more engaged with their learning if they see the purpose and are able to apply it immediately in their worlds.

• Orientation to Learning: While fundamentally, yes, the role of pedagogy is subject matter acquisition, that learning is enhanced when learners are able to mentally engage with the material in some way. However, there is also a difference here in novice and advanced learners. Any learner (adult or child) who is approaching material for the first time will be a novice, acquiring subject matter. But as that individual learns more, they will be able to grapple with the information, elaborate, and problem-solve. While adults in general have more knowledge than children, that is only true in certain domains and adults would likely have a similar orientation to children in domains in which they are novices.

• Motivation to Learn: While there is certainly extrinsic motivation built into our education systems, students will again be more engaged in the learning process if they are intrinsically motivated and interested in the material.

Now, it should be noted that Knowles himself recognized that this shouldn’t be considered a theory of adult learning but more a set of assumptions. And in reality, I think his assumptions about adult learners are pretty spot on. The problem is that he assumed that these things were not true of students.

From what I can tell (and from what others have shared on twitter, it seems as though pedagogy has shifted to look more and more like the andragogy that Knowles describes. The primary difference between child and adult learners? Their motivation to learn… sometimes. Children are put in classrooms and aren’t really given a choice about whether or not to be there, although when they do feel as though they have choice they will be more motivated to learn. Adults sometimes are choosing to learn. This is certainly true for adults coming back to school, but I would argue that most adults are put in formal or informal learning situations that they also aren’t choosing. Ever sat through an annoying PD session that had nothing to do with your role? Completed that annual training that required you to watch a bunch of online videos and take a quiz? How engaged were you in those learning situations?

There are some fundamental ideas in here about what motivates learners to be engaged and involved in their own learning, but those ideas are true for children and adults. What varies is their prior knowledge and the way in which their learning can apply to their environments.

Do adults learn differently? In some ways, yes, because their interests and environments are different than those of children. And yes, there are developmental differences between children and adults that might require various learning strategies to be tweaked or scaffolded (5), but those weren’t the differences that Knowles was referring to.

Bottom Line

Educators should know their learners, make content relevant to those individuals, give them choice in the learning process, and build on their prior knowledge – whether they are novices or experts in the domain at hand. These principles are true for learners of any age.

---

References:

(1) Roediger III, H. L., & Karpicke, J. D. (2006). Test-enhanced learning: Taking memory tests improves long-term retention. Psychological science, 17(3), 249-255.

(2) Karpicke, J. D., & Bauernschmidt, A. (2011). Spaced retrieval: absolute spacing enhances learning regardless of relative spacing. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 37(5), 1250.

(3) McDaniel, M. A., Agarwal, P. K., Huelser, B. J., McDermott, K. B., & Roediger III, H. L. (2011). Test-enhanced learning in a middle school science classroom: the effects of quiz frequency and placement. Journal of Educational Psychology, 103(2), 399.

(4) Knowles, M. S. (1989). The making of an adult educator: An autobiographical journey. Jossey-Bass.

(5) Karpicke, J. D., Blunt, J. R., & Smith, M. A. (2016). Retrieval-based learning: Positive effects of retrieval practice in elementary school children. Frontiers in Psychology, 7, 350.

In the words of American motivational writer William Arthur Ward, “The pessimist complains about the wind. The optimist expects it to change. And the realist adjusts the sails.”

For John Maxwell, this quote represents more than a nifty bit of wisdom. After all, as the author of “The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership” explains in one of his Minute with Maxwell video clips, he had the meaning of Ward’s words drummed into his brain as a kid whenever his father would exclaim: “John, don’t just stand there. Do something.”

Maxwell’s father constantly reminded his son that complaining and wishful thinking are no substitute for “adjusting the sails to take advantage of the winds.” As a result, Maxwell learned early in life that realists and leaders alike are always ready to set a new course because it creates traction and offers some control over changing situations, “regardless of how the winds are blowing.”

This is a lesson I learned very well in 1996, when I was appointed president and CEO of Paragon Information Systems, a subsidiary of Newfoundland’s NewTel Enterprises Inc., and it speaks to a foundational element of leadership, or at least effective leadership.

I genuinely believe successfully steering an organization in the desired direction requires being able to effectively set organizational sails, not to mention reset them, and do it under adverse conditions—which requires an ability to filter out the noise while maintaining long-term perspective and placing logic, not emotion (no matter how genuine), at the helm. And in my humble opinion, no first-time CEO is completely ready for the role.

Obviously, most new CEOs have previous leadership experience that provided the opportunity to develop the skills and approaches that the job demands. But no matter what level of confidence or experience someone has when first appointed to the top of the executive suite, they will still need to “grow” into the position because unexpected challenges await.

Simply getting comfortable with the role is easier said than done.

There is almost always a pivotal moment when a new CEO realizes they are no longer responsible for just what they do and say but that they are ultimately responsible for the words and actions of everyone in their organization. Given the significance of this increase in responsibility, this moment of realization is sobering, at least for leaders who understand that authority can, and should, be delegated—but responsibility cannot.

A new CEO title, of course, can also deliver a strong sense of purpose as you realize the opportunity you have to put your own imprint on an organization as you lead it forward. In other words, while being ultimately responsible for the wellbeing of an organization and all its stakeholders is challenging, it can also be extremely fulfilling.

At Paragon, I had the unique opportunity to rebuild and reorient the company at a pivotal time in its history, not to mention at an interesting time in the broader IT industry. In 1999, Paragon merged with three other companies to form a new national IT company known as xwave Solutions—where I ran Newfoundland operations before being appointed to lead the company’s European expansion as president and CEO of xwave Solutions Ireland. In 2005, the St. John’s International Airport Authority recruited me to serve as president and CEO, a position I held until retiring in 2019. During my time at the Authority, which had been privatized in 1998, I had the opportunity to lead the rapid growth and modernization of Newfoundland’s primary transportation gateway.

As the former head of two subsidiaries of a publicly traded company, and the former head of a non-profit corporation previously part of Transport Canada, I am fortunate to have enjoyed a long and interesting career across the telecommunications, information technology, and air transportation sectors. Each of my CEO roles, which accounted for half of my 46 years in business, enriched my life by filling it with leadership opportunities and challenges that had no precedent and came with no clear roadmap or operating manual to follow.

As a CEO, I saw a lot, experienced a lot, and learned a lot from my own successes and failures, and from observing other leaders. But this article is not a presentation of management theory. Rather, it is a compilation of what I consider sound advice presented to new and aspiring CEOs by a retired one with more than two decades in the role across three different organizations.

The goal here is simply to help others set and reset their own organizational sails successfully enough to achieve the rewarding executive journey that I was lucky enough to have experienced. With this in mind, I will share key learnings from my career related to governance, financial stewardship, strategy, culture, structure, team building, and leadership.

 Good Governance Makes Things Work

A description of governance I’ve found useful is that it is the system by which an organization is controlled and operates, and the mechanisms by which it and its people are held to account.

My own experience is that there are actually two distinct, but compatible, layers of a good governance model that must align to ensure organizational success. These two layers are (1) organizational governance and (2) the board and CEO relationship.

The first layer relates to the best practices of governance that an organization adopts to present itself to the external world. The entire organization must work together to ensure robust compliance with all financial, regulatory, legal, and environmental obligations. Also important is alignment with the ever-changing landscape of social/cultural developments in such areas as inclusive hiring and a full range of protections for the safety of employees, clients, and suppliers. I’ve learned that there is a strong link between an organization’s overall governance model and its brand since its image and culture will ultimately reflect the quality of its oversight.          

The second layer of governance relates more specifically to the relationship between the CEO and the board of directors, how they interact, and the defined role that each party should play. A transparent, functional relationship between the board and the CEO is fundamental to any successful tenure as a CEO. It is also essential to ensuring that the organization establishes and maintains the best practices of good corporate governance.

While directors hold the ultimate authority in any organization, a good governance model will clearly define the board’s mandate, in contrast to the mandate of the CEO and the senior leadership team—because they are different.

In my view, a strong governance model is evident when the board’s focus is on the overall vision and strategic direction of the organization, and the CEO’s focus is on running the business and achieving the organization’s strategic objectives. Such a governance model ensures a functional and respectful relationship between the two entities and contributes to strategic success.

If board members delve into detailed operational matters and/or directly contact members of the leadership team other than the CEO, it will create confusion and dysfunction. Conversely, if the CEO or other leaders attempt to deal with matters that are the exclusive purview of the board, then this is also dysfunctional and adds no value to the organization. Overreach in either direction must be controlled by the governance model and any departures from it must be addressed immediately by the board chair and CEO. There is typically no shortage of important issues to deal with in any organization, so a disconnect between board members and the CEO should never be added to that list.

My advice to any new or aspiring CEO is to ensure there is clear agreement on this layer of the governance model while being recruited for the role, as it will prevent future governance challenges. I took this approach with each of my CEO roles, first during my recruitment by the board’s selection committee, then separately with the chair and each board member. The result was a constructive, collaborative, and respectful relationship between me, as the CEO, and all the boards with whom I worked.

It is particularly important that there is complete agreement on the governance model between the CEO and the chair, who have both the responsibility and authority to remind board members and senior leadership team members of their respective mandates. My practice was to meet with my board chair every couple of months to ensure clear communication, exchange feedback, and provide them with information on developing matters that may find their way to the board table. A board chair should never be surprised or blindsided at a meeting, and I encourage every CEO to keep this in mind.

New or prospective CEOs should expect to spend up to 20–25 per cent of their time dealing with board matters. This includes meetings, discussions with individual directors, and time spent dealing with board-level considerations. This time is well spent when it serves to cultivate a professional, productive board relationship and a functional corporate governance model, and it should be valued as such.

Strong Financial Stewardship Improves Your Sleep

CEOs hold many important and diverse responsibilities to protect the health and sustainability of their organization—it’s part of what attracts us to the role. In my experience, one of the responsibilities near the top of the list is establishing best practices for financial stewardship throughout the organization.

A CEO must accept this accountability unconditionally.

Obviously, the need to ensure the optimal level of financial performance in both the short and long term is evident for the purposes of achieving strategic financial targets, enabling key investments, and delivering expected shareholder returns.

But there is another dimension of this for the CEO that relates directly to their relationship with the board of directors. The CEO/board relationship is particularly sensitive to the strategic management of the organization’s financial health. If the board senses that the stewardship of “all things financial” is less than what it should be, trust in the CEO can erode quickly. So, I can offer two pieces of advice in this area to current and aspiring CEOs: be transparent and hire a strong chief financial officer.

Timely, straightforward, and unvarnished financial reporting is essential and foundational when dealing with directors. Any potential board concerns about financial stewardship will be exacerbated when board members have reason to wonder if they have all the relevant facts. A lack of transparency may even lead board members to conduct their own fact-finding missions by contacting other members of the senior leadership team, which, as mentioned earlier, causes confusion and dysfunction in the organization.

