Vinay Nilakantan of Meridian Global presented the latest trends in learning as part of the BLI Learning Leader Symposium conducted with the MACPA Innovation Summit on June 27, 2012.

1. THE NEXUS OF MOBILE AND SOCIAL TECHNOLOGY
IN TRAINING
Presented by Vinay Nilakantan – Director of Product
Development and Research, Meridian Knowledge
Solutions, LLC

2. The Impact of Mobile
• By 2015, 80% of people accessing the Internet will be doing so from mobile
devices.
• Perhaps more important for training, Internet capable mobile devices will
outnumber computers within the next year
• The ability for this shift in access to take place is driven by three main
factors:
• Increased number of mobile devices
• Dynamic web content
• Increased network infrastructure to support high bandwidth content
* Statistics provided by The Horizon Report – 2011 Edition

3. Mobile Usage

4. Social Footprint
• The Facebook generation
• Everything to go, please
• The power of the “crowd”
• Everyone is invited
• Stay on your toes (Spotify vs. MOG)
• Recognize the power of this
• The new outreach for companies
• And here comes big data…

5. The Mobile Connect
• Mobile powerhouses
• iPads for everyone
• Networking between all devices
• 2G. 3G. 4G. 4G LTE.
• The mobile device replaces the
wallet
• Heavy social usage through the
mobile device
• Voice!

6. The intersection of training
• Byte sized learning or “crumb” learning is optimized through a social
experience.
• Creating “channels” where users can subscribe to subject matter
experts
• Peer networking through Learning Management Systems or Portals
• Corporate training announcements through mobile and social
• On the job checklists for real time evaluations
• Disconnected Learning – Creating more training opportunities
• Peer scoring and recognition through Performance Management
support

7. Mobile, Social, Global – Some examples
• You get assigned for some Required Training / compliance training and a
message will show up in your iPhone notification bar that you have one
training item to complete.
• If a forum post that you started gets a response, you get notified of that and
also allows you to update that forum post through a twitter like (128 word
capacity) message. And then keep getting updates to that.
• Get real time stats on a mini dashboard on your mobile device that indicates
what courses are the most popular through a ranking system.
• If you access a course, through a single click, broadcast that to either
Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn to share with your social network the event of
you taking that course.
• Perform a search on the organization’s wiki / knowledge base to find quick
answers to questions.
• Rate courses and content to influence others who might be interested in that
same content.

8. Changes!

9. Here are some examples…
Courtesy KPCD – Internet
Trends, D10

10. CPA2Biz – The Learning Management Solution

11. CPA2Biz - Meridian

12. The benefits of the proposition
Conferences
Subscriptions
Self Study
On Demand
Webcasts

13. Navigation

14. Business Results - Qualitative
• Post launch satisfaction survey results (Sept 2011)
o 83% overall satisfaction rating
o 77% “easy” rating on catalog search/browse
o 89% Average to Very Fast performance rating
o 89% rated 3 or higher on meeting professional needs (out of 5)
• Customer Feedback
o “Easier navigation. More polished design”
o “Streamlined. Easy to follow”
o “Faster” (from multiple users)
o “Seems to do everything that the old platform did”
o “I love the ability to download transcripts….”

15. Business Results - Quantitative
• Revenue Performance (Year to Year)
o Customer base up 50%
o OnDemand revenue up 60%
o Webcast revenue up 50%
o Co-Branded customers up 25%
• Technology Performance
o On track to deliver over 500K course completions in year 1
o Peak concurrent course completions exceeded 600 per hour
o System availability currently averaging 99.9% uptime
o Current course catalog exceeds 1500 titles
o Over 3M course transcripts (migrated and new)

16. Results
• Create a completely simplified experience for the user
• Streamline the User Interface experience to be familiar
• Do not rely purely on traditional training
• Social. Mobile. Global – The nexus of training
• Allow for members to experience a localized experience
• Make use of “dead zones”
• Create a domain experience
• Recommendation Engine
• Internationalization
• Dynamic Reporting capabilities

17. Thank you.
For any questions, please contact Vinay Nilakantan at
vnilakantan@meridianksi.com