What is a Learning Experience Platform (LXP) - The Guide 2023

A learning experience platform (LXP) is a digital tool that helps companies improve their employee training and development efforts. But what is an LXP, exactly? Its software allows employees to engage in relevant, helpful, and impactful training through gamification and other instructional methods.

An LXP can build and manage courses, provide e-learning content access, and track employee participation metrics. All while enabling continuous feedback loops between learners, managers, instructors, and others.

What is a Learning Experience Platform?

With the industry already marking over $300 million, LXPs have surely taken to revolutionize the world of online learning. Learning experience platform is an exclusive course-creation/hosting platform that corporations and organizations use for on-the-job learning.

In today's time, when work has moved online, it was only a matter of time before a remote solution was found for employee training and onboarding. The concept has made it ever so easy for companies now to keep their employees connected and up-to-date on the latest trends.

While the LXPs are quite diverse but one can funnel them down into three broad categories. Namely:

• Personalized content-centric,
• Social and collaborative learning-centric,
• Hybrid learning centric.

While most of the LXPs currently fall under the first category which focuses on individualized learning. Teachfloor is one such LXP that is defying this trend by emphasizing collaborative learning via cohort-based courses.

Why opt for Learning Experience Platform?

Surely other platforms serve the same purpose as an LXP, for instance, LMS, then what's so special about these platforms? This is a common question. An LMS (learning management system) is a platform that serves course creation more broadly. Whereas, LXPs are specifically designed for employee training. These platforms are topped with all the features that a corporation or employer might require.

To talk about what makes LXPs so special for the purpose they serve, below are some points that will certainly convince you about why they are a must-have.

Efficiency

While running a business or an organization, one has hardly the time to spend on keeping an eye on educating the employees like in a school. This requires far too much time, resources, and dedication. Which can mean compromising on your work - an absolute no-no! This is where LXPs come to save employers from extra hassle. One can easily organize individual courses to extensive training bootcamps, and stay on top of things.

Digital trends

The latest trends tell that more and more learners now opt for Youtube, social platforms, podcasts, etc to learn new concepts. Few people now feel satisfaction from on-the-shelf content. They look for diverse learning ways that help them grasp concepts in new and fun ways. This is why it is also important for learning platforms to evolve and adapt according to the changing needs. LXPs enable learners to make use of all such diverse forms of learning tools under one roof.

Moreover, when it comes to content creation, LXPs follow both top-down and bottom-up approaches. Trends show that learners also wish to contribute to the learning experience by creating the content. With the help of LXPs, it can be done seamlessly as they provide a proper channel for collaboration. This gives an added advantage; besides being training-centric, the courses also tend to individual queries that learners may face.

Integration with corporations' ecosystems

It is not enough to find a good platform to train employees, what is perhaps of greater importance is compatibility with the already present company work mechanisms. Therefore, it is crucial to find tools that are easy to integrate with corporations' ecosystems. Besides saving compliance hassle, it will also reduce extra costs.

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LXP v/s LMS: What's the difference?

So far, we have only briefly discussed what LMS and LXPs are. However, that is not sufficient to understand the nuances between the two kinds of platforms. The differences can be fairly small and specific at times. This is why you can find some LMS also acting as an LXP with brief modifications. Hence, we can say that LXP is an extension of LMS.

Below are some features that can help you tell an LXp apart from an LMS.

• An LMS follows a particular pattern by which a specific team of creators or admins run the course and learners simply feed off the content. That is to say; it follows a top-down content delivery approach. Whereas, with LXPs, anyone can share the content, making the content diverse and specialized at the same time.

• With an LMS, learning is divided into lectures and quizzes. Whereas LXPs follow a 70:20:10 model. As 70% of the learning is expected from on-work experience, LXPs ensure that there is proper facilitation of collaborative learning via live group sessions, group projects, etc. Moreover, personalized assessments help learners evaluate their performance more thoroughly.

• LMS are designed with company complaints in mind and focuses on dispensing content. Besides being compliant, LXPs also focus on measuring how well the learners are grasping the content. Consequently, LXPs help organizations to grow and perform better because their employees are trained better.

What Should You Look for in an LXP?

When looking for an LXP, there are a few things to consider.

Flexibility

Flexibility is essential because it allows you to grow.

You want your learning experience platform to be flexible so that you can adapt it to change with the needs of your learners.

The best way for an LXP to do this is by accommodating different types of learners and organizations, not just one type or another. Learning should be enjoyable, but it's also about creating new knowledge and skills for employees if certain types of employees would benefit from more flexibility in their online training options (e.g., international students).

Then the tool should offer them those options without forcing everyone else into rigid templates or definitions of what "employee" means based on whether they work full-time or part-time. If they have kids at home waiting for dinner while they learn, or if they want maximum flexibility in how they study at any given time—that flexibility could mean taking advantage of self-paced videos.

