I thought I’d write a quick blog to follow up on the briefing I did for Empowering Cloud a few weeks ago. The video briefing was all about Viva Learning and how it can supercharge your LMS and build a culture of learning throughout your organisation.
Microsoft Viva Learning is your central hub for learning in Teams where you can share, recommend, and learn from content libraries across an organization to empower teams and individuals to make learning a natural part of your day. It’s how you can bring your LMS into Teams but also, a whole lot more!
First up we looked at 3 key areas of Viva Learning
- Learning in the Flow of Work – Bring learning to the tools and platforms where users already spend their time. Microsoft built Viva Learning to seamlessly connect to their 270 million monthly active users in Teams and across M365.
- Simplified Learning – Aggregate learning content and tools from different sources. This is about making all of your company’s learning content available in one place. So reduce that bouncing between different point solutions so people can stay focussed. It means bringing content from your LMS 3rd party providers but also your own custom content, all into one place
- Personalised and Relevant – Find the right content and develop new capabilities with personalised recommendations and search in one central hub. It’s designed to make the learning experience personalised and relevant by providing learning experiences categorised by individual learning interests, with social learning capabilities built natively into Teams and Microsoft 365, with recommendations to accelerate your learning journey.
Next, we had a quick look into how Viva Learning is built and the different layers that make it up.
Bottom Layer – Viva Learning is all built upon the Microsoft Graph data layer with all the rich user signals that enable Microsoft to create a highly intelligent system that can serve up the right content at the right time.
Middle Layer – This is the aggregation layer where Viva learning can bring together the different learning systems that an organisation may have. A great new thing is that Microsoft recently announced their first set of public APIs so that ANY learning system can connect to Viva Learning. The latest learning partners highlighted in green and the “coming soon providers” are using these APIs to build their connectors into the system.
Top Layer – This is the platform layer which is where the user actually experiences their learning it is primarily in Teams but Microsoft is also bringing it to wherever people are within the Microsoft 365 stack so be that SharePoint, Microsoft Search Bing, or even office.com outlook or and I think most excitingly other Viva Modules.
Share Learning
We then had a quick demo of how to share learning. Like with most things in Viva Learning, sharing content’s been made pretty simple. From within the learning module, you are looking to share you can hit the obvious big share button at the top of the screen in Teams.
You can share the content directly with an individual or a team, you can even now copy and link and share it yourself in Teams or any other way within in M365.
Reccomend Learning
Much like sharing but this time you get a few extra features like the ability to track the recommendation. You guessed it it’s the recommend button at the top in Teams right next to that share button we just mentioned.
Now, this is where it differs a little as we can now select a due date in the window that pops up.
Schedule Learning
This is one of my fave features of Viva Learning as it encourages people to learn and is all part of building that culture where people are encouraged to learn and better themselves leaving you with a more engaged workforce.
Simply hit the add to calendar button in Viva Learning.
Now Viva Learning goes off and finds time within your calendar and picks a spot that lasts the duration of the course you are adding.
It also suggests some other times that might be suitable and you can add a description into your calendar.
In the briefing I then gave a demo of how all these things can be achieved through Teams but in the flow of work, right within the chat and teams that you’re working from day in and day out. Head on over and watch the briefing to see it in action.
Protect Time for Learning
This is a great new feature and it’s using another one of the Viva modules, Viva Insights which is great to see these integrations happening. So, very much like focus time which perhaps you’re all aware of now. This feature allows you to use a plan to automatically book out time for learning in your calendar.
So, within Viva Insights you hit the 3 dots in the top right and select settings then on the protect time tab you can scroll down to configure your recurring plan for learning.
What a great feature, and once again helping you build that culture of learning.
Licensing Viva Learning
Lastly a quick look at the licensing of Viva Learning, on the left-hand side we have what’s included in your M365 E3/E5 type of plan, and then the extra you get on the right-hand side of the picture above if you buy either the Viva Learning license or have gone for the Viva Suite license.
Summary
So, to summarise. Viva Learning is there to supercharge your LMS increase user engagement in learning and get the most out of it.
Nurture Innovation – Since hybrid work productivity and collaboration are working well, innovation needs to catch up and what better way to do this than through learning?
Viva Learning enables that community-led aspect of learning to shine and I think that’s a really important and powerful thing.
Build a culture of learning – As a company having a culture of learning will help you to stand out, and be attractive to talent but also to help retain it.