The Emergence of Content Intelligence in Learning

Many large organizations spend millions of dollars on learning content libraries, often without a clear understanding of which content is most relevant for their employees. In this article, I will unpack an “intelligent” new approach that L&D organizations can leverage to identify digital learning that’s most relevant for learners and optimize their learning content strategy.

The World of Digital Learning

Learning organizations across the world have come a long way since the bricks versus clicks debate. Since the inception of e-learning back in the nineties, organizations have experimented with and adopted various formats such as micro- and macro-learning, video, mobile, virtual, off-the-shelf, customized, and proprietary or employee-authored learning content. The world of digital learning has evolved over the years (see Figure 1), giving rise to numerous online learning content platforms?now on the market such as LinkedIn Learning, Udemy, Coursera, Skillshare, Degreed, SkillSoft, Udacity, and many more. In fact, by 2025, it’s projected this market will be worth $325 billion .

Figure 1: The Evolution of the Digital World of Learning

Source: The Josh Bersin Company, 2021

Too Much Content, Too Much Chaos

This fast-growing and competitive e-learning solution provider market coupled with an increasing appetite for digital learning has now led to the creation of enormous amounts of digital learning content and innumerable content libraries. Learners are inundated with choices—from what is available behind the paywalls of these content providers as well as from what is the free universe on the internet.

Companies make enormous investments in digital content, which typically covers onboarding, technical and professional training, compliance, leadership, and almost every new company initiative. But L&D teams don’t have a credible way of knowing what content is actually relevant and aligned with their company’s philosophy. The result is chaos—too much money spent on too many courses that offer numerous different perspectives and approaches on similar topics.

Could the Learning Record Store (LRS) Calm the Chaos?

The LRS is a new breed of a data-management platform that collects learning activity and learning transaction data from any xAPI-enabled learning system. This means data can come from a learning experience platform such as Degreed, EdCast, Percipio, LinkedInLearning Hub, Microsoft Viva Learning, and Learning Pool. The LRS keeps track of what all the learners are doing and keeps the learning data stored in one place. Rather than searching for data in the LMS (learning management system), LXP (learning experience platform), and other content systems, the LRS can operate as the single source of utilization data, and this can be tremendously valuable as a company’s content investment grows. However, there’s one missing link.

The LRS generates extremely useful insights based on the content and learning experiences with which learners have interacted, but it does that after the investments in these resources have been made. What if there were a way of evaluating good content upfront before investing in these resources? What if companies could do more than just analyze the consumption or utilization of content, but analyze the content itself—does it align with your organization’s approach, philosophies, skills, and capabilities? Enter “content intelligence".

The Missing Link: Content Intelligence

Amid the chaos caused by the proliferation of digital learning content, there is a growing need to move from more to less, from quantity to quality and relevance, and from catalog provision to delightful discovery. Organizations can optimize their learning content strategy by investing in more relevant and higher-quality content, as well as trimming back on the rest. However, truly assessing content relevance is a tough nut to crack.

Most organizations speculate on content relevance and quality by the title of a course—judging the book by its cover so to speak—or by course consumption metrics. However, assessing alignment of content with the company’s skills and capabilities as well as vision and philosophy in each topical area can be an impossible feat. Doing this manually would require an army of people and thousands of hours of effort to comb through the content and categorize. That’s where AI and technology come in, and where “content intelligence” solutions like Filtered can help.

Three Dimensions of “Good” Learning Content

Filtered —a content intelligence solution—uses AI and algorithms to analyze content libraries, assessing the content for relevance, benchmarking against other libraries as well as free resources, and then ranking the content by degree of relevance, thereby providing concrete data to support informed decision-making. Essentially, the platform uses three measures for defining “good” content (see Figure 2).

Figure 2: Three Dimensions of “Good” Learning Content

Source: The Josh Bersin Company, 2021

1. Relevance. Alignment to a company’s set of skills. Relevance is calculated for each asset, relative to the agreed-on, high-value skills in a company. Relevance is an especially important metric because it can be calculated before putting the content in front of learners, whereas usage and usefulness metrics are determined after learners have already interacted with it.
2. Engagement. Completions-per-access. For engagement, the platform can look at the proportion of users that access the content and take the learning experience through to the end as a potential indication of actual usage and the ability of the content to engage a user, rather than just the number of employees accessing or clicking into the content.
3. Applicability. Percent of people who find the content useful. For applicability, the platform explicitly solicits user feedback on each learning experience and calibrates it with the insights on relevance and usage.

Content Intelligence is Contextual and Configurable

Here’s what’s most important. The definition of right content is contextual and unique for every organization. There are for example, over a million resources available in the paid and free universe on change management, but not every approach aligns with your company’s philosophy of change management. A relevant, applicable and engaging “change management” resource for your company depends on the context of your company, your culture, your beliefs, your strategy.

The starting point is to clearly define business-critical capabilities. Once an organization has established a capabilities framework that makes sense for the near term (two to three years), content intelligence algorithms can be configured to analyze every piece of the company’s learning content to determine which individual assets are most aligned to the skills and capabilities needed by role and job type (see Figure 3).

Figure 3: Content Insights to Determine Most-Relevant Content

Source: Filtered, 2021

In addition, organizations can run analyses on existing and prospective content libraries to determine which libraries offer the most relevant content for their workforce (see Figure 4). Importantly, the cost of each library can be brought in for a direct “cost per relevant asset” comparison. These insights can help L&D teams make informed procurement decisions and optimize spend by directing content investments to what matters most for the business.

Figure 4: Content Insights to Determine Most Relevant Content Libraries

Source: Filtered, 2021

Content intelligence is a powerful solution for streamlining content, engaging learners with the most relevant content, and maximizing ROI (return on investment) on learning. Several organizations like Astra Zeneca, GSK, Sutton Trust, Heineken and P&G’s European L&D teams are embracing AI-powered content intelligence to separate the wheat from the chaff and put the most relevant content in front of their learners.

Where To Go Next:

• Read our report Content Intelligence: AI-Powered Insights on Learning Content (available publicly for the next 90 days and then reserved for?JBC Members ).
• Read our report The Learning Record Store Comes Of Age to understand the urgent need for a learning data architecture and how the LRS can help.
• Join 40,000 HR professionals in the?Josh Bersin Academy ?– our program, The Agile Learning Organization challenges L&D organizations to think differently, to learn new approaches, and to reimagine the power and purpose of learning more broadly.
• Contact us ?to become a?JBC Member ?for access to action-oriented practical research, assessments, diagnostics, learning programs, community, and much more.