Whenever possible, instead of having mandatory attendance times every week/month/quarterly/year depending on how often someone learns best by interacting with others face-to-face!

Scalability

Scalability is one of the most important aspects of a business. However, it can be more complex when you need to grow than adding resources. An LXP can help with scalability by providing a system that allows your team to grow while remaining on the same page.

A great example of this is Amazon Web Services (AWS), which has grown from an internal IT department into a multi-billion dollar company without adding any new staff or resources outside their existing teams.

This scalability was due to AWS' use of their proprietary technology: Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). By utilizing EC2, AWS was able to create a scalable platform through which they could operate at a large scale without needing additional employees or hardware upgrades; instead, they were able to focus on expanding the functionality and usefulness of EC2 itself.

Customization

• Customization: the ability to customize the platform to your needs.
• Add and remove features: change the look and feel of the platform, change navigation and behavior, redirect to other sites from this platform, integrate with other systems, or scale up or down for use by more or fewer people.
• Add/remove users: add new users (employees) or remove existing employees from your team if they leave.

Integration With Other Systems

Integration with other systems is a core feature of the Learning Experience Platform. It provides you with access to data from other systems that can be relevant to your training needs, such as:

• Learning management systems
• HR systems
• Project management and performance tracking tools

Security And Privacy

Security and privacy are top priorities for any LXP. You must be able to protect sensitive data, encrypt it, and protect against cyberattacks. Your platform must also have a strong security policy that explains how you will keep your users' information safe.

Ease Of Use

Ease of use is a key feature that everyone will appreciate. It's important for learners because they want things to be straightforward to use so they can focus on learning. It's also essential for the organization because they want to save time and money training people on how their LXP works. And it's significant for us as a provider because we want our clients to feel confident in our products, which means making them as simple as possible!

Support For Multiple Learning Styles

Learning styles are the kind of learning that's best suited to you. For example, some people learn best by seeing, some by hearing, and others by doing.

For example, if you have a kinesthetic style (learning through movement), an online course might be a good fit for you because you can interact with it physically and move around as needed.

The most common types of learning styles are visual (how the user visually perceives the world), auditory (how they hear things), and kinesthetic (how they feel). Learning experience platforms should support multiple learning styles so users can get the most out of their time in class or on their own time at home.

What Are the Main Features of an LXP?

The first step is assessing and analyzing the needs of the business and its aims. Here you will have to sort out the reasons why you wish to opt for an LXP i.e. what sort of training you intend to provide, what the content will constitute, etc. Consequently, these pointers will determine which model of LXP you require for your business.

Determine whether you want to opt for hybrid, independent on-demand learning, or social learning for your program. Once you have that down, pin down potential LXPs that fit the model. For instance, Teachfloor provides a wide range of features that make it suitable for the social learning model.

Keep your learners in mind

Since LXPs are concerned with the learning performance of learners as well, you must keep them in mind when choosing your LXP. For instance, if you are designing one-time training programs then an ordinary LMS will do the job. But if you want tailor-made programs that target specific groups of learners, then LXP is what you need.

Moreover, you will have to be mindful of learners' tech skills. There is no use investing in a complex platform if your employees don't have the basic know-how of it. On the other hand, for more experienced and tech-savvy employees, it is better to use LXP which feels up to the mark. Teachfloor is a user-friendly platform that users can modify according to their needs. Admins have the freedom to add specialized tools to their cohort programs if they wish to.

What does your LXP offer?

With the industry flourishing, there are a lot of options now for people to choose from. It is advisable that one takes a look around and weigh in their options.

Here is what you will get if you choose Teachfloor as your LXP solution.

Collaborative learning tools

Teachfloor is designed to host cohort sessions. Since cohorts are big on social interaction, Teachfloor comes with built-in tools like the Discussion wall and Peer Review. The discussion wall is much like Facebook and is similar to the use. Here people can exchange their general views, ask questions, or simply socialize. With Peer Review, people can give feedback on each other's assignments. So besides individualized training, learners can also have a diverse understanding.

Zoom integration

What is an LXP without a proper video conferencing tool? Teachfloor comes with Zoom integration. This means you don't have to spend extra money on hosting your online live sessions.

Manage and run an academy

The issue with other LXPs is that they don't provide an umbrella space under which you can run several courses like an academy. With Teachfloor, you can host multiple courses at the same time under one branding along with several instructors. Such a feature is perfect for corporations as they require one such space where they can target several training programs together. It makes it easier to manage the training and allows to run of specialized programs for different groups at once.

Conclusion

Learning Experience Platforms are becoming increasingly popular by the day. More companies are ditching in-person training for this efficient and cost-effective method of training their employees. So if you haven't tried it out yet, why not give it try? Now you know what to look for in an LXP to suit your business needs.

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