Equally important is having a CFO with a broad range of financial experience and skills, along with a bias towards strategic thinking and strong financial governance. The ideal CFO is a person with unimpeachable integrity who is comfortable speaking truth to power. Such a CFO will quickly become a trusted advisor and a partner in ensuring the required level of financial stewardship. I was the beneficiary of such quality CFOs throughout my career as a CEO, and I cannot overstate their value.

And, because of that, I always slept well.

 Laser Focus on Strategy Gets You Where You Want to Go

Early in every one of the strategic planning sessions I led, I shared the following quote from Lewis Carroll’s book Alice in Wonderland with my team: “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.” It’s the reply from the Cheshire Cat to Alice as she’s trying to navigate Wonderland and asks, “Can you tell me where I should be going and how I can get there?” I believe this statement has great relevance when starting a strategic business planning exercise, since every organization needs to have a laser focus on its ultimate strategic destination and the path it must follow to get there.

Early in every one of the strategic planning sessions I led, I shared the following quote from Lewis Carroll’s book Alice in Wonderland with my team: “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.

Regardless of size, all organizations possess a finite amount of “energy,” where “energy” is defined as time, money, and people. Determining how and where to invest this “energy” for the greatest advantage of the organization is the essence of strategic planning. Failure to establish strategic priorities and a clear direction—along with ill-advised investments and a lack of focus—will, at best, undermine performance and, at worst, severely damage the organization’s future prospects.

Strategic planning efforts should be championed by the CEO. The board and other senior leaders should be involved of course, but it is the CEO who must drive strategic planning given their prime responsibility for the health and growth of the enterprise. It is difficult for me to understand how anyone could lead an enterprise without the benefit of the direction and guidance provided by a robust strategic business plan—it would simply be far too random.

Strategic planning has always been essential, but global trends, coupled with the ever-increasing rate of change in recent years, have served to heighten the importance of determining strategic direction, key priorities, and the investments of time, funding, and people required to advance the organization. Such trends also mean that the planning horizon of strategic business plans should now be shorter—two or three years versus five years—since assumptions more than three years out have become less reliable. As well, annual reviews along with any required refinements are essential elements of strategic management.

Hope is a powerful emotion and it’s good for humans to possess it. However, as has been universally said, hope is not a strategy, and it cannot be the basis on which any business looks to manage its growth and ensure its future. For strategic planning, time must be taken to:

• thoroughly understand opportunities and threats in the external environment
• honestly assess internal organizational strengths and weaknesses
• define what an ideal future for the entity would look like
• determine a reasonable number of major strategic objectives (three to five, in my opinion)
• put in place specific and clear strategies to achieve the set strategic objectives
• inform and engage employees to ensure their participation in executing the strategic business plan

Important things typically don’t just happen organically—they have to be thoughtfully and strategically pursued. The CEO is the individual who must drive this process and who must select the relevant measures of success to accurately determine if there is meaningful progress along the desired path.

Beyond the obvious benefits of a thoughtful strategic plan, I’ve learned that there are two other notable benefits for the CEO—engaging the board, and team building.

First, a compelling strategic plan will engage directors at the right level of involvement. It will also appropriately engage a parent company if the organization is part of a larger, diversified entity.

Second, the process of building a strategic plan with your senior leadership team will have a galvanizing effect on the team itself, as the entire leadership group takes ownership of the plan they helped to build, understands how it fits together, and commits to the level of collaboration necessary for strategic success.

Strategy and Culture Must Be Aligned

One of the most important lessons I learned in my CEO career is the need to align organizational culture with organizational strategy, and to advance them together.

Unless you engage and equip the people in your organization to understand and embrace the important changes called for in a forward-looking strategic plan, the potential to achieve worthwhile strategic progress becomes much less certain. Without advancing the organization’s culture in meaningful ways, employees are more likely to fear and resist strategic changes, not to mention lead them to find creative ways to undermine them. The well-known statement that “culture will eat strategy for lunch” is applicable here.

However, my experience is that the vast majority of employees want to understand their employer’s organizational strategy and how it will affect and benefit them. There are many effective ways to invest in corporate culture so that employees are more comfortable to welcome and help execute a new organizational strategy, and the following paragraph shares some of the culture-advancing approaches I have successfully used in the companies I led.

I made it a regular practice to personally present the entire strategic business plan and its major priorities and objectives to all employees—typically in small groups to increase their level of participation—and invited their clarifying questions and their suggestions for improvement. We also engaged employees at all levels of the organization in the various action teams and strategic initiatives that were required to “put legs under” the organization’s major objectives and strategies.

Whenever a new strategy required employees to develop higher skills, we would invest in a structured and comprehensive training program for those employees. If employees were unionized, we would present the strategic plan to the union leadership to remove any confusion on their part about our intentions and to address any concerns. We also made it a practice to celebrate our company’s collective strategic successes along the way with the entire employee team. I made it a habit to keep my office door open when not in meetings, held periodic Coffee with Keith sessions with small groups of employees, and resisted the creation of executive-only enclaves in our buildings.

Other culture-advancing investments included linking a portion of individual compensation to the achievement of strategic objectives, and also adopting a clear human resources policy of promoting from within the organization wherever skills and employee ambition aligned.

All of these investments to develop the corporate culture have the singular goal of creating an environment where mistrust and fear of change are diminished, while information sharing, mutual respect, and participation are increased. I should note that it’s rare to see 100 per cent of employees embrace such culture-building initiatives right away, as some just need time to test the sincerity of your intentions. However, my experience has been that initially engaging a majority of employees is a valuable start to the process. Other employees will engage over time once they find a way to work through their individual trust issues.

I found that one of the greatest benefits of this approach is that each employee has the opportunity to clearly understand how what they do in their role contributes to the success of the entire organization. The positive attitudes that flow from this knowledge are remarkable and go a long way in engaging employees in the implementation and execution of the strategic plan. My experience is that most employees genuinely want to know that the contributions they make throughout their careers are a meaningful use of their talents and energies, and that they are recognized as such by their employer. In fact, I would contend that informed and engaged employees can be an organization’s greatest asset—perhaps, its only source of sustained competitive advantage.

The need to align strategy and corporate culture is articulated well in the following quote from the respected author on leadership Carol Kinsey Goman: “Organizations don’t change. People do—or they don’t. If the human beings in your organization don’t trust leadership, don’t share the Vision, and don’t buy into the reasons for change, then there will be no successful change, regardless of how brilliant your strategy is.”

 Structure Must Follow Strategy

Through my career, I observed that there are many ways to structure an organization and that there are many factors that can influence organizational design. These factors can include such things as historical precedent, personal bias, individual ambition, short-term financial considerations, and even board influence.

My experience is that organizational structure should be primarily determined by an organization’s strategy. Once an organization has thoughtfully determined its strategic priorities and objectives, then the organization should be structured to best enable the achievement of these strategic objectives. This may require such actions as (1) consolidating departments or divisions to improve business processes, (2) creating new departments or units to leverage strengths or correct weaknesses identified in the business plan, or even (3) abandoning activities that no longer support a new strategic direction and then re-assigning the affected people to more strategic pursuits.

If organizations are structured for reasons other than to support the achievement of strategic objectives and/or to better serve clients, then further re-organizations will inevitably follow when the plan falters and the structure will then hopefully become aligned with the strategy.

Stock Your Leadership Team with Leaders

Throughout my career I was surprised with how often I observed executives and managers who were reluctant to build their teams with individuals possessing levels of intelligence and experience that matched or exceeded their own.

Perhaps it was due to their intimidation resulting from low self-confidence as a leader, a lack of emotional intelligence, or a concern that their subordinates may look stronger than the leaders themselves in their eyes or the eyes of their boss. Whatever the reasons, this reluctance demonstrates weak leadership and lost opportunities.

When building teams, I consistently looked to surround myself with the brightest, most capable people available. I invested in them, presented them with challenging and interesting assignments to sharpen their skills, delegated authority to help develop their decision-making abilities, and gave them exposure to more senior leaders in the organization. Just as importantly, I regularly engaged them in key decisions, routinely seeking their input and counsel even when it differed from my own perspective. As a result, I benefited from having teams of intelligent, trusted advisors who were keen to learn and grow as leaders in their own right, to pursue strategic objectives, and to add value to the organization.

My advice to CEOs and other leaders is to stock your leadership teams with leaders. Look to engage the sharpest, most capable, and most confident people available as you build your teams. It’s also critical to build diversity of experience and opinion on your teams, rather than simply engaging people who regularly share your own views. Accommodating and encouraging diversity of opinions around the leadership table will inevitably lead to more thoughtful, more strategic, and more relevant decisions.

An additional benefit of recruiting and developing strong talent is that it establishes a solid foundation for any organization’s succession planning. I believe every CEO should help plan for their ultimate replacement by giving the board of directors the option of finding the next CEO within the organization. Building a senior leadership team populated by talented and strategic people will help enable the long-term sustainability of the organization.

I’ve observed a unique dynamic and a special energy generated by high-calibre leadership teams that help to create an enjoyable employment experience for all concerned—you might even call it fun.

And keep in mind that nobody ever said you can’t have fun at work!

How You Lead and What You Say Matters

As a young manager, I learned a couple of important lessons about leadership and communication that were reinforced during my time as an executive and a CEO.

First, I learned that the leadership style of a manager, executive, or CEO will inevitably shape the leadership style of their direct reports—positively or negatively. If a leader demonstrates a thoughtful, facts-first approach to the job, then their direct reports are likely to replicate it. If a leader leads in an open, collaborative manner, then direct reports are more likely to follow suit with their own teams. Conversely, if a leader’s style is autocratic, opinion-based, stress transmitting, and characterized by finger pointing, then a similar approach may be adopted by subordinates who believe it’s necessary for self-preservation.

The opportunity for leaders to model the change they want to see in their organization is remarkable and should be seized.

Second, I learned that what leaders say—and how they say it—matters a great deal to those receiving the messages. This is particularly important if the organization is experiencing any type of crisis because the choice of words and tone can either signal calm or exacerbate an already challenging situation. Even if people cannot recall exactly what you said, they will always recall how you said it and how that made them feel at the time.

My advice to leaders is to consistently take the time to reflect on what you say or write. Sleep on it if you have the time. Avoiding knee-jerk reactions, speeches, or e-mails in favour of a strategic communications approach will help to reassure people and help build a constructive corporate culture. As well, honest, consistent communication builds trust and employee engagement.

There is no question that CEOs are held to a high standard. But this is perfectly appropriate. After all, how they lead and how they communicate drives an organization’s brand by helping establish the “personality” of the culture in a very tangible way.

Taking on this responsibility is challenging, but it offers an opportunity to make a genuine difference that few people will ever have the chance to experience, so grab hold of it!

The foregoing thoughts and observations have hopefully given you a sense of how I valued my 20-plus years as a CEO, along with how remarkable the learning was for me. Most days I wouldn’t trade it for a villa in Tuscany.

