Viva Learning – an effective tool for adult learners?
Do you tend to stay with an organization that prioritizes learning and development? For most people, the answer is yes. Learning and development are career priorities.
Surveys prove this out as well. In a 2022 Work Trend Index report, 76% of employees say they'd stay longer at a company if they could benefit from learning and development support. Learning at work is critical for employee satisfaction and retention.
Learning at work is different than early classroom learning
One thing to keep in mind about learning at work — learning as an adult is different than learning as a child.
A model for thinking about how professionals learn is the “4Ds of learning” from: The Diversity of Workplace Learning – Modern Workplace Learning 2023. The 4Ds for successful learning are:
Discovery: Discovery is about self-directed learning, where people use their intrinsic motivation to discover topics they want to learn about. Adults tend to be more driven by internal motives than external motives with learning, and want to feel in control of their learning. The most popular places these days where people discover learning on their own are sites such as Google, YouTube, Tiktok, etc.
Discourse: This is about learning from others. We are social creatures, and often learning happens from talking to people, or in tools like Teams, Slack and Yammer. However, learning needs to happen in a ‘safe space’ as most professionals don’t like looking incompetent in front of peers or superiors.
Doing: Much learning happens while doing the job, and many people learn through taking on new projects and responsibilities. For adults, the willingness to learn comes from seeing the relevance of the knowledge, and how they can align it with their daily work. Learning activities that are task-oriented and focus on problem-solving give people the confidence that they can conquer new challenges.
Didactics: This is a fancy word that essentially means ‘formal instruction.’ Didactics are the formal learning situations such as courses or conferences.
All these components need to come together for a full and effective learning journey.
In our experience delivering Microsoft 365 training at organizations, the traditional classroom learning style (didactics) where people are together for 1-2 days doesn’t work well because people quickly forget what they learn. It doesn’t follow all the principles above either – people don’t usually opt-in or discover the learning, there’s limited time for discourse, and there is little practice and doing.
Learning happens best when it’s in short bursts over a longer period, giving time for discussion, application, and practice. We’ve come to a proven training program of about 8 hours of in-person training – 4 hours of lectures and 4 hours of hands-on labs – in 1 hour sessions executed over 5-6 weeks. We give people time to self-direct their learning by applying it to their situation or content.
We can use Viva Learning to support this program and how adults learn. Let’s see how…
How Viva Learning supports adult learning styles
I. Primarily an easy discovery tool
If you think about learning something, how do you usually start? Typically, we search out things on YouTube, TikTok, Google, etc. At work, you might seek out learning by browsing a catalogue of courses, finding mentors/coaches, or going to conferences that you choose.
This is the major benefit of Viva Learning. It’s easy to seek out learning that’s incorporated into a tool that you likely spend time in – i.e. Teams. This eliminates some barriers to accessing learning, like navigating to a separate platform or browsing dense content libraries.
Discovery of learning catalogs in Viva Learning (in Teams)
Viva Learning provides a bridge to all the catalogue(s) that your organization might have. It shows learning resources from your Learning Management System (LMS), assets saved on SharePoint sites, and courses from external catalogues such as LinkedIn Learning, Udemy, etc.
Overview of Viva Learning and connectors that surface courses from multiple data sources
The integrations can be with the Microsoft provided connectors, SharePoint resources, or built using the Graph API.
Note: You need a Viva Learning or Viva Suite license to connect to most learning management systems. With the embedded version, you get access to LinkedIn Learning select free content, Microsoft Learn, Microsoft 365 Training and content in SharePoint. Learn more about licensing.
People have some control over what they see in Viva Learning as well. You can set interests and change them over time as your role changes, which changes the courses that are recommended to you:
Setting interests in Viva Learning and seeing suggested courses
We recommend adding the project, SharePoint or Microsoft 365 training to Viva Learning and the related interests will show up. This can be a ‘soft-sell’ way of sharing the Microsoft 365 capabilities you just implemented. Managers can also recommend some of the training to future hires as needed (more on that below).
