Emerging Technology Implementation Plan

EMERGENT TECHNOLOGY IMPLEMENTATION PLAN: NGDLE

Emergent Technology Implementation Plan The Future of Learning Experience: NGDLE Michelle King EDT 511: Emerging Trends Learning Design Arizona State University Professor Stacey Pasquel December 4, 2020

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EMERGENT TECHNOLOGY IN LEARNING DESIGN: NGDLE

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Emergent Technology Implementation Plan The Future of Learning Experience: NGDLE

Detailed Description This is an implementation plan for a Next Generation Digital Learning Environment for organizational training and enablement for product support engineers. An NGDLE consists of five core dimensions: interoperability and integration; personalization; analytics, advising, and learning assessment; collaboration; accessibility and universal design” (Milman, 2016). The NGDLE is learner centered system which utilized headless authoring experience (HAX) open source code to rapidly author learning from multiple web platforms within a single learner environment. “HAX is a completely headless (architectural design decision which means it's not tied to any platform and makes all its calls from the website in as opposed to webserver out)” (Ollendyke, 2017).

Within organizations, the need to upskill, reskill and rapidly deploy training/enablement that is learner driven, provides ongoing assessments, personalization, social learning and a dynamic environment is critical need for the future of work. According to the World Economic Forum Future of Work report, 97 million new jobs of tomorrow will emerge by 2025 (Stefanova Ratcheva, 2020). As we look to the future of work within specific organizational divisions like product support, the need to evolve the current approach of event based LMS centered learning is self-evident. The speed of technological change has already surpassed the waterfall methods of instructional design using enterprise LMS delivery.

By implementing a NGDLE open source HAX methodology for product support engineers, we can drive student centric learning communities that empower learners to make

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important decisions about their learning experiences, how they will create and apply knowledge and how they will demonstrate their learning to assessment authoring and rendering systems that offer meaningful assessments to empower learning experience for students that ”yields timely relevant and actionable evidence” (Aurora Institute, 2019).

Figure 1: The NGDLE: Credit: University of Minnesota, Office of Information Technology.

Context or Setting Product support engineers are responsible to assess, troubleshoot, and solve customer technical issues to ensure the effective use of cloud-based products. Cloud-based products are significantly updated and enhanced four times per year with software releases including hundreds of changes to the existing products. This setting requires product support engineers to benefit most significantly from a NGDLE to achieve mastery in an environment of continual change. The targeted group of product support engineers is approximately 600 individuals working in offices globally serving a client base of more than 2,000 customers and millions of users. Learners would engage via a web portal with communication, learning, assessment and information resources combined into curriculums defined by learners. This dynamic environment would connect learners to web platforms like Slack, Zoom, YouTube, GitHub, internal services (Splunk, Open Grok), product documentation, intelligent search, wikis, and internal knowledge base tools. A recommendation engine will power differentiated support for learners based on their individual learning needs using meaningful analytics tracking the learners progress. Analytics driven by machine learning will assess learners on competency-based learning theory which “allows learners to progress as they demonstrate mastery of content,

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regardless of time, place or pace of learning” (U.S. Department of Education, 2020) creating personalized learning opportunities. By adhering to the 5R open course design framework, “retain, reuse, revise, remix and redistribute” (Lane & Goode, 2019) the NGDLE implementation will create an open education community where learning is owned by the learners.

Required Resources Resource requirements will necessitate changing the current learning environment and organizational learning structure. “Rather than expertise in a single LMS product, running an NGDLE requires a capable technology ‘conductor’, orchestrating dozens of technologies that work together” (Lane & Goode, 2019). Other resource requirements include learning experiences designers, code developers, technologists familiar with the open source architecture, administrators, content curators, data scientists, human resource advisors, legal and compliance advisors, data security advisors, and specialists in change management, design thinking, and project management. Due to the architecture code being open source the availability is free and open. Using existing enterprise LMS as administration, the bulk of availability concerns rests in the identification of and implementation of integrable web services and platforms. This area of integration will evolve significantly over the next 5-10 years which implies the need for resources focused on technology integration which opens additional integrable content through emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, predictive analytics, augmented or extended reality, and mobile learning. According to Lane and Goode (2019) in OERu’s Delivery Model for Changing Times: An Open Source NGDLE: A major advantage of NGDLE’s is the ability to replace existing components whenever we find a new functionality similar component that we think offers advantages for learner usability, application stability, maintainability, scalability and other criteria, allowing rapid evolution of the overall system (p. 5).

Costs will be significantly reduced as the open source code methodology does not require license fees. Associated costs include “commodity-hosting infrastructure costs, and staff time to set up and maintain” (Lane & Goode, 2019). This creates low fixed costs which remain stable regardless of the number of users. Self-hosting the NGDLE architecture will reduce costs as much as 92% annually (Lane & Goode, 2019). Hardware costs are not impacted as the technology utilizes web services and does not increase the need for additional servers.

Dependencies are minimal but as noted require technologists, code developers, data scientists and content curators. These roles exist within the organization which allows for reorganization and repurpose of aligned roles to ensure continuity. Significant dependencies are associated with change management of the learning system, data collection and application.