I sincerely hope that at least some of what I’ve said will be of value to you in your own leadership careers. I’ll leave all you current and aspiring CEOs with one final tongue-in-cheek lesson: It’s OK for a CEO to take a little of the credit when things are going well because, when things go badly, they may get all of the blame.     

Wishing you success at setting your own sails.

 

The post What I Learned as a CEO appeared first on Ivey Business Journal.

Social learning theory is a behavioral theory that posits that new behaviors can be learned by observing and imitating others.

Source

Since a global pandemic hit the globe two years ago, companies across the world have been trying to adapt to a new hybrid work reality. That also includes Microsoft. It has been leveraging Teams to make learning resources more accessible for employees.

Last year, Microsoft launched Viva. Viva is a new employee experience platform accessible in Microsoft Teams. It includes different modules. There is a Learning module that provides employees with easy courses based on their interests and roles.

According to PwC’s annual global CEO survey, 79% of CEOs say the talent and skills of their workforce is their number one issue. Meanwhile, employees spend only 1% of their workweek on formal learning. Based on this, we can see the skills gap is real, and we know the time gap at work is also real.

People also have different learning preferences. Adult learning theory tells us adults learn faster when drawing from their own experiences and references. It also tells us that learning needs arise quickly, and it’s best to address these quickly.

Based on this data and adult learning theory, learning needs to be more engaging. And seamlessly integrated into places where people are already spending their time at work. Microsoft’s Viva Learning platform addresses some of these challenges.

What is Viva Learning?

Viva Learning is a training app that organizations can add to Microsoft Teams. Employees can easily access learning content in Teams from different sources. They can search for relevant courses, view them directly in Teams, and mark them as completed.

• Microsoft Learn
• Microsoft 365 Training
• LinkedIn Learning
• and an organization’s custom content.

If an employee or the whole team needs additional learning on a specific topic, they can assign training modules and verify whether they have completed them. All these features are part of any Office 365 and Microsoft 365 subscriptions

How to add your content to Viva Learning

Many organizations may already have training content that they have spent time and money creating. Therefore, they may want to add that content to Viva and make it accessible to employees through the app.

To add your existing content to the platform, you’ll need to follow these steps:

• First, make sure that you have the Knowledge Administrator admin permissions assigned.
• Then, navigate to your Microsoft 365 admin center, click on settings on the left, and then org-wide settings.
• From there, you will see the Viva Learning service, and you can also turn off providers like Linkedin or add other content from SharePoint.

To add your content from SharePoint, click on SharePoint and add the URL of the site you want to use.

For new SharePoint sites, you’ll need to wait one hour before adding the URL to Viva.

Once you add the link, it will automatically create a SharePoint list named “Learning App Content Repository” located in the site contents.  

In the Learning App Repository list, add the training folder URLs you want to add to Viva.

Once you add your content, it will appear in the Viva app, with your organization’s name as a Provider and all the materials in the folder.

Employees can click on any material and view it directly in Teams, just like the other learning content.

Permissions

Microsoft’s learning platform follows all existing content permissions. Therefore, only content that a user has permission to see is searchable and visible within the app.

For example, suppose you had HR training material added to a SharePoint folder with specific permissions only to allow the HR team to see it. In that case, only HR employees can access the training content in the app.

How to deploy Viva Learning to all users

To ensure employees can access the learning platform in Teams, you need to ensure that the platform is allowed in the Teams admin center:

• Go to your Teams admin center > Teams Apps > Manage Apps, and search for Viva Learning.
• Make sure that you have set the app to “Allowed”.

Employees can find the Viva app in the Teams app store. Otherwise, you can create a Teams App Setup Policy to pin the app to the employee’s taskbar in Teams so that they can view and easily access it. Here’s how to proceed:

• Go to the Teams admin center > Teams Apps, then choose Setup policies.
• From there, you can create a policy and pin the Viva Learning app on behalf of users.

Adding the Viva to the user’s taskbar in Teams ensures they can easily see the app and quickly access the learning courses they need.

Promoting a learning culture with Viva

Viva Learning aggregates all your learning in one place, with powerful social features and recommendations that makes learning a natural part of your day. It accelerates onboarding and upskilling, and it fosters a culture of individual and organizational learning by helping people learn in the flow of their work in Microsoft Teams.

There is already a wide variety of learning options for organizations to train their staff. So, why do we need this new app? Here are some of the key reasons Microsoft decided to launch this new platform.

People are spending more time in Microsoft Teams

Due to the pandemic and the rise in remote working, Microsoft Teams has become a central hub where many people now spend their days at work. As a result, it makes sense to bring training content to apps users already use rather than expecting them to go elsewhere.

Addressing common training challenges

When I speak to customers about internal training, the most common challenges they’re facing include time restraints, information overload, and ineffective training methods. Viva Learning addresses these problems by enabling employees to consume one-hour courses in 1–2-minute chunks. The courses suggested to them are also based on their interests and roles.

Summary

Viva Learning attempts to overcome some of the most common challenges in training staff. If people have to go out of their way to find learning, it is relatively unlikely that they will do it.

Moreover, because there is so much training available, it can be tough for individual employees to choose what to focus on. Bringing the most relevant training to individuals means they’ll be more likely to learn.

Considering a lot of the Viva features come out of the box in Office 365 and Microsoft 365 subscriptions, it seems like an obvious choice for organizations to turn on and use. For organizations using an existing Learning Management System, Viva Learning is a great way to complement their system and brings those LMS features into Teams.

If you don’t know which model of community you’re building (and the conventions of that model), you’re probably going to struggle.

Community models can be as distinct from one another as Abrahamic religions. We might share a common faith in connecting people, but the best practices of each model vary greatly.

If you follow #CMGR on Twitter, it often feels like community builders live in different worlds sharing conflicting advice and ideas. The truth is most people are sharing advice that works for their model of community building.

Whether it works for you or not depends largely on if you’re following a similar model to them.

 

Community Building Models Which Work in 2022

The main brand (emphasis on the word brand here) community building models today fall within five buckets. Each bucket has unique conventions.

(click here for full image)

For example, if you’re building a support community, creating a sense of community isn’t such a big deal. Most people just want to get answers to their questions and be on their way. However, if you’re building peer groups or user groups, then creating that sense of belonging is far more important (this is the essence of this debate).

For sure, you absolutely can succeed by defying these models and blazing your own trail. But you’re making life much harder for yourself. This is because the success of each model depends upon embracing the conventions of that model.

 

What Are Community Building Conventions?

Like writing a movie, it’s best to pick a genre and stick to the conventions of that genre.

Sure, sometimes you can defy conventions and succeed, but there’s a reason we don’t see many romantic horror movies; audiences have preferences.

This is true for communities too. Conventions of community models reflect the preferences of their audiences. These preferences cover four key areas:

1) Value to members. This is the unique value you need to offer (and promote) to members. Without the right value, members won’t visit.

2) Critical success factors. This is what needs to be present within your community for members to get that value. Without these, members won’t stick around for long.

3) Key challenges. This is the hard part of making that model work. It’s what your strategy should be designed to overcome.

4) Platform. This is the technology members prefer to achieve that outcome (defy this at your own risk).

So, for example:

• If you’re building a support community, pick a forum platform which is easy to scan and search for information, nurture a group of superusers, and do everything you can to redirect people with questions from other channels to the community.

• If you want people to share how they use products, embrace blogs, videos, and social media where people already share expertise. Aggregate them into a single place. Prune the bad and feature the best.

• If you want advocates to say nice things about you to others, use a dedicated advocacy platform and provide rewards advocates actually want. Put strong training and quality controls in place.

• If you want to nurture peer groups (especially elite peer groups), you need to keep it exclusive, spend time welcoming each person, and invest heavily in great facilitation (rather than moderation!) on a simple group messaging tool.

• If you want user groups, then find the right leaders, use dedicated (virtual) event software, and create systems to scale it up rapidly.

The more conventions of the model you embrace, the more successful you’re likely to be.

When you defy the models, you’re going to struggle because you’re trying to change the preferences of your audience.

Member preferences are so critically important (and, sadly, so commonly ignored).

 

Let’s Be Honest About Member Preferences

Understanding the real preferences of members will save you a lot of time and money.

Often we do things that are clearly against the preferences of our audiences.

Here’s a couple of questions:

How many brand communities do you regularly participate in by choice (i.e. not because you need a problem fixed?)

When you engage with peers in the industry, how often do you do it in forums hosted by a major brand?

How often do you contribute articles to knowledge bases in a brand community?

If you answered ‘none/never’ to all of the above, why would you think your audience is any different?

If you’re trying to persuade your members to do something you’ve never done (or wouldn’t do), you’re probably not being honest about member preferences (which usually aren’t so dissimilar from your own).

Too often we try to build communities that are clearly running contrary to the preferences of members. This means we’re going to end up fighting against the odds.

 

Different Audiences Have Different Conventions Too!

To make matters a little more confusing, sometimes there are unique conventions for specific audiences too.

One recent prospect complained that since they moved their developer community from Discourse to their integrated Salesforce platform, participation had plummeted. Developers had simply begun using a member-hosted Slack channel instead.

Why did this happen?

Because Discourse is better for developers, it has features developers like and are more familiar with. It’s a widely accepted convention that developers use Discourse. When you battle natural preferences, you’re usually going to lose.

Likewise, I recently talked a game developer out of launching a forum for gamers to hang out and chat. That’s simply not where gamers go anymore. They prefer Discord, Reddit and other channels.

It doesn’t take much research to identify the conventions you’re working with.

You can battle against user preferences if you want, but it is going to be a battle.

 

If You Don’t Embrace The Right Conventions, You’re Probably Fighting The Odds

Sometimes you see the same mistakes so often you start to wonder why no-one seems to learn from them?

For example, around 95% of groups hosted within hosted brand communities are devoid of any activity.

This means your odds of making sub-groups work within your hosted community are around 5%.

Unless you’re playing the lottery, those are terrible odds.

But that doesn’t stop community after community trying to make it work. Some don’t know the odds, others simply think that their situation is different.

And you might well be different. You might just have the audience and unique circumstance to make it work for you, but you’re always going to be fighting the odds.

This is the crux of the problem:

Instead of embracing the natural preferences and behaviors of our audiences, we try to persuade them to change their preferences.

Once you start trying to change preferences of members, you’re stacking the odds against you.

Sadly, many people seem to have a completely false idea of the odds against some of their community plans.

 

Five Reasons We Don’t Fully Appreciate The Odds Of Success

This isn’t a comprehensive list, but in my experience there tend to be five common reasons we don’t fully understand the odds of success in a community activity (or don’t understand the preferences of members).

1) Success bias. Failures are naturally removed from the web. This only leaves successful examples. Yet for every success there might be dozens of failures. The reverse is also true. Often a single successful example inspires dozens of failures.

2) Imagining people who don’t really exist. We imagine there are time-rich people unlike ourselves who are happy to take the time to learn new tools, write long knowledge articles, and share their success stories with others. If you can’t find an abundance of real people with preferences to match your idea, you need to change your idea (rather than try to change the people!).

