Bad experiences from users are often the result of misunderstandings about needs and expectations, poorly coordinated design, and organizational shortcomings. By mimetism, companies often design their learner experiences with efficiency in mind. They seek a short-term return on investment through productivity, process industrialization, activation, and conversion, basically in “fish where the fish are” mode. This strategy obviously does not allow for end-to-end rethinking of learner experiences in a “human centric” mode, with the risk of losing sight of the vision of the learner experience. Nor does it fully benefit from the potential of digital technology. However, the irruption of digital technology in e-learning projects is radically changing the way we come into contact with learners, interact with them, and perform “customer care.” It is the key that will enable the success and optimization of omnichannel experiences, without which any e-learning project will be limited or ultimately doomed to failure.
TopIntroduction
The digital revolution is now underway in all sectors of the economy. It constantly reinvents new ways of producing, exchanging and consuming according to technical and societal progress. For most companies, the Internet has become a communication channel and a receptacle for innovative business models. The acceleration of the diffusion of this revolution on a large scale is based on three pillars. The first is technological, notably through Big Data and artificial intelligence, with all their advantages and disadvantages. Advantages in terms of customer knowledge and the promise of a personalized response to their expectations, but at the cost of an intrusion into their private lives and the risk of saturating their attention. The appropriation of these technologies by companies and by customers undeniably allows major innovations on both processes (productivity gains) and products (new markets, new products or services) as well as on the way they are designed and delivered (co-creation with the customer).
The second pillar is economic, with the emergence of disruptive global players (the GAFAs) and startups capable of reinventing value chains and/or imposing new business and intermediation models. These new players have introduced standards and created relational habits to which consumers are now attached and with which they are satisfied. This invites companies, whatever their sector of activity, to question their business model in order to better respond to consumer expectations and competition from these new players, by deploying organizational innovations and accelerating their digital transformation.
Finally, the last pillar is social and societal, with new modes of sociability, interaction between individuals and collective action. Digital technology favors innovations in usage and consumption (collaborative consumption, co-production and dissemination of knowledge, communities). But it also calls into question centralized powers and the sovereignty of States, and calls for new forms of economic regulation and governance, particularly with regard to the ownership of data and its use while respecting the privacy of customers.
In this turbulent context, the training and/or education industry, like other industries, is undergoing a major change and must accelerate its transformation to give e-learning its credentials. Numerous benefits have been clearly identified, encouraging e-learning to make qualitative leaps. At the heart of this transformation, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Robotic Process Automation (RPA) can be at the origin of differentiating businesses combining economic efficiency and operational excellence, quality and speed of service, and personalized learner relations. However, the integration of these technologies requires rethinking the end-to-end learner relationship (1), building a cognitive path with a pedagogical model for each learner by capitalizing on the advances in experiential learning (2) and successfully setting up real Learning Experiential Platforms (3) capable of responding quickly to new needs that emerge among learners with an increasingly high level of requirement and personalization while respecting personal data. This triptych invites training companies, especially those investing in the field of e-Learning, to go back to basics, in other words, to get closer to their learners in order to better address them. Everything is going faster and further, and learners in a hurry expect balanced, fluid, direct, fast, simple and effective relationships. Digital solutions - including those using artificial intelligence technologies - represent a formidable lever. With them, we can imagine differentiated proposals that focus on the relevance of courses and on the quality of exchanges with learners to offer real learning experiences.