The 2022 platform updates that matter most

27 February, 2023| Sunanda Jayanth| 5 min read

Looking back, the most important thread that stands out is, as a team, we’ve grown by leaps and bounds over the past year, and we couldn’t be prouder of what we have accomplished. However, we want to shift the spotlight to showcase what this means to our customers and users.

So, we’ve distilled the biggest updates to our platform in 2022 and sorted them into what larger goals they help accomplish for you. Here goes!

We begin with the learner experience in mind…

Most of the updates that learners see are about ensuring that the experience is intuitive. Besides that, it is important to keep them motivated and engaged to complete their learning within the platform.

But that’s not the whole story. We started the year by taking it one step further: providing learners with more control over their growth trajectory. In the following section, we’ll delve a little deeper into how we allow them to do that.

Keep learners engaged and motivated

Ultimately, the goal of digitising your training offering and hosting it on a platform is to reach a wider audience and help your learners really learn. But what does that mean? We call it ‘learning impact’, but it starts with communicating well with your learners. Keeping them engaged and motivated will help them commit to the training programme.

In line with this, just before the second quarter, we made notifications for learners more streamlined and intuitive:

  • On the aNewSpring app, learners can choose which general and social notifications they want to receive. All they have to do is adjust the settings to receive a push notification at their convenience!

  • Learners receive emails and notifications about new events. To avoid cluttering, a single notification will be sent out if multiple activities are added in a content block.

  • You can notify learners of a course that has become accessible so they can begin as soon as they want.

Visualise a growth trajectory for your learners

Imagine having to find your way around a dark room without the help of your flashlight. Quite difficult, right? You would keep bumping into objects and won’t be able to do your tasks normally.

That’s exactly how your learners would feel without a well-defined learning path that leads them towards their goals. With the profiles and competencies feature, learners can gain insight into their own progress. By tying certificate activities to competencies, you can provide them with an overview. With this, they can keep track of their progress and find available learning journeys before they forge ahead to achieve those competencies.

…and we come full circle, building improvements for the learner in the backend!

So far, we focused on changes with the learner in mind, improving their overall experience with the aNewSpring platform. The updates to our backend are no different. While they make life easy for the learning design team and the day-to-day users of the platform, they’re laser-focused on the impact of your learning program.

Continuously improve your training offering

All improvement begins with feedback. So, we had a busy third quarter trying to facilitate this. The result? Learning designers and training developers are now able to place knowledge and evaluation questions within a lesson activity. Essentially, this gives learners a chance to describe what they’re experiencing in their own voice! In this way, you can tap into the pulse of learners, without having to worry about scoring. In addition, you can evaluate and measure their experience within the context of a lesson, without having to create an extra evaluation activity.

At aNewSpring, we believe that there is always room for improvement. However, we realised that we didn’t give you the room to do so with assessments or hand-in assignments once they were published.

Trainers prefer to tweak their ongoing activities, often due to legislative changes, feedback from learners or to renew and refresh the content. So now, designers can add or hide questions in an assessment. They can make adjustments to an assessment after it is published without having to create a new one.

Another distinguishing feature that allows for improvements in training is the new moderator role. This makes it easier for you, as a training provider, to calibrate the assessments of your instructors and offer feedback. It helps ensure that the training adheres to the highest standards and there’s no bias.

Automate course delivery

We track the time spent by learners on a learning journey, which is also displayed on the certificate. In addition, the session time is also tracked and reported—this indicates the time a learner is “inactive” before the session expires and they need to login into the system again.

In conjunction with the above feature, we’ve also added a new condition for blocks and activities, which makes them available only after the learner has spent a certain amount of time on that course.

Conditions can also be applied to bundles, which means they unlock content or sections by progressing through the bundle. Towards the end, they can also earn a ‘bundle certificate’ by completing a course that’s unlocked once everything is finished.

Improving with other tools

  • Accessibility with text-to-speech

The ReadSpeaker WebReader offers a way to make content more accessible for all kinds of users. With the click of a button, they can listen to the entire text on the page.

  • Turn text into a real-life talking avatar

We’ve added an integration with Synthesia.io, which is an innovative tool that converts text into real-to-life talking avatars. It’s an easy way to create more engaging and visual content.

  • Interoperability

Microsoft Learn is a huge resource for learning paths and modules. If you have an account, you can add it to your training offering on aNewSpring. This is made possible with LTI (Learning Tools Interoperability).

Devil in the details Wants to become a fixer-upper

Sunanda Jayanth

Explorer of details. Lifelong chai connoisseur. Apocalypse prepper.

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