3) Preferences change. There was a time when people happily hung out in forums chatting to friends. For some older generations, this may still be true. But I’m betting few (if any) of us still do it today. Preferences have changed and we haven’t stayed current with the modern preferences of our audiences.

4) Software vendors promote their solutions for every situation. There is a big difference between a platform offering a feature and members wanting to use the feature (on that platform). In theory, groups, knowledge bases, and gamification can all be really useful, but most of the time members won’t use (or care about) any of these features. If you haven’t used any of these features on another brand’s community before, why do you think your members will?

5) The desire to ‘Do Something’. A new VP of marketing arrives, sees a collection of disparate platforms, and decides this is confusing, wasteful, and cluttered. She decides to do something and suggests a far better solution; bring everything together into one integrated experience. But this runs contrary to the preferences of members as we’ll explore in a moment.

Each of these really skews the real odds of success when you run against member preferences.

You can’t resist them entirely, but try to be mindful of their impact.

 

Can You Embrace Multiple Community Building Models At The Same Time?

Yes, but you have to embrace all the conventions (and challenges) of each model!

You can’t just combine them together and hope it works.

For example, many support communities (people asking/answering questions) also try to be a ‘success’ community (where people proactively share best practices).

Typically, this is a struggle. Preferences today suggest people don’t go to forums to learn. In most fields today, people share knowledge and learn directly from blogs, video sharing sites, and other social media tools.

You become a ‘success’ community by either finding members willing to submit this kind of content into your community (difficult) or aggregating and filtering the content already out there (a lot easier). Patagonia and Peleton are good examples of this.

Likewise, if you want to build private peer groups where people hang out and chat, that’s not likely to happen within a hosted community platform. You need to use platforms where people are most likely to hang out and chat. That’s usually group messaging apps (Slack, WhatsApp groups, even email works well at small scale). You need to keep each small, private, and exclusive (i.e. don’t invite everyone). You need to link these to the community (and vice versa).

This makes measurement difficult.

But, believe me, it’s far better to make life difficult for your metrics than your members.

 

Some Simple Questions To Guide The Model You Use

FeverBee invests a ridiculous amount of time researching and understanding the preferences of our clients’ audiences.

We do this because it’s a lot easier to embrace preferences than try to change them.

If we embrace the preferences, we stack the odds of success in our favour.

Sadly, so many strategies today are built upon wishful thinking rather than preferences identified by members. This usually reflects a failure to take a data-driven approach and not spending anywhere near enough time really understanding the audience today.

In fact, just by asking a handful of simple questions (shown below) you can uncover a great deal of member preferences.

(click here for full image)

This isn’t a comprehensive list but you get the idea.

Begin the process with a blank slate and a completely open mind and you’re far more likely to find the right model and platform for you.

 

Summary

The model of community you’re developing influences everything you do.

It highlights the value you should communicate to members, the key metrics you need to track, the major challenges you should overcome, and the platform you select.

If your community isn’t where you want it to be today, there’s a very strong chance you either have the wrong model (or you’re not embracing the conventions of that model).

I’d suggest a few key steps here:

1) Use the template questions above to identify value and platform preferences. You will likely find they fall the platform preferences match the model.

2) Get everyone aligned on the model. Everyone involved in building the community needs to understand the model you’re using and the conventions of that model. Defy the conventions at your peril.

3) Develop your strategy to achieve the critical success factors of the model. Align everything you do to get those critical success factors in place. Use the resources and strengths you have to overcome the challenges of each model.

Good luck!

The post Five Brand Community Building Models That Succeed (and why many fail) first appeared on FeverBee.

Principles of #WorkingOutLoud allow us to revisit topics with which we feel familiar and comfortable – to question ourselves, to explore new facets, to ask ourselves questions, or address the practical things we have learnt whilst ‘in practice’. Today i am reflecting on aspects of learning design, relating to knowledge, the creation (and co-creation) of meaning, and the building of capability. With that in mind, a quick reminder of spaces: the blog is my first reflective space – so i feel no obligation to make this exploration complete or even fully coherent – if you want my ‘well considered’ work in this area, the ‘Social Learning Guidebook’ is the best place to start.

To the matter in hand: to what extent should we ‘teach’ or convey knowledge, to what extent do we create space to discover, and what, precisely, is it that we discover? Let’s start with some pragmatic definitions: considering ‘knowledge’ as discrete ‘truths’ which have been discovered, and validated, considering ‘meaning’ as the conceptual understanding we create, and considering ‘capability’ as the things we can do.

Let me try to illustrate that: i’m sat in a coffee shop – if the coffee machine breaks down, the quickest way to fix it will be through established knowledge – probably the manufacturer wrote a book of this, and people are trained. If that fails, the operators who have to deal with it’s quirks everyday may have some ideas too. A last resort is for me to fix it: i only have theoretical knowledge, no practical experience whatsoever.

Fixing this coffee machine can be achieved in a number of ways: through that formal codified knowledge, through experiential tacit/tribal knowledge, or, at a push, inference from theoretical knowledge, transposed from other fields (e.g. i know about pressure, about oils, organic chemistry etc).

Codified knowledge may be global: the same knowledge may fix this thing in Singapore or Seattle. Tacit/tribal knowledge may be variable: in Seoul a barista may know how to hit the machine on the side in just the right place – something explicitly forbidden by the manufacturer, but workable in practice. Tacit knowledge tends to be hyper local, and hidden, either accidentally, or by design.

Formal training tends to circulate formal knowledge: Social Learning may surface tacit and tribal knowledge, if we earn it, if we create the circumstance.

Now: in this sense, formal knowledge relates pretty closely to structural capability. If i run 3,000 coffee shops around the world, a strong programme of formal knowledge ‘teaching’, or mechanisms, technologies, and structures, of knowledge access, sounds like a good start.

Indeed, we could go further: if we use Social Learning approaches to ‘discover’ or mine the social knowledge, we can categorise it, into that which should be codified, extending our formal knowledge, or that which should be banned (e.g. it turns out that hitting the machine fixes this issue, but breaks the filter more often, overall increasing maintenance costs. This leaves us a secondary issue to ‘train out’, or address the ‘helpful’ local solution (which may be tied into the fact that the local barista may have unearthed a mechanical weakness in the overall system, but has no voice to be heard – it’s an open loop where feedback and potential learning is lost).

Taken as a whole, this rough example illustrates some key concepts: formal knowledge is owned and controlled, hence easy to ‘give’ to people, easy to ‘test’ for retention, even for application. But not necessarily ‘good’ or ‘right’. Scaffolded Social Learning approaches may enable us to enhance or amend this, or loop back to rectifying behaviour, or addressing local needs or issues. And, between these two things, capability may be built.

But coffee machines are one thing: what about e.g. leadership, or even something like ‘sales training’, or ‘strategy’. What about ‘mindfulness’ (if it’s really a thing), or ‘ethics’. Social skills, behaviour, things that are subjective, personal, practice based. Things that are contextual, possibly that do not have a global truth or reach. Probably, in fact, most of what we need to ‘perform’.

A reminder: these are very much a part of capably, but are not traditionally ‘teachable’. But nor are they innate. These are developed truths (philosophers and scientists may both throw up their hands at this) e.g. i find my truth, and you find yours. And then we ‘perform’.

Strengths and weaknesses: highly divergent (although possibly within frameworks or a matrix, if we can discern it), developed over time, not instantly, hard to measure, hard to spread, hard to control etc. But grounded in practice, often effective. Hard to share. This is a common truth: you and i may both ‘perform’ well, but by entirely different means (externally) and within entirely different cognitive and conceptual frameworks (internally).

Social Learning schemas may help us here, with caution: specifically narrative, storytelling approaches, whereby we can share something of that internal framework – because our individual learning may rely on the fracturing and reforming – constant iterative cycles of this – to change our conceptual frame of operation. I’ve written more about this process here.

Whilst Organisations are currently finding it useful to talk about Learning Science, we also have to remember that instructional design happens within a broader social context too: what learners expect.

It’s easy to dismiss that, but in reality it’s a dominant force. If learners expect to be told, and we ask them to explore, we may get lucky, and unleash them, or we may get unlucky, and confuse, annoy, or lose them altogether. I’ve had all three experiences in the last month alone.

It’s not that we need to ‘meet’ expectation, but we must defy it carefully.

Take it back to ‘knowledge’, ‘meaning’, and ‘capability’ – a foundational question we must ask is which one of these we want? Do we just need people to perform within an agreed matrix of capability, and do not care if they ‘believe’ it, or do we need people to construct meaning (from which they may build capability, if we support it), or do we just want to give them knowledge?

And does there always have to be knowledge? I’m struggling with this in a programme right now: i think it need largely to be about ‘meaning’, but i feel obliged to convey knowledge – probably partly to prove my worth, if nothing else. Because we are, of course, bound into the system ourselves.

Perhaps one simple answer is that we need everything: we need to teach, and we need to explore (in case it was not clear, i use ‘explore’ to describe this more socially collaborative model – where we focus on finding meaning).

But what if we cannot do everything – or if people do not want everything?

There is an additional tension to navigate: for global Organisations, the maintenance, validation, and support of, learning, is a long tail. Codified learning tends to have high up front costs, but it persists over time (usually for way too long). Social Learning, perversely in some ways, also has high up front costs – but not in the creation of assets – instead i think design itself is high – and so is facilitation, measurement, and validation, although emergent technologies are potentially impacting on this.

Specifically: we need some aspects of moderation (in some, not all, cases). And we need active connection and interconnection – essentially to find meta narratives and ‘truths’ at global levels. So e.g trends, sentiments, meta-analysis of narratives etc.

There is a risk that we are currently seeing the application of technology to Social Learning from the perspective of formalisation and scale – which are inherently unsocial – so we need to keep a close view on this.

Sharing this reflection as part of my broader work, through last year, and into this one, as i graffiti and rework my core pedagogical theory and work.

Quality blended learning systems for improving undergraduate students’ skills
Ifeanyi Benedict Ohanu, Taiwo Olabanji Shodipe, Chinenye Maria-Goretti Ohanu, Josephine E. Anene-Okeakwa
Quality Assurance in Education, Vol. 30, No. 2, pp.169-183

This study aims to investigate the effects of quality blended learning systems (QBLS) on the improvement of undergraduate students’ skills through the use of the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) and the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) model.

The study sample includes 1,200 subjects of which 126 and 1,074 are lecturers and students, respectively. The subjects were selected from seven post-secondary institutions in Nigeria. A stratified sampling technique was used in data collection. Collected data were analysed using exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses.

The results reveal that QBLS influences the perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness, attitude, subjective norms and perceived behavioural control towards intentions that culminate in the usage of blended learning tools (BLTs).

The study supports the belief that QBLS enhances users’ behaviour towards system usage with the TAM and the TPB predicting real usage of BLTs via users’ intentions. Practically, teachers should adjust the existing BLTs not only to create new ones but also to suit personalized teaching and learning activities.

