What It Is and How We Got Here
“Learning Experience Platforms” (LXP) have been defined as a new product category in competition with the LMS industry. So, what exactly is LXP? Is this some kind of secretive new LMS? Does it replace LMS? Can it be used in conjunction with an LMS? Let’s take a look at this and other mysteries surrounding the LXP.
Even though the first LXP stuff was released about ten years ago, popular interest in it only started four or five years earlier. Unlike the established LMS marketplace, which has hundreds of items, the LXP marketplace has only a few dozen vendors. With a few exceptions, most of the leading LXP products are not provided by LMS vendors. The LXP room, like many other relatively younger learning tools, can prove confusing at times. As the fog surrounding the LXP dissipates, its presence in the learning technology area expands.
The Difference Between LMS And LXP
A learning management system (LMS) is primarily a tool for training institutions that must manage the delivery of formal learning courses and programs. Administrators can use it to schedule and manage learning events, deliver learning materials, upload and track eLearning curricula, and manage compliance training. Usually, LXP doesn’t do any of this. Instead, LXP functions as a personalized learning platform. LXP identifies, indexes, and tags learning opportunities and content from multiple source systems. LXP knows each user and finds material that fits their job role, skills and hobbies.
Instead of the usual top-down employee training strategy of LMS, LXP enables a bottom-up approach that empowers employees to manage their learning and professional progress. Both techniques are important. Organizations can use the LMS to ensure that staff have received regulatory compliance and other required training. LXP assists employees in finding information to assist them with their current assignments as well as in planning and developing their long-term career capabilities.
Four Major Trends Driving the Need for LXP
- A More Comprehensive View of Learning
Casual, micro, social, participatory, interactive and customizable learning is becoming more prevalent. While LMSs excel at managing courses and classes, they fall short at managing knowledge resources, eBooks, performance support options, expert blogs, educational games, social networks, Augmented Reality work tools, Virtual Reality simulations, and other similar resources. Organizations want better methods for matching suitable individuals with opportunities and relevant content.
- Transition to Independent Learning
For many years, businesses and their training divisions were seen as bearing primary responsibility for workplace learning. Many employers now expect employees to take responsibility for their learning and professional growth. This transitions from descriptive to self-directed training education require a different support paradigm, which is suitable for LXP.
- Greater Emphasis on User Experience
Students are often annoyed by their LMS’s confusing instructions, unnecessary clicks, extensive course catalogs, inadequate search features, and generally unappealing design. LXP uses many of the same strategies as successful retail sites that self-regulate our browsing and purchasing interests to provide better and faster opportunities to link us with good content.
- Machine Learning Advances
Machine learning enhances a wide variety of software applications. Previously, recommendation engines needed Big Data; however, they can now predict user intent with a smaller data set and greater accuracy. Improved search results and more relevant recommendations provide considerable benefits to users who may have limited time to hunt, select and sift through all the noise.
What Does LXP Do?
The properties of the LXP identifier are sometimes difficult to understand. Several gamified, social, and video-based LMS providers have referred to their product as LXP, although they are more of an LMS than LXP. LXP products have evolved in recent years to the extent that a standard set of core functionality has developed. This basic ability helps in category definition. It’s important to understand that LXP products are different from one another, with each having its own set of features. A structured approach to LXP evaluation and selection is recommended to ensure that you identify the product that best suits your company’s demands. Among the qualities that set the LXP apart are:
LXP serves as a gateway to informal and formal content stored in other systems. Many LXP programs lack content, in contrast to LMS, which does eLearning courseware and other course resources. Instead, they index and link to information in your company’s LMS, knowledge base, digital bookshelves, document management systems, specialist blogs, social networking sites, official content, and other sources.
LXP’s ability to apply the client organization’s metadata schema to classify content uniformly across all of its content repositories is a critical component. Robust taxonomies and a careful approach to categorizing content serve to ensure the usability and utility of LXP for end users.
- User Experience Predictions
Predictive logic is used in most LXP products to assess which content is likely to be significant to an individual. User profile information (such as job role, sector, and workplace), search and article usage history, self-assessed ability gaps, selected topics of interest, and similarities with other users can all be predictors. This predictor is used by LXP to narrow search results and offer suggestions. When you use LXP, content that is highly relevant to your unique work context, skill level and professional learning goals will surface.
LXP includes several features that allow users to manage their learning goals and activities. Users can explore their abilities and areas to progress through skill-based self-assessment. Users can define their area of interest using the topic checklist. Users can create and monitor their learning plans.
Conclusion
LXP opens up new opportunities for businesses that have multiple sourcing systems with formal and informal materials to enhance performance, learning, and growth. It allows them to tag all of that content using a standard metadata structure. This offers consumers a job- and skills-centric view into content, as well as personalized recommendations and improved search results. It provides users with the tools to identify, plan and track their professional progress.
LXP has evolved into another important element in the enterprise learning technology application stack. It is not a replacement for LMS. Rather, it serves as a doorway for users to access personally relevant content in an organization’s LMS as well as media resources, documentation, and other social exchanges.