A Look into the Future with LCvista’s Learning Management Advisory Group
LCvista’s Learning Management Advisory Group is comprised of senior leaders in the Learning and Development space who meet quarterly to discuss themes and trends within the Accounting industry. Our first Learning Management Advisory Group meeting of 2022 kicked the year off with a conversation around automation.
Goals
Our meeting focused on the following questions:
- What are common objectives of 2022 across firms?
- What role does automation play?
- In what ways can a Learning Management System enhance existing features, streamline processes, and introduce new tools to assist teams in achieving these goals?
Discussion & Themes
The discussion began with a review of Learning and Development team goals for 2022. Common objectives and themes include transitioning to hybrid and in-person learning, simplifying the user experience for professionals, expanding training offerings, and streamlining processes across the LCvista platform.
Exploring Automation in Learning Management
When we surveyed the members of our Advisory Group, 100% of respondents answered that automation was either somewhat important or very important to their firm’s Learning and Development strategy for 2022. So, in the spirit of streamlining processes, we focused on the role that automation plays in the areas of Reporting, Notifications, Evaluations, and Issuing Credit.
Reporting
With the continuing need to measure, track, and share data, administrators benefit from the ability to automate the delivery of reports. After saving a custom report in LCvista, admins can choose to send that report to an individual or group on a recurring schedule.
As we look to the future of reporting automation, enhancements on our roadmap to improve efficiencies in reporting include at-a-glance dashboard widgets and dynamic in-app guidance for administrators.
Members of the group also discussed the potential for predictive analytics to further enhance administrators’ ability to digest and act on learning and compliance data.
Notifications
Certainly, scheduling emails to firm professionals and admins based on pre-defined triggers represents an enormous opportunity to leverage automation. For example, admins in LCvista currently use notifications to trigger past due notices for assigned training and reminder emails that can be sent before a deadline has passed.
In looking at a snapshot of new notifications created in the past month, it’s clear that the benefit of communicating updates and due dates via email are being used to create efficiencies in learning and compliance management. Admins are leveraging notifications sent directly to managers to communicate approval requests, session enrollments, learning plan registrations, and more. Further, notifications targeted at professionals are used to send program invitations, warn of upcoming deadlines, and request training evaluations.
Looking ahead, the L&D leaders in the group expressed excitement for further flexibility in preview and email testing capabilities and prebuilt templates.
Evaluations
The LCvista evaluation framework allows for admins to automatically send training evaluations to professionals based on session completion or at a scheduled end time.
To further increase both the completion and efficacy of evaluations, our Learning Management Advisory Board suggested enhancements to this workflow that included automated reminders for evaluations awaiting response, evaluation templates that align with NASBA standards, and default questions that utilize instructionally sound learning objectives.
Issuing Credit
LCvista continues to expand our network of integration providers for webcasts and live events. While we currently offer integrations with Webex, Zoom, On24, and Conferences I/O, our list of supported integrations is constantly growing.
The level of automation supported in this area of learning management provides a unique opportunity for efficiency under NASBA regulations. By allowing administrators to customize rulesets that calculate credits earned based on factors such as attendance or poll questions answered, LCvista can dynamically recommend how many credits to issue for event participants.
Future enhancements in this arena include automating the entire process of issuing credit while also considering the use of timed agendas and multiple fields of study.
Conclusion
The conversation around automation in these different areas was an exciting and lively discussion which resulted in a number of opportunities to create additional efficiencies and dynamic workflows to further benefit our customer community. We are excited to further explore the ideas brainstormed during this meeting!