Three systems. One blog post. A repeat, in the sense, that a year ago, the debut battle between these vendors, occurred. It was and still is, one of the most popular posts, and since the systems have changed, it is only fitting to bring about a second battle to compare each vendor to one another.

Some Ground Rules

• 100% independent – No pay for play here
• The data that will be presented, the features, the comparison analysis – is relatively fresh.  As of the end of November 2021.
• The screenshots are the latest.
• I have seen demos, in-depth, from each vendor multiple times in 2021. The latest viewing? November 2021.  Each vendor has provided me additional information as they added items – for 2022, or have on their roadmap.
• One feature I would love to show you is Guidebooks, which I think is the breakout feature for 2021, which appears in Degreed Intelligence.  Degreed requested that the Guidebooks not be shown, nor any screens from Degreed Intelligence, with the exception of Skills Coach.  I have honored that request.
• On the other hand, the second big breakout feature which I see as truly human-centric will be discussed, but it is hard to show, because it taps into the “search” angle, plus in 2022, they are taking it another step, which I will note – and I believe will be a game-changer in the learning system industry. This capability is in the Fuse Platform

This comparison is system to system to system, based on capabilities, functionalities, system pros/cons (when applicable) – learner and administrator side, metrics too.   Client size wasn’t relevant for this analysis, nor who they focus on in terms of verticals/industries.  Two of the systems are really TXPs, although one pitches itself as an upskilling platform, the other as either an LXP or TXP.  Both have certain functionality that you see in an LMS, which is very common these days, due to the ubiquity of the space between LXP and LMS.  They are Degreed and EdCast TXP.

I will add that what an LXP actually is, and how vendors even within the LXP market are pushing it as, are two different items, that will not be discussed here, but just an FYI.

The third system is a learning ecosystem. Some folks call them a learning knowledge platform or system.  In the end, it is part LMS, part LXP, part Skills Platform, part engagement, and part human-centric.  This is Fuse.

Each one is a learning system at the end of the day.  Each will be in the top three learning systems for 2022.

Let the Battle Begin

Learner Side

The best way to present the various learner side is to show it off.

Fuse

Fuse first and foremost ties everything around communities, which is where a set of learners are placed, depending on what the client, wants. For example, by location, or job role or skills or a combination or by interest, and so forth.  A learner can be in multiple communities.

The communities are essential. Content/Courses are tied into the communities, which you can even segment further down – so x learners in community Y see only these courses/content, while y learners in community Y see something else.  The same applies to comments, knowledge sharing, etc.

This approach is not for everyone, and thus to try to compare them without fully understanding the approach and how it really works, to say Degreed or EdCast TXP, isn’t a fair representation.

Once you understand the methodology, the angle, and why it appears as it does, with higher engagement based on various factors, then it makes a tad more sense. Again, though, it isn’t a fit for everyone, because it doesn’t look like every system.

Fuse presents a number of views (the eyeball), which I really love.  It is good to see how many people viewed it. Likes appear – that is common, but where are the dislikes?  Comments -the number is shown, and then a click and on the same screen you see the comments.  I’d like to see a rating score right there, next to the views, and likes.

You can view content, most recent, recommended, and other options, including the type of content – a nice plus.

Fuse uses a machine-learning algorithm (referred to as A.I.) throughout their system, which yes, EdCast TXP and Degreed do as well.  But Fuse doesn’t make you complete the content/course to see what is recommended.  Degreed does.  This is a strength – i.e. Fuse, and EdCast TXP does the same.  Think this way, recommended is only as good as what someone is doing, or seeing or viewing – which can be narrowed down.  If I have to click “complete” – which is how Degreed’s system works, then honestly, how accurate will recommend really be?

Back to Fuse.

The UI is modern, with a lot of options, and can appear different for each client, as the client has a lot of choices for design and experience.  That said, I believe it needs a refresh, which is on their roadmap for 2022.

The Fuse Catalog

The catalog follows a very familiar route using filters. I am a huge fan of filters. In the screen below, the new human-centric, human element to the Fuse platform is front and visible.  I typed in “Popular videos on engagement by Steve Dineen” – and output appears.  You can search by popularity and latest, just to name two.

The date is always visible, duration, number of views (the eye), likes, comments, and share.  I’d love to see those ratings again (search by ratings is on their roadmap), and dislikes too.

I mention the human element aspect because Fuse is the only vendor in the space today, where you can type in phrases, similar to what you would do on a search engine and the content appears. As the screen below shows, a specific inquiry – something someone might type in a search engine generates the right information.

I wasn’t limited to a tag or keyword, which plenty of systems offers. In a test, I typed in bad smells from the kitchen – and content appeared showing, what would cause that.  I was very impressed with that search capability, especially if I needed to solve a problem in my kitchen (oh, and taps into going beyond just business-focused or skill-focused only, another plus).

Coming in early 2022, they will launch the ability to search by a question, “What do I need to be a leader?” – for example, and any content that is free – whether by the end-user OR as the client, you purchased a 3rd party publisher or two, then that content/courses appear.   This latter search capability, no one is doing yet, which is why I believe it will be a game-changer – we all want the human element to systems, which are lacking. Human-centric is a must, IMO, and systems as a whole, feel like I am walking into a museum – look here, look there, oh be personable and warm? Nope.

EdCast TXP

This is the home learner page for EdCast TXP.  If you have purchased “Career Pathing aka Career Mapping”, then it will appear on the top of your home screen. If not, it will not appear.  Ignore the word”Spark” it is their SMB solution, but the UI/UX for EdCast TXP is the same, hence the screen.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Personally, I am not a fan of “my assignments”, because of the system which pushes the whole courses/content tied around skills aspect (which does exist), why would assignments – which is means required to be an essential need there.   It is true you can remove that section/area, but it is defaulted on. The UI/UX though is modern and fresh.  Recommendations is based on what you are currently taking, or completed – that is nice because in the case of Degreed, completion is what recommendations are based on – not taking it, or looking at it – completion only.

That isn’t the case with EdCast TXP.  The recommendations use the machine learning algorithm (which all vendors refer to as A.I.). I like that it shows whether the content is user-generated (another learner) or from a specific source.  A cool option, which does not exist, but would be a nice win, is if the name of the person is mentioned, beyond user-generated. Perhaps I want to follow that person and tie skill coins to that.  Then on the metrics side, an administrator could see how many people follow that end-user content, what topics, and so forth.  Lots of segmentation there, which would help anyone in L&D or Training.

Getting back to what is in the system.  I’m not sold on the “Free” statement under each piece of content that is found.  I say this, because if the client doesn’t purchase any 3rd party off-the-shelf courses/content (all are fee-based), then what is the value of saying “free”?

The only angle for “free” is if you are selling your courses/content and the learner has that appear in their learner home page, but again, that seems odd.  It is more likely that they would see the content/course fees in the catalog, then buy it, and then it appears on the learner’s home page.

I do like that the type of content is presented, but would love to see some type of icon of what it represents. If it is a PDF, it says PDF, it doesn’t show the universal icon of a PDF.  There is a reason why people in L&D and Training, when writing training guides, work instructions, and so forth, always include an icon, that is recognizable and means X.  Like a light bulb -means tip or information.  A red stop sign? Stop.

They are not the only vendor who doesn’t do this, but to me, it is a missed opportunity.  The thumbs-up is nice, but what about the thumbs-down?  Again, EdCast TXP is not the only vendor who shows only thumbs-up, and not the other option.  Likes again – good. Unlikes?  You can leave comments, but they appear on another screen, and the share function, is slick.  There isn’t any way to see the number of people who looked at it though, or rate it – would be a better word.

Discover is well, a way to discover next-generation skills, a variety of academies – which you can follow, different types of courses/content, which usually is premium (i.e. it is not free) and states “follows”, even SMEs/Influencers which you can follow too.  On a separate note, I never understand why some Influencers/SMEs do not follow others.  Sort of defeats the purpose of shared learning.

Anyway, the two issues I have with the discover screen is seen below

To actually go to the course/content, you have to click the green box, or if it has an image or whatever. If you click “Follow”, congrats you are following it, and that’s it.

When you click the box though, you could see “pathways”, “Smart Cards”, and/or “Courses” or may see only “Courses”.  You do have a variety of options here, again a plus.  It is when you click the courses, you will see either “free” or “paid” – which means it costs money. Paid is past tense, so I think showing the cost would make more sense.  I have the GO1 license, so any publisher in the GO1 library, which is massive is listed as “free”.  The same will apply if you have purchased Udemy or LinkedIn.

Again, the purchasing of content/courses is common with 3rd party publishers, and most nowadays including GO1, smaller publishers, and bigger ones such as Open Sesame, have an “all you can consume model”, which the majority of people/clients purchase.

Back to EdCast TXP

I love the Smart Cards, which can be content from someone you follow, or something out of one of those libraries you purchased, or again “Free”.  Oh, and yes, you can see smart cards you have to pay for.  That said, the likes, share, comments are doable, and the type including “interactive” is listed. A nice plus.  Many systems, like LinkedIn Learning, lists video and courses – which are videos and is a peeve of mine.  That isn’t the case with EdCast TXP.  A video is a video. A course is a course, which may have a video in it or not.

Skill coins are sort of virtual credits, which you can use to purchase 3rd party content yourself or purchase other items or use for whatever.  It’s a nice feature, but a reward store is a must for “credits”, and EdCast TXP lacks that.

Degreed

Learner home page

Totally not a fan of assignments – sort of gets back on low usage, if all you are doing is having to do assigned work. Anyway, the resources area provides a quick way to get to the content/information. Monthly Activity is nice, but again, completions is driven hard here, yet the whole LXP angle has always been learner-centric, informal.  Guess those days are gone, when learner-centric means required, and informal means, uh formal with a twist.   Degreed isn’t the only vendor who went this route in the LXP space – they all did – i.e. all LXPs. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I like the “Connect with a Mentor”, but I wished I could actually see the person and talk in a video-to-video angle, which you can’t.  Nevertheless, I found it interesting that they show the number of skills they have, although I wish I could hover over and see what those skills were, OR here are how they rate with “focus skills”.   The analytics btw, do not have any mentor data around how good or awful these folks are – I think it would be a plus to know – allow your learners to rate them, and then have the rating below the skills. I  mean, sure they may have the skills, but they have no personality and treat you like a sub-human.  Five out of five!

The Catalog 

• You can search for pathways, courses, articles, podcasts, and other content
• The catalog uses filters – the options include Type, Provider, Duration
• If you have purchased the add-on called I believe, career mapping – it is shown as opportunities, then the opportunities will appear next to the key tag word you are searching for.  In opportunities, you will see the number of skills you need, and how many you have for that opportunity.  To learn more about the opportunity, you just click.
• To see who the 3rd party publishers are, they are visible as icon badges – with their logo.   This appears on the catalog page, along with pathways.

