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Successful companies across all industries go to great lengths to build a culture of learning. When the culture of an organization is geared towards upskilling¹, they are able to perpetually add value and grow their market share. A company that is not busy growing is busy dying. When innovation moves at breakneck speed and the competition is always around the corner, the best defense against decline is having the most knowledgeable team.
Kurt Hayes, Chief Learning Experience Officer at Dignity Health Global Education, has partnered with Yellowdig to use our platform to create such an environment, saying, “What we’re focused on is really delivering high-fidelity, high quality online experiences out to the world, and bringing the best of learning science, technology, and design together to create truly meaningful experiences that can scale.”
When he set out to create this kind of experience, he found that the kinds of platforms used by businesses and higher-ed instructions were archaic in comparison to the social media sites that dominated much of online life. When he set out to find a solution that allowed learners to “engage in meaningful generation and elaboration,” he knew Yellowdig was the perfect software to get the job done.
As Kurt moved into the corporate space, he had to create a learning experience across a wide range of new topics for healthcare workers — over 160,000 of them. Yellowdig is the “connective tissue” around all the different components to keep users engaged and allow them to collaborate in a social way with their peers, mentors, and facilitators. This kind of interaction facilitates a much richer collaboration.
Yellowdig is much more than a virtual training platform - it is a place for remote employee community
Even though the COVID-19 crisis left many organizations scrambling to find a solution to work remotely overnight, because Dignity Health Global Education’s programs were designed in this online format, they’ve been able to operate despite the fact that employees can’t be together physically. Their infrastructure allowed them to be flexible at a critical time for their employees, many of whom are healthcare workers.
These kinds of capabilities have made Yellowdig an integral part of many corporate structures. The same elements that make it so useful for education are the same elements that make it productive for businesses. The reward structures and natural social inclinations drive a strong feedback loop. As employees participate in discussions, they are interacting as a community and improving the learning environment, resulting in exponentially refined outcomes.
According to Amanda Antico, Founder and CEO of EvolveEd, “This notion of community and social interaction is probably one of the important things we failed at in higher education and we fail at in adult learning. What excites me about Yellowdig is that this is a very simple tool for people to carry on learning in the way that is best for them. This really is the magic science of Yellowdig.”
But any magic science requires measurement — after all, this is corporate learning, and organizations are easily going to be able to calculate immense ROI from integrating Yellowdig into their educational programs. Change is the only constant in today’s business environment, and Yellowdig allows employees to remain on the cutting edge of their industries so they can stay competitive and innovative. Corporations can establish and measure KPIs to ensure that a distributed workforce is working collaboratively, retaining knowledge, and solving problems with critical thinking born out of assigned learning. In much the same way users can constantly learn and collaborate, corporations can constantly monitor, assess and alter effectiveness based on hard data.
Stakeholders can compare the health of their Yellowdig programs against the success of all Yellowdig users.
Many companies have adopted programs like Slack or Microsoft Teams as communication tools, and over time they have filled a void and become teaching tools by default, but the software was not designed for that kind of application and is not effective when it comes to instruction. Yellowdig is different.
“Where Yellowdig is important to me in this process, in terms of KPIs and understanding the learning that’s occurring, is that it’s designed for an education setting, so you can get the data back in an educational context through an educational lens…It allows people to engage socially and collaboratively in a really meaningful way…We can then look at all the interaction data that’s occurring between people in that space and be able to assess the true effectiveness of the collaboration and sharing that’s going on in the learning process.” -Kurt Hayes
There has never been a better time to adopt connectivity tools. What was once a goal of many corporations has become an overnight necessity. This can be regarded as a setback, or it can be regarded as an opportunity.
“There’s going to be a sea change coming…the scalability of this peer-to-peer modeling is going to be one of the most fascinating things we’ve seen in the last two decades in this space and because the world is moving more quickly we’ve got to make sure the upskills that are happening inside of the corporate environments are attuned to that.” -Amanda Antico
The tools on the market today are so dynamic that a company can easily leverage a platform like Yellowdig and immediately see the value in the software. COVID-19 might force a company’s hand, but that company will surely be glad at the investment they made. Yellowdig’s high engaging features result in rich interactions based on the lastest learning principles. These kinds of outcomes will have company leaders wishing they adopted the technology sooner.
For CLO leaders who are interested in following Kurt’s footsteps and implementing Yellowdig to support a more connected workplace learning environment, Yellowdig has extended the following limited time promotional offer during Q2 2020:
We understand that it’s important to identify value before considering a partnership at full-scale, and as such we will NOT charge for any of the platform access, on-going training or support services during the first 3-months (our Partnership Exploration phase). During this period, you will be encouraged to leverage Yellowdig’s services within as many L&D programs as possible.
At the completion of the Exploration phase, Yellowdig’s social learning experts will provide you with a comprehensive data report, which will outline key takeaways from the 3-month trial along with data-driven recommendations for future programs. These reports should help CLO’s and other Learning Leaders to make informed decisions about how to drive increased employee engagement, knowledge sharing / networking, and affinity, with a myriad of strategies that should be used whether you decide to continue on with Yellowdig or not.
An engagement of this scope would typically cost between $10k-$15k, but this will only cost $5k for those who would like to participate. Essentially, this $5k investment will just cover Yellowdig’s cost in generating the final report.
Cohen, Mark A., Forbes https://www.forbes.com/sites/markcohen1/2019/09/03/upskilling-why-it-might-be-the-most-important-word-in-the-legal-lexicon/#2681897a36a9