Degreed Update - DLM Beta and More!
• John Vandivier
This article updates readers on recent developments for <a href="http://degreed.com/">Degreed, including the ongoing <a href="http://degreed.com/learning-management">DLM Beta.
Degreed is a learning management platform which I have written on many times in the past. Basic Degreed is free and very useful. Go use it. They are also coming out with sweet new stuff for group learning, apparently initially targeted toward corporate use.
I will briefly outline my understanding of their current value proposition for the new product. I will also mention a little of the feedback I've given them so far. If you would like to participate in the DLM Beta please let me know. I will try to get you into my little test learning group.
Value proposition:
- Track all types of learning, both formal and informal, by everyone in the organization. Get awesome analytics.
- Before you invest in buying or developing training materials, Degreed helps you find free training materials. We have 150,000+ courses and 1m+ articles, videos, and books mapped to key business and technical skills.
- Instead of choosing to buy a subscription for your whole company from one provider, set up a FlexEd Spending Account on Degreed which lets your employees pay for the content most beneficial to them from any provider.
- Set personal or team goals to drive performance towards developing key skills and track progress.
- Goals - Set goals based on specific things you want to learn, or points you want to earn, for yourself or for a team
- Achievements - Earn badges! In the near future, create your own custom achievements.
- Analytics - See progress over time...With leaderboards!
- Learning Queue - Save things to learn later, and suggest or assign things to learn to your team.
- In a personal capacity, I am most excited about the idea of social learning and trackable continuing education without the need for a formal institution.
- In a professional capacity, I am most interested in two aspects: Being able clarify the intellectual assets of an organization through the knowledge management analytics and, secondly, being able to create courses.
- DLM seems heavily geared toward the corporate world. Any plans to accommodate hobby learners, MOOCs, home schools or others either by modifying the product or through later products?
- Are the following features implemented or planned?
- Advanced material detection: Detect all video, not just YouTube. Detect podcasts and information present in images such as infograms. More related commentary as per my old article here.
- Learning validation. Degreed allocates points, for example, for reading a book; yet, two people may read the same book and understand the contained material at very different levels of precision. One possible solution: User-generated tests. Whether top-down from a project manager, or through peer grading. Even allowing organizations to make their tests available outside of the organization. Perhaps for a fee. Perhaps allowing professional, independent graders, course designers and/or test makers. More in my old article here.
- Retainment tracking or modelling. Degreed values a book read a year ago as = a book read today point wise, yet my current knowledge base is characterized by a far superior memory of recent readings. Retainment could be generically modeled over time and other factors, or they could be precisely measured through periodic review exams comprised of random selections of questions from past exams. My old article elaborates, here.
- Some sort of an ability to white label. I'm wondering how this could be leveraged by third party corporate trainers or training consultants external to an organization. Unfortunately, many corporations have weak internal training regimes and instead rely on third party training and certification.
- Self-generating reports for the analytics which will be provided, with an focus on nice graphics. Sprout Social's reports are a great example of what I mean. Bosses and clients love graphics.