Here is a screenshot of content you have saved for future viewing/access.  I like the type – but similar to many others in the industry it lacks an icon to match with it.  Duration is always a misnomer, but every vendor does it. What takes you 15 minutes, may take me two hours. Plus, the whole purpose is to focus on what you want, when you want to know it.  If the content is from a 3rd party publisher, you will see their name next to duration.  The top of the screen shows “Assigned”, content that is assigned to you, shared, saved, pathways and plans.

Here is the plans screen

And finally, the pathways screen – think sort of a learning path if you will, with content under the said pathway.

How do Fuse, EdCast TXP, and Degreed stack up from learning environment functionality?

Based on my Learning Systems Template of 24 features within the learning environment

Degreed 20/24, with the two big misses (i.e. they do not have it), plus a half miss.

• A customizable home page that is a different look/appearance/theme based on the learner who logged into the system
• Search by ratings
• Repeatable creation of events based on a standard course template (e.g. number of days, min/max seats, title, description) – this is the half miss because Degreed does not have any event management features/functionality. Nor do they have classroom management or vILT functionality either.

EdCast TXP 21/24, however, the three missing items are all on their roadmap for 2022

Two stood out as missing:

• Search by ratings
• Learner progress bar or similar

Fuse 23/24, with the one item missing – on the roadmap for 2022

• Search by ratings

Who Scored High in other key areas and who didn’t?

Compliance

1. Fuse, 12/13 features, with digital signature on their mobile app coming in 2022 (this is the only one missing)
2. EdCast TXP, 9/13, with the remaining items on the roadmap. This includes a digital signature on their mobile app, coming in 2022, and workflow features.
3. Degreed 5/13, items that are missing include diagnostic tools to identify compliance and competence gaps and recommend or assign appropriate learning, workflow features, digital signature in the system, and yes on mobile.

I will add that the mobile digital signature is very new to the industry, so it isn’t a surprise that all of them are missing it.

Machine learning (aka AI in the industry), Playlists, and Content Curation –  31 features via my learning systems template

Let’s take a look at an apple to apple comparison for machine learning

Digital Coaching is getting hot, let’s take a look at how Fuse vs EdCast TXP vs Degreed compare

Total possible Score – 13

1. Fuse 10/13 and EdCast TXP 10/13
2. Degreed 4/13 – Definitely a weakness

Notifications

Are a must with any learning system, very few have SMS notifications, yet, in the group below, two offer it.

Functionality	Fuse	Degreed	EdCast TXP
Upon registration of courses, events (webinars/seminars, etc.)	Yes	Yes	Yes
Automatic and customizable email notifications	Yes	Yes	Yes
Schedule notifications (hourly, daily, weekly, monthly)	Yes	Yes	Yes
Auto notification when CEU/CPD needs to be completed, before the expiration	Yes	No	Yes
E-mail notifications when a required course/content is about to expire	Yes	Yes	On Roadmap
Auto reminders via e-mail	Yes	Yes	On Roadmap
Future Tech  – Ability to send (SMS) – text messaging	Yes	No	Yes
E-mail templates	Yes	Yes	Yes

Mobile First – You hear it all the time, wait, I do…   Possible Score – 14

1. Fuse 13/14 – the only item missing is admin functionality in the mobile app (it is rare to have it, so no surprise here).  They have a mobile app for iOS and Google Play, and have on/off synch – a definite must!
2. Degreed 11/14 – Admin and instructor capabilities are missing, no surprise on either – since admin is rare, and Degreed doesn’t offer any functionality around instructors to begin with, let alone vILT, classroom management.   The other miss, is rare to begin with, so not a problem there.
3. EdCast TXP – 9/14 – All the missing items are on the roadmap, biggest surprise – lack of on/off synch.  Bummer.

Skills Capabilities – This is based on my entire skills tab functionality

1. EdCast TXP – 77%
2. Degreed – 72%
3. Fuse – 66%

Generally speaking, all good scores, because skill capabilities/functionality as a whole in the entire learning system industry is still at the infant stage.  Fuse is going full throttle with skills capabilities in 2022. If they hit their targets, they will bounce into the 80s.  For Degreed the big area that is “on the roadmap” with capabilities is under the Skills Development area, with five items.  EdCast TXP, it is digital coaching and skills validation that is on the roadmap.

The majority of the learning system space has skills ratings. How do these three stack up against one another?  I should note that Degreed was the very first vendor to have skill ratings with the explanation and 1-5 angle.

Functionality	Degreed	EdCast TXP	Fuse
The learner can self-validate themselves on a skill or skills	Yes	Yes	Yes
Manager can provide a skill-rating validation of an employee (who has completed their own skill validation rating)	Yes	Yes	Yes
The system identifies what each skill rating represents (1 to 5 scale)	Yes	Yes	On Roadmap
The administrator can edit/delete what each skill rating represents	No	Yes	On Roadmap
The system provides proficiency details for each skill rating identified 1-5, thus someone who is 1 means they are proficient at only this and so forth	Yes	Yes	On Roadmap
Administrator can edit/delete/modify proficiencies descriptions	No	Yes	Yes
An analytics section specifically around skill ratings validations.  Includes a comparison total score by each learner, manager comparison for each learner, skills proficiencies, skill strengths, and areas to improve with score rating.	Yes	Yes	Yes

Overall, very impressive.

Administration Side

A learning system, regardless of the type, is only as good as the administration side, yet so many folks, focus on learning first. Understandable, but uh, who is in the system the most?

Again, this is based on my Learning Systems Template, available for download (FREE)

Total Possible Score – 32, includes functionality side and skills capabilities on the administration side. You will see a split – first half – based on the functionality tab on my Learning Systems Template; 2nd half is based on the skills tab on my LST.

1. Fuse 31/32 – 97%  (the feature they are missing is on their roadmap for 2022 – and is rare in the industry to have it, in 2021 anyway).
2. EdCast TXP 27/32 – 84%
3. Degreed – 27/32 – 84%

If I remove the drag/drop on the admin side for UX – which I believe systems should offer, and some do – it is not universal though,  Degreed would move up to 28/31, EdCast the same, 28/31.  Fuse has drag and drop.

LXP/TXP will often note that they are not an LMS, which is okay, that’s fine, but when you start offering manager features, and instructor and go above 90% on the functionality admin side, then…

EdCast TXP is working on manager-specific functionality (again view my template),  Degreed doesn’t have it, Fuse, of course, do – then again, they are not only LXP here.

In the early days of the LXP space, nearly every LXP was missing one feature, the one below:

Allow administrators to set multiple levels of approval (e.g., no approval needed, supervisor approval, instructor approval, etc.)

And, guess what?  Degreed is missing it, and EdCast TXP has it on their “roadmap” – so, uh right now, they are missing it too.

For those playing along, and wondering – Fuse, yes, they have it.

Metrics

Again, Degreed asked me to withhold their metrics, but I have written about Degreed Intelligence (add-on cost), and how the articles/books/viewing metrics still are bar graphs/pie charts  (they appear in some of the Degreed Intelligence screens too), but then the other side, with top content (by provider) viewed, and top 10 topics – is a winner, and I wish every system has it.  Plus the other side has a better data visualization.   Degreed Intelligence includes Skills Coach, which makes no sense because it isn’t really metrics in the way the other two modules are geared for and are – that said, here are a couple of screens showing it off – what it presents is nice, but does it really need to be part of an add-on?

And the Analytics is presents  – Which I like – big fan of spider webs unless they are on my chair, then, no..just no..

Fuse

Best metrics in the industry, period. Oh, and it is included at no additional charge, Let’s check out some screens:

Wait, there’s more

There is even more, but I only wanted two screens.  Trust me, it is the best in the industry. I cannot stress that enough.  Better yet – as if it could be – they are going extra level with even more advanced analytics tapped into the skills and content intertwined in 2022.

EdCast TXP

Ever since they included EdGraph as part of their system, it is an additional cost, add-on), unfortunately. However, it has a lot of pop with very specific metrics, ideal for the segmentation of data.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Another new feature on the data side of the house is Skills Studio, pretty cool once you learn how to use it – a small learning curve is in order here. This is where an admin can do this themselves, without having to get someone from IT involved (yuck). What’s the old joke – wanna have your system ruined? Call IT.  Snark. Snark. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Battle has been fought, the results are in. 

Depending on your take, you well may have your own take on which one won it all. 

For me, I see a clear winner,

Maybe you see them as well. 

Let’s find out together.

Actually, for 2022, tied at #2 is Degreed and EdCast TXP.

The number one learning system for 2022 is Fuse.

E-Learning 24/7 

New user interface

The most obvious change is the new taskbar, which now displays pinned program icons centered at the bottom of the screen by default, just like on the Mac. But that’s it for the similarities. The new start button opens an entirely new floating start menu, which is also positioned centrally. The live tiles introduced with Windows 8 are history.

New functions

For years, one of Windows’ strengths has been its flexible window management. However, the possibility of pinning apps and windows to the edges or corners of the screen with the mouse or Windows and arrow keys is overlooked by many. This is probably why Microsoft is now making the practical window management more obvious.

Arrange windows quickly

Windows can now be pinned or quickly arranged at the edge of the screen with a click on the maximise button.

As soon as the mouse is placed over the maximise button of windows, a selection of various positioning options appears. For example, three windows can be quickly placed next to each other on a large widescreen monitor and Windows 11 will remember this window grouping.

Windows 11 will have optimised touch operation with a new virtual keyboard, an improved dark mode, new sound effects and a new start-up sound. Virtual desktops can be managed more easily and apparently Skype is flying out. Instead, Microsoft Teams and a new Xbox app will probably be integrated into Windows. With the Xbox app, Microsoft probably wants to promote its Xbox Game Pass, a subscription service for PC and console games.

Important new features for gamers that may also be shown today are Auto HDR and DirectStorage. Enabling Auto HDR adds High Dynamic Range (HDR) to newer PC games, provided the gamer has a compatible HDR monitor. DirectStorage is said to massively speed up loading times.

Microsoft will hold a second Windows event for software developers after the presentation for media and the general public. At this event, Microsoft could explain its plans for the new Windows Store (officially Microsoft Store). The tech blog Windows Central reported in April that Microsoft was planning to release a revamped app store this year that would not only be clearer and faster, but above all more open to all kinds of apps and games. The new Windows Store is supposed to pave the way for developers to bring any Windows application into the store, including browsers like Chrome or Firefox.

Microsoft even plans to allow app providers their own sales platforms or payment solutions. The latter would mean that app developers could avoid Microsoft’s store fees in the future. Software providers such as Adobe have so far had no reason to offer their subscriptions for Photoshop and Co. via the Microsoft Store, but that could change in the future. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella recently promised app developers “the most innovative and open platform to develop and monetise apps”.

New taskbar and new start menu

On the upper half of the start menu are the pinned apps, which are arranged in rows similar to a home screen on a smartphone. A click on “all apps” opens the alphabetical list of all installed apps. Frequently used apps can be pinned in the start menu via this app list. If there is not enough space for all pinned apps, the other apps appear when you scroll down in the start menu.
In the lower half of the start menu, Windows 11 always shows the most recently opened apps and documents. Finally, at the very bottom, on the right of the start menu, is the button for shutting down or restarting.

