This is the 2nd in a short series of blogs on how to enable the different modules of Viva. So, todays blog will be how to enable Viva Learning in your Microsoft Tenant.
Background
A lot of people think Viva Learning is a Learning Management System LMS itself, but that’s not quite right, it’s more a learning experience platform. It plays very nicely with LMS but it also allows you to integrate multiple LMS into Viva Learning and you can also create your own learning repositories in SharePoint. This give you the ability to bring all of your different learning content sources into one single platform and the real beauty of it is, it’s served up right in Microsoft Teams meaning it’s all in the flow of work.
Another really powerful aspect of Viva Learning is how it can help your company to build a culture of learning with the ability to share content, create learning pathways. Below are a few short examples of how to use this then we will get on to how to enable Viva Learning in your own tenant.
You can send a Viva Learning course to a colleague right within a teams message.
OK I know this blog is about Viva Learning but I just had to throw in this bonus Viva Insights tip.
***Tip*** Use viva insights to block out time for learning on a schedule within the protect time area of Viva Insights.
Enablement
OK, on to the actual enablement of Viva Learning. It’s a relatively simple set of tasks to get this up and running.
Prerequisites
You’ll need to have Microsoft Teams deployed for your organization in order to use Viva Learning.
Licensing
Everyone with an M365 license gets Viva Learning by default with it’s basic features but to access the premium features you’ll need to have a Viva Learning or Viva Suite license. Below is a picture of the premium features currently available.
Permissions and Admin
To set up learning content sources in Viva Learning and manage individual licensing, you’ll need these permissions:
- Microsoft Teams admin
- Microsoft 365 global admin or SharePoint admin (to configure SharePoint as a learning content source).
- Knowledge admin
The knowledge admin is an Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) role in the Microsoft 365 admin centre that can be assigned to anyone in the organization. This role manages the organization’s learning content sources through the Microsoft 365 admin centre.
Configuring Content Sources
Now we’ve got the licensing and permissions in place its now time to configure your content sources. Like I mentioned in the intro one of the great things with Viva Learning is the ability to have multiple learning content sources. To configure these sources make your way to the Microsoft 365 Admin Centre and then I personally like to use the search bar at the top and simply search for Viva.
Then select the Viva Learning option under the settings section.
We can then configure multiple different content sources from various different LMS providers. This list is ever growing and now with the API open to all expect to see the available LMS providers grow very quickly.
This is also the locaiton you can configure your own SharePoint repository for Viva Learning. Here is a link to Microsoft Learn content on how to configure this. Once you have your URL you can simply pop it into the settings of this page as below.
NOTE – When adding any new content source you may need to wait up to 24 hours for it to become available.
Pin Viva Learning In Teams
Now we have Viva Learning configured with our content sources it’s always a good idea to pin the app within Teams for all users. This is done simply by navigating to the Teams Admin Centre and finding the setup policies option under Teams Apps.
Then scroll down to the pinned apps section and hit the new button and then you can search for Viva Learning.
Hit the add button (twice) then save your policy.
Hit confirm and it really is as simple as that. I’ve obviously added this to my global policy for all users but you could always create a new policy for a selected group if you’re not looking to add it for everyone right away in the case of a pilot group etc.
Summary
So as you can see it’s relatively simple to get everything configured and pushed out to users, the next part is for your company to record/write/create their own learning content and then get into building learning paths for people. Also as with ALL the different areas of Viva a very strong adoption and change managment program should be employed to get the most out of it. You really want to encourage your workforce to take on elective learning and share and talk about great content they’ve found/completed. Get out there and super charge your LMS and build a culture of learning in your business.