People are more likely to be motivated to do training when they opt-in themselves, and because Viva Learning is integrated into Teams — where people are anyway — the power to choose self-directed learning is easier.
II. Share and discuss learning
Sharing learning with others is a challenge in most organizations. Unless it’s part of performance expectations, people won’t always do it. Technology alone won’t motivate people to share learnings, as it’s a combination of culture + technology. We won’t get too deep into that here — this could be the topic of a whole other blog post! 😄
However, there are a couple of features in Microsoft 365 and Viva Learning which help share the learning.
The easiest way to share learning is to record learning sessions/training with Teams, and then save the recording to the appropriate Learning SharePoint site. For example, at Gravity Union we record our Lunch & Learns and share them in a document library. This way people who missed learning sessions or who are onboarded later can catch up.
You don’t have to visit the SharePoint library though to find the learning. After a little configuration, it shows up in Viva Learning under your company site like this - in this example, learnings show up under the ‘Contoso’ organization:
Viva Learning showing learning resources from SharePoint
These materials could be videos, documents, presentations, links etc. It’s beneficial to see the organization’s learning material with the ‘official’ courses and programs – again, where anyone can share and discuss learning! One tip: if you save videos with the new version of Stream and videos are in various sites, add links to the videos from the Learning Centre - then people will still find the videos, and also see the discussion in comments.
Tips for connecting SharePoint content to Viva Learning
As of this writing, connecting SharePoint to Viva Learning is a little clunky. Here are a few tips:
Choose a main Learning site in your employee portal for the connection, and make sure content is saved into folders (yes, folders!) in the Documents library. In our testing, we’ve found the content doesn’t have to sit in the Documents library only, but it works best if all the document libraries you use are in the one main Learning site.
The permissions on each folder need to be set to a Microsoft 365 group
Enable the Viva Learning connection to SharePoint, and find the list it creates. In this list, add links to the folders – this is very important.
Be patient - wait a day or so for Viva Learning to sync into Teams
If you have issues, there is a sync log that you can export into Excel. It will tell you which objects worked and which didn’t.
More social features
With a paid license, people and managers can recommend the learning to others and optionally set due dates.
Recommend learning - Image courtesy of Microsoft
People will get notifications if learning is recommended to them, and there’s a view to see all recommended learning. Reminders are in the Activity Feed if you happen to be late in completing the course:
Viva Learning notification - Image courtesy of Microsoft
This isn’t the full functionality of a typical LMS, but it’s enough for some organizations who have lightweight learning tracking needs.
While Viva Learning (or really any online tool) can’t replace rich discussions with people face-to-face, the supporting functionality that enables discourse of an organization’s specific learning resources are helpful.
III. Learning as part of doing
In my experience, I’ve found that learning on a project is the most powerful way to learn. When others mentor and coach during a real-world project, people pick up new concepts and apply them right away vs. a course where learnings take time to apply.
Viva Learning is still a separate place to access learning – so it doesn’t replace live project training or peer coaching.
However, because Viva Learning is designed to support ‘bite-size’ learning that happens throughout a day or week or month, the learning can be applied whenever it’s convenient. There’s no going off-site or even going to a different system to access the learning. This can save people some time and effort in hunting for learning across various systems when they’re in the middle of a project.
And as we mentioned above, make sure you add your organization specific learning to Viva Learning to make it relevant to jobs and projects. Think Lunch & Learns, weekly team sessions, project retrospectives, or even tips that you record yourself from Teams or Stream. With permissions, you can target specific Microsoft 365 groups, so it can be tailored to those who will find the content useful.
These recordings and presentations are usually already saved somewhere, and Viva Learning can surface content easily for bookmarking, recommending and light tracking.
We hope this shows you how Microsoft 365 and Viva Learning supplements training and development – and inspires you to set it up on Teams. Reach out if you need help or advice!