Was everything better in the past? If you don’t like the centred arrangement, you can get help: Alternatively, the start button and the apps in the taskbar can be displayed on the left. This can be done with a click in the settings, but the live tiles are not returned.

The fundamentally revised start menu is probably one of the reasons why Microsoft is making the leap to version 11.

New icons in Explorer

System icons and important folders such as documents, downloads, music, pictures and videos get a refreshed and colourful look. The file explorer itself looks unchanged in the preview version, but it is quite possible that it will be polished up by the time the final Windows 11 version is released.

 

Widgets for weather, news, sports results

With Windows 11, the widget window that was just introduced with Windows 10 gets a new look, but apparently it can’t (yet) do more than before. It shows the weather forecast, the latest news from various media or sports and stock market reports. The topics can be personalised and media you don’t like can be hidden.

Smoother window animations

Already visible in the preview version are new and smoother animations when moving, maximising or closing programmes and windows, which brings us to the new functions in Windows 11.

Rounded corners

Those who like to work with a digital pen will be pleased with the revamped Ink workspace on the far right of the taskbar. All apps that are frequently used with the pen in everyday life can now be pinned there, be it note apps or graphics programmes.

As mentioned, not all design changes are yet included in the leaked preview version of Windows 11. It is likely that the system settings and other areas will also receive a makeover.

And what else?

Windows 10 has so far only provided limited support for the power-saving ARM chips that enable longer battery life. Now the ARM emulation layer is finally to be expanded to include 64-bit support. In concrete terms, this means that in future many more apps can also be ported for Windows devices with power-saving ARM chips.
However, this means that four-year-old PCs and laptops are partly no longer supported, which is not pleasant. Of course, the seventh generation of Intel processors dates from 2016, but unlike in the smartphone market, development here is much slower and more staggered. Processors are still being built and installed in devices for years.

How to check if your laptop can run Windows 11

Follow these steps to test whether your PC meets the system requirements for Windows.

1. Download Microsoft’s PC Health Check here. Open the file, agree to the terms of service and click Install. Make sure the box is checked that says Open PC Health Check, and click Finish.
2. The app home page that pops up says “PC health at a glance.” At the top, a box reads “Introducing Windows 11.” Click Check now.

Disclaimer

All Pictures you see on this article are under copyright by Microsoft. For more information about Windows 11 I highly recommend you the Windows Insider link HERE

About the Author:

Drago is a Microsoft MVP for Office Apps & Services and professional for Microsoft Exchange, PowerShell and Cloud services. He works as principal System Engineer and cloud solution architect in a leading swiss IT company and CSP. He is also a Trainer for Microsoft Cloud services and Web 2.0 in swiss schools.

This blog post is part of Microsoft Teams Week. Find more great blogs here.

Reference:

Petrovic, D. (2021). Microsoft uncovers Windows 11 – these are the new features. Available at: https://www.msb365.blog/?p=4545 [Accessed: 1 December 2021].

The post Microsoft uncovers Windows 11 – these are the new features appeared first on European SharePoint, Office 365 & Azure Conference, 2022.

This article is a part of a series I plan across the various Microsoft Teams capabilities. One of the considerations for you before deciding to roll out Microsoft Teams is to definitely understand the various capabilities within Teams and understand the impact of it considering your Governance requirements within your organization.

Private and Public teams are in such an area. Understanding the various capabilities of both will definitely prepare you for various decisions that need to be taken if you plan to roll out your Teams either as a Private or a Public one. What I am trying to do in this article is to highlight a set of consolidated features that are to be kept in mind, and of course, there are various articles on the same topic across the internet but I have tried to add certain additional observations as well based on our hands-on exposure in our organization and related implementation.

The fundamental difference between Public and Private Teams are,

• Public Teams are available for users to be searched and displayed to allow users to join when required
• Private Teams are controlled by a Team Owner who provides controlled access
  
  • While Creating the team OR
  • Based on Request Access

Public Team	Private Team	Remarks
Not-Default	Default	By Default, when a user is creating Team from UI, the default is always set to Private
Available to be searched across from MS Teams, Outlook etc.	Available to be searched  across from MS Teams, Outlook (As per Microsoft Documentation)	Recent Change for Private Team – Earlier was searchable only from Outlook (From March 23, 2018, this capability is documented to be available from Teams interface as well) Note that I was not able to replicate this, as per my hands on experience Private Teams were searchable only within Outlook Online and not from Teams Interface.
Users can join and pro-actively post search	Users are required to request access	Request access email is sent to the Team Owner, who needs to add requested user Note that I was not able to request access from the Teams interface since the Private teams were not yet discoverable through search from the Teams interface. However, as a user, I was able to send an Email to the private team using Outlook with a request access message.
Users are automatically added while they join	Team owner adds a user based on the request. Users are notified/alerted via Team of change	Requested Users are notified within the Team interface as “Activity” alert
Observed that if users join a Public team there is no notification as such (From mail/teams interface). Which means, the Team owner is not aware if anyone new has joined or not, until he/she checks the specific team members list.	Admins are not notified of a user request to join a team via Team interface.	I experienced that this is achieved only using Email
As mentioned, Public teams are available to be searched from Teams and Outlook	To prevent the search of Private Teams in outlook, can only be handled by PowerShell which is a specific Exchange Online change for the Group created.	Set-UnifiedGroup -Identity “<<Team Name>>” -HiddenFromAddressListsEnabled $true I have not tried this with a public team, but I assume that it will also be applicable to a Public team.
Users can invite other users to join Public Team	Only Owner can invite other users from a Private team	Applicable even for inviting External users (if enabled within the Teams Administration setting) Note: External users cannot invite other external users from Public or Private teams
All users in the team will have access to the related workspaces for View, Edit, Add files (One Note, SharePoint etc.)	Accessible if Owner Approves request	Note that in case of External users for Private / Public teams, the owners can decide what kind of access they can provide to external users within SharePoint.  There are similar controls across all other workloads which are topic of discussion itself about External users and how can they be controlled.
Users can share files with other users within/outside team	Users can share files with other users within / outside team	External users cannot share files outside

The whole concept of External users and the impact of them on Teams and Various workloads within a Team is a topic which needs to be discussed separately. I assume that the above comparison was able to provide an overview of almost all the considerations to be kept in mind for Private Vs. Public teams.

This blog post is part of Microsoft Teams Week. Find more great blogs here.

About the Author:

As a Solution Architect, my responsibility involves providing consulting and service delivery for my Organization. I support the full business and IT solution lifecycle – strategic planning and design, to implementation and governance. My contributions encompass a broad portfolio of strategies and solutions that leverage Enterprise Implementations utilizing various Microsoft Technologies.

Reference:

Ramakrishnan, P. (2021). Microsoft Teams – Public VS Private. Available at: https://www.c-sharpcorner.com/article/microsoft-teams-public-vs-private/ [Accessed: 1st December 2021].

The post Microsoft Teams – Public VS Private appeared first on European SharePoint, Office 365 & Azure Conference, 2022.

Technical best practices for Teams admins to ensure healthy meetings

The return of employees to the office requires preparation and planning to address capacity, quality and adjust to new patterns of use after more than a year and a half of mostly remote work. Ensuring a great experience is central to our #PeopleFirst strategy for service management.

At Microsoft, we’re listening to employees and customers about their needs, and we’ve gathered some simple best practices to guide you, as Teams administrators, on how to ensure a smooth and successful return-to-office experience. In this blog, we share how existing tools can be leveraged to establish technical readiness by focusing on direct service connectivity, sufficient network capacity, and healthy devices.

Adjusting to using Teams in hybrid environments

The use of online meetings has grown significantly since the pandemic started in early 2020, and one-on-one meetings have become more common than direct calls between two participants. Even as employees transition into hybrid work environments, many expect that usage of online meetings will remain high.

Our customers expect that elements of the hybrid workplace will remain in the mid to long term, as not everyone may go back to the office full time. This will result in higher network capacity demand compared to the pre-pandemic times. The user experience with a cloud service such as Teams depends on the user’s ability to communicate successfully with the cloud. To assure ideal end user experiences, we’ve seen customers quickly make network changes—such as implementing VPN split-tunnel setups—after employees had to continue working from home on short notice.

Now that employees are coming back to offices, our customers want to ensure that high-quality experiences in Teams meetings will continue. It’s vital that IT professionals help our end users achieve this, even as the complexity of devices, identities, locations, and scenarios continue to grow.

Steps to improve Teams experiences

We make every effort to streamline and simplify the delivery of healthy, compliant, and secure cloud services through Microsoft 365. To achieve that, we’ve compiled three steps that enterprises should follow to improve Teams meeting experiences, no matter what devices participants are using or where they are located:

 

1. Use direct service connectivity

For the best user experience in Teams meetings, it is important to open direct connectivity to the service endpoints, specifically those in the optimize category. These are three Teams-dedicated IP address ranges with four UDP ports. See ID11 on our worldwide endpoints document for reference.

 

As with the VPN split-tunnel implementation, customers are advised to implement proxy bypass and open UDP connectivity to these service-specific endpoints for improved Teams experiences on corporate networks. Most customers already have implemented this, but we recommend validating that these endpoints are still reachable from your offices. The Transport tab in our CQD Power BI reports can help identify networks where direct UDP connections cannot be established and identify areas that do not allow direct service connectivity. In addition, running the Teams Network Assessment Tool allows you to confirm connectivity. If you already have uploaded building information to the Call Quality Dashboard (CQD), it will be even easier as you’ll be able to identify the sites directly.

 

If you have been using Teams live events, consider the implementation of an eCDN solution to optimize the delivery of video streams to in-office viewers without affecting network performance. Please be aware that the view-only experience currently doesn’t leverage eCDN.

2. Analyze network capacity and usage
The hybrid workplace is increasing bandwidth demand from your end users. While Teams is adaptive to the available bandwidth and can deal with low-bandwidth situations, ensuring that sufficient bandwidth is available creates better experiences for meeting participants. We encourage customers to consider monitoring load on the proxies and exhaustion of network address translation (NAT) pools if they are close to capacity.

Additionally, there are related issues to check as employees return to the office. Is there a slow ramp up of employees returning to your company facilities or will you allow all employees to return at once? What is the expected percentage of users going back to the office? Has your company reduced office space, or moved to another location? Is there a need to assess network readiness ahead of opening to meet the needs of your desired plan?

Customers can analyze current usage patterns using the CQD, the Quality of Experience Report set, and the dedicated Back to Office report to identify the busiest hours and days of online traffic. These reports also provide filtering capabilities on ASN and public IP address ranges to sort by specific regions, countries, or sites. We have published updated bandwidth estimates for typical scenarios and advise customers to closely monitor the capacity of relevant network links. Managing end user experiences, including establishing the role of a Quality Champion, and regular quality reviews allow you to identify trends before they become a problem.

