An award-winning approach to blended learning feat. Nick Eriksen and Gordon Johnson
Welcome to Your Brain On by Salience Learning. I'm Karen Foster. And I'm Christa Gerhard. In this series of Your Brain On, Iris Hill, Vice President at Salience Learning, takes a behind the scenes peek of the recently earned Brandon Hall Gold Award for Best Use of Blended Learning. This award acknowledges the great partnership efforts of connecting Salience Learning's role specific evidence based learning design with Eurecos' technology advancements to create an award winning process for impactful learning.
Speaker 1:This is part one of our series. I'd like to welcome Amy Parent from Salience Learning as well as our guests from Eureka's joining us today on Your Brain On. My name is Ira Sale, Vice President of Salience Learning. And today we're going to talk about the Brandon Hall Award as Salience Learning and Eurecos has both earned that prestigious award. So with that, I'm going to ask Amy to introduce herself to the new listeners.
Speaker 1:And then I'm gonna ask you to introduce our guests.
Speaker 2:Hi, I'm Amy Parent. I am the director of learning ecosystems here at Salience Learning. I have a background over fifteen years in instructional design and educational technology across the industry from K-twelve through corporate and individual businesses. I've been lucky and gracious enough to have had the opportunity to discover, but then also work with Nick Erickson, who is the chief technology officer at Eurecos, and then also Gordon Johnson, the strategic head of marketing.
Speaker 3:Nice to see you guys.
Speaker 1:Would you like to tell us a little bit about yourself so our listeners get a better view of your background?
Speaker 4:Yes, I'm Nick and I have been working with innovating the educational space for the past, I think twelve years as the CTO with Eureka's, working with innovating the whole educational space from a technology perspective, trying to get all those changes that have been happening through those years and drive those changes in the technology and making this happen with all the teachers and instructors and instructional designers that we have been working with, the companies. And we've also changed strategy during those years as we have moved into the extended enterprise space coming maybe from a slightly different angle, but constantly being more and more focused in actually developing the building blocks that enable everything when you put them together in the right way. And that has been the most exciting challenge of all of this during the past twelve years.
Speaker 1:So, Nik, I'm going to circle back on that comment about the building blocks. But before we do so, I'm gonna just ask Gordon to introduce himself.
Speaker 3:Yeah, sure. So Gordon Johnson, and I've been in this industry probably almost as long as Nick has. Give you an idea of that, I think when Nick and I started, elearning was not a thing at the time. So it's been a while. And, I've worked for many training companies, learning technology companies, and things like that.
Speaker 3:I'm excited, to talk today about blended learning and this great use case that we've been talking about for a while and to share this with everybody.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I know you've been instrumental in working with Amy Parent here at salience learning. And that granted us the ability to earn the Brandon Hall Gold Award. And I know that was for the blended learning program. So Amy, maybe you could just tell us about what that blended learning program was and still is at Salience. And then I'm going to circle back and see how those building blocks might have been used that Nick was sharing in the development of this program.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so at Salience Learning, we had the vision and we saw the need to develop a program, if you will, that would help address a really broad set of skills that are fundamental to the work of individuals in the pharmaceutical and the life science industry. And we saw the strategy of blended learning being the one that would help lead to the performance changes and the degree of performance expectations that were there from the program. So those programs are capability academies. They deliver capability academy development in strategic thinking, critical thinking, and generating insights. And these are all really trending and very important foundational credibility to those who work across the life sciences and pharmaceutical industries, no matter what your role is in that organization.
Speaker 2:It was a strategy that needed to use both self directed computer based kind of learning moments and activities and experience, but also blend and combine that with instructor led experiences. So the Capability Academies needed to work with a partner that would be able to support that larger strategy from both a sound delivery mechanism and opportunity from a computer perspective, but then also support what was also happening from the instructor led side of that program.
Speaker 1:So your relationship in partnering on this came about, I think it was over a year or so ago. So tell me a little bit of how the partnership happened and maybe Nick and Gordon, you can jump in as well to kind of share how that relationship started.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think there's my perspective on the partnership. And I think Nick and Gordon, you have your perspective too. So we had a very, very strong point of view and a vision for what great learning and impactful learning was in a blended strategy. And that also included in the delivery on a digital side of it, right? A computer based side of it.
Speaker 2:And so when we looked at who was out there in the market, who could pull in what we know works in learning from a social learning perspective, from an opportunity to measure and collect evidence of impact perspective, to be able to support a strategy that includes both passive and active learning in a digital format. Really, it was very, very limited. And I was really excited to have discovered Eurecos and partner with them from different perspectives, both from a mechanism and real logistical perspective that I just described. But then as I got to know Nick and the company, we ended up from my point of view, having a lot in common in terms of what we were trying to do to innovate the space and show people what was really possible when it comes to impactful learning in this way.
Speaker 1:So Nick and Gordon, what would you add to that?
Speaker 4:Well, I can go first. So yes, I completely agree with Amy on the vision and the perspectives. I mean, we have been working with blended learning for quite a while for various different organizations, for both didactical and pedagogical perspectives, and coming from a very wide range of industries. Blended learning is also about processes. So it's about supporting not just the content that you're delivering, but the all kinds of quirky ways of managing pathways through something for specific people in a very personalized fashion, and being able to actually execute this from a technology perspective.
Speaker 4:That means that you need to understand the didactical and the pedagogical approach to this before you can actually develop the technology that can support this kind of behavior. And this is what we have been thinking about for years. And, you know, it developed as an evolutionary thing, really, you know, because it's not something you come from day one to day two, and then you're an expert on this. This is something that you need to explore and improve over time. So this is part of the modular approach that we have.
Speaker 4:But the other thing that Amy said is the evidence based part. This is something that is unique. When you deliver a program such as this, then you will have your goals and your KPIs. And this is directly connected to the content that you're creating. And that means it's not a standard you just pull out of the head.
Speaker 4:And then you say, hey, this is the result. You know, this is good. This is when the impactful learning has happened. They actually, you know, change their behavior after this. That is not something that comes up automatically.
Speaker 4:And that means that Amy also has to design those outcomes, the measurements and the KPIs from the very beginning as part of the program, so that you can measure that outcome at the end. And that's not a small feat.
Speaker 3:I think one important thing to add here is that the concept of blended learning is not a new thing. It's been around for a long time. And but I think the challenge has always been getting the technology to catch up with those concepts that instructional designers are trying to put together, you know, they have a perfect learning design. But there's no technology that can actually deliver it or, or even a bigger problem is the technology delivers it in kind of a clunky way. Because I think all of us have taken a class or whatever, where, you know, it's like a video class.
Speaker 3:And then at the end of the video, it says, go to the forum and write five things to share with somebody else in that forum, you know, it's kind of forced in a way. So it's actually the design of the class to make it all cohesive as a whole is important and also having learning technology to be able to accommodate all those grand ideas that instructional designers have.
Speaker 5:Thank you for listening to this episode of Your Brain On. Please subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Krista Gerhardt. And I'm Karen Foster. And we'll see you next time.