Area9 Lyceum Blog

A focus on quick fixes results in learning and development (L&D) “technical debt” that is too great for companies to bear today, given greater demands to build proficiencies throughout their workforce. By understanding what cutting-edge adaptive learning looks like, companies can take the first step toward paying down technical debt and improving L&D with a truly personalized approach.

To level the playing field of future job opportunities, all workers must be reskilled to meet the ever-increasing demands of the technology-enabled workplace. This requires the “rulebook” for learning to be rewritten, no longer assuming a distribution curve in performance, but rather seeing everyone as capable of achieving proficiency and mastery, provided they are given the targeted support and time they need.

New talent development approaches are driving the thinking around hiring vs. retraining to respond to rapidly evolving technology, a global skills shortage, and the cost of continuously hiring new talent. As employers grapple with their talent demands, a conversation around reskilling must occur among managers, corporate leaders, HR, and chief learning officers (CLOs).

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) offer a bold vision: addressing some of the most pressing challenges in the world today. As each goal is pursued, we must consider the impact of learning and education for all, from workers who need to be retrained to children for whom equality in education is the gateway to a better life.

A pilot in command of a commercial airliner confronts the unexpected, such as a sudden mechanical failure requiring a system override or another aircraft in the same airspace. Immediately, the pilot and co-pilot must make critical decisions and take action.

We recently open sourced "Flow", a functional programming language developed by Area9 to solve many of the challenges of developing multi-platform, responsive, enterprise-capable applications. In this blog post, Area9 CTO Asger Alstrup Palm explains the relevance and value of Flow from a programmers point of view.

When CIOs invest in enterprise applications—whether developed in-house or purchased from third parties—they must balance a number of key characteristics: supportability, maintainability, deployability, and cost. Nine years ago, as Area9 developed its adaptive learning platform and related applications, we needed a programming language that would let us optimize those characteristics for ourselves and our clients. The result was Area9 Flow, and today we are releasing it to the open source community.

FARMINGTON, Connecticut—Airway Management Education Center (AMEC) is excited to introduce Airway Manager: Emergency™, the newest educational experience from the creators of The Difficult Airway Course™.

One of the reasons companies love using Adaptive Learning for their training needs is because of the extensive and comprehensive data that it generates. 

On the surface it appears to be an easy win: tapping into the knowledge and expertise that exists within a company through user-generated content. Short how-to instructional videos can be cheaply and easily made and uploaded by experts across the company, then be searchable and accessible by every employee.

Researchers and physicians at the Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Brigham and Women's Hospital, and NEJM Group conducted a survey study to determine user experiences with an adaptive learning platform and the impact on first-time American Board of Internal Medicine Certifying Examination (ABIM-CE) test takers.  The study was published in AMEE MedEd Publish, an open access online journal for medical and health-care professionals.   

The survey study examines the NEJM Knowledge+ adaptive learning platform, which we co-developed with NEJM Group, and found that the majority of respondents rated the platform as helpful and the content as good or excellent for exam preparation and relevant to their learning needs. The study also found that a significantly higher proportion of users reported passing the ABIM-CE on their first attempt compared to the national average (95 percent vs. 89 percent).

Compliance training is not popular: most people find it to be the most painful form of corporate training. It is usually a recurring requirement and employees know they’ll have to retrain at again and again. In this post we’ll focus mostly on health and safety, but the same problems with traditional e-learning affect all forms of compliance training.