If you cannot use any existing network monitoring data, you may want to use the updated network planner in the Teams Admin Center to estimate bandwidth demand. As with any simulation model, this should be used as a starting point and should be completed with network capacity monitoring to refine the estimated bandwidth consumption as more users return to the office.

In addition, some customers consider the limitation of media bit rate for users in heavily constrained sites to control the end user experience. In the near future, you will be able to use roaming bandwidth control to apply dynamic bandwidth policies based on users’ locations to help with heavily constrained sites.

3. Make sure user devices are optimized
Both personal and conference room devices like Teams Rooms play a crucial role in delivering optimum meeting experiences, and we expect that to remain true in hybrid work environments.

Making sure all devices are optimized is crucial. Customers can leverage the device management capabilities in the Teams Admin Center to quickly identify Teams Rooms devices reporting unhealthy statuses and start remediation activities before a site opens. If you are not using Teams Rooms devices in all sites, you may want to work with your Cloud Video Interop provider to ensure all existing rooms are up and running.

Learn more about improving Teams experiences

The three steps outlined above—ensuring direct and unhindered access to the Teams service, validating network capacity, and confirming rooms and devices are healthy—will improve the Teams experience for employees as they return to the office. Follow them as recommended and look for our next blog for Teams admins or explore the Teams site for admins and IT professionals for more resources. As always you can learn more about managing Microsoft Teams at https://aka.ms/SuccessWithTeams on Microsoft Docs. Utilize our sections on managing the service and our network configuration learning path on Microsoft Learn. Bring your questions to our Teams Community to get them answered by our experts and learn from other customers.

 

 

Online learning has become a prevalent part of the educational landscape. This has some significant benefits. It enables learning to continue when distancing is a necessity. It also provides greater access options to students living in rural areas or experiencing mobility challenges. However, for students living with neurodivergent traits, e-learning can be problematic.

Neurodivergence covers a range of students whose cognitive or neurological functioning operates differently from the majority. This tends to include autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Learning difficulties like dyslexia form part of this definition, too. It can also be used to describe those navigating mental health challenges.

---

Read more: Thinking differently about dyslexia in the classroom: Part 1

---

As an educator, it is important to help students and their parents to achieve the most positive e-learning experience. We’re going to run down a few elements to consider.

Provide structure

One of the common challenges surrounding students with neurodivergent traits can be a lack of structure. Certainly, each child living with such challenges will have their own experiences and needs. Some students navigating autism can find it difficult to be comfortable with an unpredictable learning environment. A novel educational approach can also disrupt concentration for those with ADHD, learning difficulties, or anxiety. As remote learning can represent a looser way of learning, it’s important to implement a sense of structure.

---

Read more: Answering the Why? How? What? of lesson planning

---

Work with parents to create practical schedules for classes. When students are learning from home, they’re not always going to be connected to a teacher. As such, you need to arrange reliable, repeatable times at which the entire class gets together. Plan to have discussions, share ideas, and learn together.

This isn’t just about having the same times for the same activities each day. Variation is important, particularly balancing on-screen and off-screen activities. It’s more about giving students some confidence there is an underlying structure to their school day.

Beyond the schedule, it’s also important to understand how you can adapt the learning structure to support greater focus. Often this comes down to talking through solid techniques that can get everyone involved into the right mindset to learn any time of the year. This can include focusing praise on how well students respond to the process rather than leaning on personal traits. It can also involve integrating regular time for breaks and naps into the schedule, even for older students.

Planning strategies to maintain focus can create the kind of learning structure best suited to keeping neurodivergent students engaged.

Consider surroundings

Environmental factors can play a significant role in education. Neurodivergent children may find the elements most disruptive to their wellbeing revolve around the presence of external stimuli. While a school may have a certain amount of control and resources to create a suitable environment, e-learning from home doesn’t always match up. As such, it’s important to work with parents to ensure the students’ surroundings are well-designed to suit their educational needs.

In many cases, this involves allocating a specific learning environment in the home. Not everyone has an entire spare room to dedicate to this. But even a corner of the living room, dining room, or bedroom can be helpful here. This creates a space neurodivergent students can connect to as their class. It also creates a distinct mental separation between school space and home space. You can recommend decorating the area with neutral-colored paint and adding soft lighting. For students who experience disruptive stimming behavior — as with autism or ADHD — it can be wise to remove elements provoking this tendency from the room.

---

Read more: Teaching students how to manage digital distractions

---

Alongside in-home teaching areas, many parents are keen to have their children take advantage of outdoor spaces. This can be a great break from the homeschool room, particularly if the student is feeling overwhelmed.

Remember, though, outdoor classrooms can present challenges alongside the inspiration and space the natural environment can offer. Even in a yard, there can be a variety of stimuli proving to be distractions for neurodivergent students. Wildlife can pull focus and weather can create discomfort.

Talk to parents about how to mitigate the disruption, like implementing outdoor furniture to make it feel more like a classroom space. Discuss measures to recognize when the outdoors can function as a break to release some energy. You should also review how effectively to transition back to indoor learning when necessary.

---

Read more: Can outdoor learning help hone your students’ learning?

---

Encourage self-care

Neurodivergent students cannot have a successful online education experience if they’re suffering. A recent study found students learning from home are experiencing higher levels of stress than their in-class counterparts. This is before taking into account the challenges of neurodivergence. As such, it’s important to consider the role encouraging self-care in these learners can play. With some additional focus on this, you can successfully support their remote education.

Your priority here is to maintain communication. Teachers need to keep an open conversation with parents about students’ mental and physical wellbeing at home. Talk about the impact this has been on classroom progress.

Most importantly, the student needs to be an active part of these conversations. Some neurodivergent students may not have typical communication skills. But many have excellent insights into what they find challenging, what their emotional state is, and what they need.

It can also be wise to empower students to use the school’s learning management system (LMS) to access emotional support from counselors.

Alongside communication, socialization can be important. Neurodivergent students often face hurdles related to social anxiety and maintaining relationships. Unfortunately, remote learning can be quite an isolating experience. It also doesn’t give these students opportunities to practice coping methods and forge friendships with peers.

You must work with parents to make arrangements for students to study together. Find time and space for them to socialize occasionally, whether online or in person.

---

Read more: 4 Steps towards digital wellness for students

---

Conclusion

Online learning can be beneficial to give students greater access to learning. But it can be challenging for those with neurodivergent traits. Teachers need to work alongside parents to build a supportive structure. You also need to ensure an appropriate learning environment. Importantly, emphasize self-care to help students be mentally and emotionally prepared for their education. It’s never going to be easy, but all students deserve the chance for a fulfilling educational experience.

The post Online learning tips for neurodivergent students appeared first on NEO BLOG.

We weigh the pros and cons of free vs. paid, plus list 5 tools to consider if a free help desk is right for your company's support team.Read the full article

Guy Wallace is a Performance Analyst and Instructional Architect who has spent over 40 years in Learning & Development. With a background as a Journalist in the Navy and then later video production for training, moving into self-paced instruction at Motorola, then as a consultant Curriculum Architecture Design projects for major clients, his focus has always been on ‘performance’, in both analysis or design. His focus could be seen as lying at both the top and tail of learning design – an emphasis on up-front analysis with its eyes on end-point performance. He has published 17 books and many articles on the methods and need for a performance approach to learning, rather than just training. 

Performers not learners 

For Wallace, the culture of L&D is very classroom based, so analysis of real-world performance, in context, seems alien. They are more comfortable with didactic training, leaving transfer and performance to the learner. Customers usually see training as the sole solution to their problem, yet that problem is almost always improving needs and performance beyond learning.   

It is a mistake to focus immediately on content and topic solutions. Wallace reverses this to put actual performance centre stage in the learning process. He is single-minded in his belief that a focus on performance, along with thorough analysis of performance context, unlocks the right solution, so much so that he likes to call his target audience performers, rather than learners. 

Performance Analysis 

As a method he believes that rather than push back at training requests, one should let the analysis data guide the client’s decision making on whether to continue or not. 

This is why Guy believes in thorough up-front analysis. His approach drew from Geary Rummler on guidance and performance analysis focused on tasks and outputs. Also Tom Gilbert with his focus on accomplishments, worthy outputs, not just behaviours. Bob Mager provided the tools on performance analysis, gap analysis and the writing of behavioural objectives. Another huge influence is Richard E. Clark on cognitive task analysis and gap analysis. 

First one must understand whether the actual performance requires memorisation or reference to resources. Rather than automatically produce training, he believes that one should default to job aids, then job aids embedded in training, only then training to improve critical knowledge and skills.  

So ‘performance’ needs to be unpacked through Performance Analysis, ideally starting with a facilitated group process involving 8-12 master performers, also subject matter experts, along with supervisors and management and sometimes novice performers. They must work together to produce a performance model of ideal performance and then review what the gaps are, along with their causes for non-master performers. Identifying non-Knowledge/Skill obstacles is also required. The more that is uncovered through this form of analysis, the greater the eventual impact on performance. 

His four instructional analysis areas are:  

1. Target audience 

2. Performance (ideal & gaps)  

3. Enabling knowledge and skills  

4. Existing content assessments for potential reuse 

This last approach is to increase the reuse of client content, either “as is” or “after modification” to reduce costs and speed up performance improvement. 

This is accompanied by four means of learning: 

1. Leave it to informal learning 

2. Standalone job aids 

3. Job aids embedded in training 

4. Training for memorisation and honing of critical skills 

From this, his Modular Curriculum Development method, ADDIE in structure,  has six phases; Project kick-off, Analysis, Design, Development, Pilot, Revision and Release – with four gate review meetings with the clients. 

Influence

Guy has been pushing the performance approach for decades and now that it has come back into the fold, through the informal learning movement, 70:20:10, learning in the workflow and technology such as Learning Experience Platforms, he is seen as one of the gurus in this field. He is part of a movement that seeks to avoid unnecessary instruction. Technology that delivers workflow learning has also given Wallace’s approach new impetus, as job and performance aids are now common in LXP delivery, with its focus on search and pull, rather than push. 

Bibliography 

Wallace, G.W., 2021, Performance-based Lesson Mapping  

Wallace, G.W., 2011, The Curriculum Manager’s Handbook

Wallace, G.W., 2021, The 3 Ds of ThoughtFlow Analysis  

Wallace, G.W., 2020, Conducting Performance-Based Instructional Analysis  

Wallace, G.W., 2011, Analysis of Performance Competence Requirements

Wallace, G.W., 2011, Performance-based Curriculum Architecture Design

Wallace, G.W., 2011, Performance-based Modular Curriculum Development

Wallace, G.W., 2011, Developing Your Management Areas of Performance Competence

Wallace, G.W., 2011, From Training to Performance Improvement Consulting

Wallace, G.W., 2011, The Fifth Management Foci

Wallace, G.W., 2011, Lessons in Making Lemonade, Volume 1

Wallace, G.W., 2011, Lessons in Making Lemonade, Volume 2