#ectel2019 #mlearn2019 keynote @GeoffStead on #informal learning at scale #languages #AI

Geoff Stead (@geoffstead ) takes the stage with a headset, a black shirt and walking like a fit Californian surfer (looking great).

As chief product person of the Babbel language corporation, he talks about informal learning at scale and will offer insights. 750 people all working on 1 app, fully funded by individuals willing to pay small amounts of money to learn languages. Mostly Euro-centric coming from the organic growth of the organisation.

5000 courses => 64000 lessons (unique language pairs), focus on communicative confidence, light-hearted, diverse topics. Well over 1 million subscribers (of which I am one - Spanish).

Digital = scale and reach
Team of 10 people can start the magic of the web.
How can we ensure Quality?
Learner centric, otherwise what is the value of the application?

Using a learner journey to unite efforts, to enable connections between learners. Conceptual flows of individuals that is used as the mantra to move the app forward.
See picture, where they also embed some spaced learning.
They work with patterns that are turned into fake persona's, which are designed and modeled (design thinking approach). Enabling developers and strategist to understand the different demographics. These personas are linked to learner journeys. Which enables to keep a focus on the learners.

Learning from the learners
What do they do? analytics, A/B tests, behavioral segmentation (showing what you did, signposting to what you did and worked...), interviews, intercept surveys, wishboard, market surveys, UX research (ask permission to video tape parts of the learner journey and ideas), customer service, market research. Not one is representative, but hoping that with enough different angles they are hoping to get closer to the actual learning in all it's complexity.

Dev at scale
20 different teams of people, a lot of independence, but only one product. So how likely it is that the releases are synchronizable as soon as they are launched by teams? Tripping over each other, contradictions, ...it quickly becomes chaos. So it is self-driven and autonomous, but potentially disastrous for the learners. Marketing and money was basis for scaling: stickers in planes and on poles in big cities, get people to pay a bit of money.

How do you trade off freedom versus working together
Teams organised around User Journey: Experience Groups (XGs) are clusters of teams across Product & Engineering, uniting tho enhance cross-functional collaboration around product ideas and speed up the development cycle: impressions, engagement, learning, learning media, platform and infrastructure (really interesting this!).

Product department 
Product is made up of many specialist teams. some teams are embedded within multi-function or engineering teams: didactics, product design, product management and QA, data engineering and analytics, quality and release management.

Towards "learning experience design"
Mixed multidisciplinary approach, but in larger companies most of the time they are not often set up as bridged teams in a multidisciplinary, cross-functionalness.

Babbel meetups in Berlin every 2 - 3 months, welcome to come and have a look.

LXD basics
digital learning is not content distribution, we are only a small slice of our learner's day, we never really know what is going on. Learning Experience Design, all about the multidisciplinary nature.

Learner engagement
It only works for them if they use it. What is the science of pulling learners back in?
Weekly active paying users: returners. One of the key drivers = 7 day return to learning (it is this that most of the dev teams use to validate short term impact of new features and refinements). If the people who try a new release, do they come back within 7 days to use this newly released option. This simplifies discussions on what is important.

Obsessive focus on interpreting events: Tableau, Amplitude (big fat data stream).
Mixing art and science to understand the engagement ladder (to help our learenrs focus - hooked (N Eyal) triggers motivation (Fogg), Nudge (Thaler, Flow state, spaced repetition, babbel qualitative and quantitative data....).

Gamification: treat with care, some very useful tools, often used for trivial impact.

AI to make Babbel more human
AI is a very broad umbrella term for a wide range of very specific disciplines. Babbel uses 'narrow AI' to focus on very specific problems/opportunities. NLP, CL, ASR...
Making interfaces more human (hybrid human-AI). Using NLP to give the automated feedback more human (eg "I understand what you meant").
Making guidance more useful: content recommendations, based on other, related topics and level. Still very much in beta. Optimising for speed, and identifying opportunities.

Rose Luckin's golden triangle is used.
Tutorbot corpus (Kate McCurdy, Dragan Gasevic...)

@oebconference workshop notes and documents #instructionalDesign #learningTools

After being physically out of the learning circuit for about a year and a half, it is really nice to get active again. And what better venue to rekindle professional interests than at Online Educa Berlin.

Yesterday I lead a workshop on using an ID instrument I call the Instructional Design Variation matrix (IDVmatrix). It is an instrument to reflect on the learning architecture (including tools and approaches) that you are currently using, to see whether these tools enable you to build a more contextualized or standardized type of learning (the list organises learning tools according to 5 parameters: informal - formal, simple - complex, free - expensive, standardized to contextualized, and more aimed at individual learning - social learning). The documents of the workshop can be seen here.

The workshop started of with an activity called 'winning a workshop survival bag', where the attendees could win a bag with cookies, nuts, and of course the template and lists of the IDVmatrix.
We then proceeded to give a bit of background on the activity, and how it related to the IDVmatrix.
Afterwards focusing on learning cases, and particularly challenges that the participants of the workshop were facing.
And we ended up trying to find solutions for these cases, sharing information, connections, ideas (have a look at this engaging crowd - movie recorded during the session).
The workshop was using elements from location-based learning, networking, mobile learning, machine learning, just-in-time learning, social learning, social media, multimedia, note taking, and a bit of gamification.

It was a wonderful crowd, so everyone went away with ideas. The networking part went very well also due to the icebreaker activity at the beginning. This was the icebreaker:

The WorkShop survival bag challenge!
Four actions, 1 bag for each team!

Action 1
Which person of your group has the longest first name?
Write down that name in the first box below.

Action 2

• Choose two person prior to this challenge: a person who will record a short (approx. 6 seconds)
• video with their phone and tweet it, and a person/s who will talk in that video.
• Record a 6 second video which includes a booth at the OEB exhibition (shown in the
• background) and during which a person gives a short reason why this particular learning solution
• (the one represented by the booth) would be of use to that persons learning environment
• (either personal or professional).
• Once you have recorded the video, share it on twitter using the following hashtags: #OEB #M5
• #teamX (with X being the number of your team, e.g. #team1) . This share is necessary to get the
• next word of your WS survival bag challenge.
• Once you upload the movie, you will get a response tweet on #OEB #M5 #teamX (again with the
• number of your team).

Write down the word you received in response to your video in the second box below.

Action 3

• Go to the room which is shown in the 360° picture in twitter (see #M5 #OEBAllTeams).
• Find the spot where 5 pages are lined up, each of them with another language sign written on
• them.
• Each team has to ‘translate’ the sign assigned to their team. You can use the Google Translateapp for this (see google play, the app is free!).

Write down the translation in the third box below.

Action 4
Say the following words into the Google Home device which is located in the WS room

“OK Google 'say word box 1', say word box 2, say word box 3“

If Google answers, you will get your WS survival bag!

And although the names were not always very English, with a bit of tweaking using the IFTTT app, all the teams were able to get Google home mini to congratulate them for getting all the challenges right.