Goal Alignment The most significant challenge for employees working in product support is the ability to continually learn how to support customers product issues related to defects, administration, integration, and configuration in an environment where the product they are supporting is being modified and enhanced frequently. Each quarterly software release, hot fix, or patch to the software can have unintended effects on customers. Although customers are using a cloud-based product where they share the code base, each customer is configured to specifications that differ from other customers creating a challenge to effectively assist customers with their identified issues in a timely manner. The resources product support needs to learn and troubleshoot customer issues is not centrally located, curated, compiled or organized which leads to product

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support spending valuable time researching from multiple sources. The impact of this lack of organization and curation places a further burden on more senior product support experts to assist in solving customer issues. Product support will benefit directly from an NGDLE architecture in providing a single source entry point to content pulled into learning curriculums via xAPI’s providing a structure for troubleshooting protocols based on the specific customer issue. The impact of the NGDLE is significant in relation to productivity, customer satisfaction, service level agreements and net promoter scores. These metrics have a direct correlation to operating profit and subscription renewals.

Product support engineers have identified (via surveys and assessments) three areas where an NGDLE would provide opportunities to improve employee engagement and motivation: confidence in troubleshooting, configuration and knowledge. Estimates show that increasing confidence in these three areas for product support would result in an increase in operating profit of close to a million dollars annually. An NGDLE is the best approach to meeting the needs of the learning goals of the product support organization connected to their major business objectives (MBO’s). This implementation has three major connections to goal alignment: responsive to learner identified needs, personalized learning recommendations based on analytics, and sustainable methodology that can be adapted as the business and organization changes. While NGDLE’s have been implemented within academia, organizations are still primarily utilizing enterprise LMS systems for the bulk of their learner needs which makes NGDLE’s an emerging technology with immense potential to change learning at a systemic level.

Physical Implementation Using the internal open source web interface “launchpad”, a widget will be created as the portal to the NGDLE. Developers, technologists, content curators, project managers and learning experience designers will collaborate on the UX designers on the structure of the learner interface with the component model applications available on the internet which have been tested by millions of users (e.g. YouTube, Khan Academy, Wiki Educator) reducing testing to API integrations. Social learning aspects such forums and boards related specifically to product topics integrated with communication software such as Slack, connect experts and non-experts to dynamically developed content.

Training plans for pre-deployment include UX testing, user group and pilot group beta testing to measure effectiveness, ease of use, adaptability, integrations, and adoption rates.

Development includes behavior analytics noting how often users engage and remain engaged with specific content. Post deployment plans include analysis of data on user behavior, clicks, up votes, engagement (length of time), results of assessment and skill/competency improvement metrics. Adaptations and adjustments will directly reflect both user behavior and engagement.

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Figure 2: Mockup of learning curriculum for an NGDLE for product support sources include LinkedIn learning, W3schools, GitHub, wikis, assessments and pre/post self-assessment

Risk mitigation plans include defining success criteria, identifying all stakeholders, data privacy needs, security, process workflow, analytics generation and use, key goals, training for users, integration mapping, data integrity, content curation standards, scalability, monitoring, testing, and user acceptance. The project team will include each area as part of the risk mitigation plan noting that the current learning systems remain intact and available up to six months after full deployment to ensure continuity.

Implementation Assessment The project team, in conjunction with key stakeholders, will establish the expectations, project champions and detractors and establish the workflow for the project. Key milestones will be identified for each phase including user acceptance testing (UAT). The project plan will serve as a key indicator of success. At each phase the measure of success will be determined through UAT, key stakeholder feedback and operational stability. User adoption, user behavior, and user feedback (assessments, surveys) will provide analysis of the success of the implantation.

Measurements of learner engagement with the NGDLE components, personalized learning engagement, recommending learning accuracy, competency assessment incremental increases and user feedback is a direct correlation to the successful adoption of the technology. Key indicators: adoption of familiar/existing features, adoption/engagement of new features, and routine usage versus new usage for new users and existing users are success indicators for the project (Sharon, 2020).

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Resources Aurora Institute. (2019, November 14). A New Definition of Competency-Based Education for K-12 Education Transformation. Retrieved December 01, 2020, from https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/a-new-definition-of-competency-basededucation-for-k-12-education-transformation-300958183.html Lane, D. C., & Goode, C. (2019, November). OERu's Delivery Model for Changing Times: An Open Source NGDLE. Retrieved 2020, from https://oeru.org/assets/Marcoms/OERuNGDLE-paper-FINAL-PDF-version.pdf Milman, N. B. (2016). Instructor Roles in Next Generation Digital Learning Environments (Links to an external site.). Distance Learning (Greenwich, Conn.), 13(4), 67-69.

Ollendyke, B. (2017). ELMS : Learning Network. Retrieved December 01, 2020, from https://www.elmsln.org/blog/post/introducing-hax-next-generation-content-authoring Sharon, T. (2020, May 25). Measuring user adoption. Retrieved December 01, 2020, from https://medium.com/@tsharon/measuring-user-adoption-b367eb32d619 Stefanova Ratcheva, V. (2020). Future of work: 5 things to know about the future of jobs.

Retrieved December 01, 2020, from https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/10/5-thing-toknow-about-the-future-of-jobs/ U.S. Department of Education. (2020). Competency-Based Learning or Personalized Learning.

Retrieved December 01, 2020, from https://www.ed.gov/oii-news/competency-basedlearning-or-personalized-learning