Area9 Lyceum Blog

COVID-19 CYTOKINE STORM – What it means and why we need to learn about it.

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by SARS-CoV-2 infection is associated with a wide spectrum of disease severity, with up to 20% of patients developing severe disease and progressing to life-threatening acute respiratory distress syndrome. The immune response in coronavirus infections, including SARS-CoV-2, plays a central role in viral elimination. In addition, emerging evidence suggests that immune dysregulation may contribute to the pathophysiology of severe COVID-19, which exhibits overlapping clinical and laboratory features consistent with a “cytokine storm". This a complex clinical presentation which may be responsible for end-organ damage and mortality observed in this disease entity and consists of hyperinflammation combined with the failure of the immune system to counteract infection with antiviral response mechanisms.

Can Learning Outcomes Be Improved While Lowering Costs?

It is fairly easy to lower learning costs: create and deliver fewer courses, and/or move classroom courses online. Maybe even dump formal training altogether and switch to “user generated content.” But is it possible to lower costs without negatively impacting learning and business outcomes—and perhaps even improving them? As COVID-19 continues to escalate in the U.S., this question is more important than ever. In this blog, I’ll discuss how corporate learning and development (L&D) can answer the CFO’s call to “do more with less.”

Retraining Will Be Crucial in Aviation’s ‘New Normal’ 

As the global airline industry comes back from the pandemic, staffing could become a challenge—particularly if the ramp-up in flight capacity happens quickly. The goal across every airline will be to align rehiring with the pace of the rebound, so as people are rehired, they are also retrained quickly. Reassigning and reskilling, as well as training in new safety and operational protocols, will require adaptive learning to get people up to speed efficiently and effectively.

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the business landscape, with lasting changes in the ways in which people work and learn. As Microsoft President Brad Smith said in a recent CNBC interview, “I think there is a greater acceptance of almost remote everything.” Hand-in-hand with widespread remote working is the need for more effective remote learning.

SUMMARY – Pandemics aside, there are clearly exciting times ahead for learning and development (L&D) as evidenced by this year’s update to the Donald H. Taylor 2020 L&D Global Sentiment Survey. Top priorities in the survey are learning analytics and personalized/adaptive delivery. Together, they showcase the vital importance of L&D delivering the kind of learning that will advance business and talent strategies within organizations. Although the survey and the analysis in this blog date to before the COVID-19 outbreak, the topics discussed are even more relevant now that remote learning has become imperative for all organizations.

Adaptive Learning Course Now Available at No Cost to Health Professionals

CHESTNUT HILL, Mass., March 10, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Area9 Lyceum has released an adaptive learning module on COVID-19, using AACC Learning Lab for Laboratory Medicine on NEJM Knowledge+.

Area9 Lyceum is pleased to announce a partnership agreement with MTW of Portugal, a strategic communications consulting firm that specializes in training for national and international leaders across multiple industries.

The three hottest topics in Donald H. Taylor’s L&D Global Sentiment Survey 2019 are personalization, artificial intelligence (AI), and learning analytics. Although these are separate topics on the survey, they come together in one place: adaptive learning, in the application of AI to learning data to achieve personalized outcomes.

Training Industry has announced that Area9 Lyceum has been named to the 2019 Top Training Companies™ List for the training delivery sector of the learning and development market.

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.