Spotlight On: Mehdi Tounsi from OpenSesame

Mehdi Tounsi from OpenSesame

We caught up with Mehdi Tounsi, Senior Regional Director at EdTech company OpenSesame, to interview him about the upcoming year for L&D, challenges on the horizon, technological advances, and what inspires him the most about learning tech! Give it a read!

What do you see as some of the biggest upcoming L&D trends for 2022?

At Speexx Exchange in December 2021, one of the speakers, Jeremy Blain, put it nicely – he talked about “power skills” instead of “soft skills”.

I see four main trends:

Adaptability

The first one is adaptability, which involves helping people adapt to an ever-changing work and life landscape and giving them the tools to help them really adapt to that. Some might argue that this is a form of change management, as well.

Collaboration

The second one, which is tied to the first, is collaboration — our ability to be able to work with others, especially because now collaboration with others is a blended skill. It’s no longer around the water cooler or the coffee machine; it needs to be done with a hybrid approach. Having the ability to collaborate on both fronts, whether it’s virtual or physical, is becoming a key skill.

Growth Mindset

Growth Mindset

The third trend is around having a growth mindset — how do you keep positive; how do you maintain the ability to see the glass half full despite all that’s been happening and what could happen in the coming months?

It’s about keeping your employees focused on the prize and helping them to see the opportunities ahead of them. It’s also about encouraging them to be an “active actor” in their work lives, versus just a passive spectator. I think that’s especially important.

Learning to Learn

The fourth, and the most important, is supporting an environment of “learning to learn.” We have inherited a workplace and a culture where, for too long, learning in education systems force feed knowledge, rather than teaching how to learn. As a result, we have workplaces where changes occur at a pace too fast for most to keep up with.

You will hear terms like “upskilling” and “reskilling”, but these are down to your ability to adapt and learn. It’s crucial to put the emphasis on the “learning” aspect, as this has been missing. How do we allow our people to learn? How do we allow that process of making mistakes, being able to learn from those mistakes and then acquiring that knowledge and methodology to be able to move on and embed that new piece of information into our workflow? I am seeing a clear focus on that.
Those would be the four main trends of focus for 2022. Then, of course, there is the technological aspect where we will see a lot more AR and VR driven concepts.

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What do you see as some of the biggest challenges in L&D at the moment?

I’ll say it three times, because that is how important it is — curation, curation, curation!

24 Minutes to Learn

A few years ago, Josh Bersin authored an article about the overwhelmed employee, in which, at the time, he estimated that the average learner had 24 minutes a week for learning. That time window shrunk even more lately. Therefore, access to information is great, but access to the right information is paramount and I think that too often we see employees being overwhelmed by the amount of learning content being thrown at them without any consideration to how relevant this is to learners.

Content as Food

There’s an analogy I like to make quite often — I am a proud native of Lyon, France, which is famous for its gastronomy — which is that you can think of any learning system where there is an LMS or LXP as a fridge and think of content as the food. The vendors of the food will say “we have the best food”, and “we have the biggest selection of food”, but what’s the point of stuffing your fridge full of as much food as possible if you don’t know who you are feeding or what you need to feed them? I think that’s what’s missing, and why I am talking about curation. It’s about not just making sure that there is plenty of food available for your learners, but it’s also what food we need to feed them, and at what given time.

A Meal Fit for the Learner

A Meal Fit for the Learner

Here’s another real-life analogy — I’m going through quite a transformational time with teenagers at home and they are a different species altogether! There is something that my daughter does that got me thinking of late, where she would come into the kitchen, open the fridge, look inside and stare inside for what feels to me like hours — only to turn around and say to me “what can I eat?” If you transfer this analogy to the learning example, this is the main challenge that a lot of L&D practitioners are having now. They are spending large budgets on having amazing LMS and LXPs and they try and buy as much content as they can from the best publishers out there, only to discover that they have an exceptionally low adoption or usage rate. Why is that? Well, the main reason is curation! If we are in between meals and it’s time for a snack, there is no point in offering someone an entire five-course meal. Give them a snack! Perhaps they need a five-minute refresher on how to do a table in excel. Allow learners to build this into their workflow and be able to find that five minutes easily, use it and then they can continue with whatever they were doing beforehand.

Contextual Learning

However, if I am a supervisor and I’m moving on to a managerial role, then being offered a whole learning path on situational leadership, to giving and receiving feedback, giving appraisals, would help me to hone my skills as a manager. In this example, it makes sense to have a program that would take more time and requires more dedication. It has to be highly contextual.

What are the human-centered benefits that Machine Learning and AI bring to personalized learning paths?

Tools to Help Us Do Better, Learn Smarter

I’ve delivered some presentations on Machine Learning and AI, which show how technology can enhance and make our lives easier. First of all, I would say that we shouldn’t be worried about AI and talent management. But also, at the same time, Machine Learning and AI are tools to help us do a better job, but they’re not a substitute for human interaction or common sense. To answer the question, they will both help a great deal in terms of being able to save time.

Around five years ago, Josh Bersin wrote about the consumerization of the workplace and how there was a divide between our everyday lives in which we use our devices and consume all kinds of content in a way that is highly personalized and efficient for what we want to achieve, juxtaposed with how we are more resistant to technology in the workplace, preferring more archaic methods to perform our jobs.

Recommendation-Based Learning

When it comes to Machine Learning and AI, Spotify and Netflix-style suggestions-based algorithms can also work excellently for learning. Imagine being given recommendations on which courses will help you tackle your next project in a more efficient way? From this perspective, these technologies offer a true value-enhancing benefit to helping embed learning in the flow of work.

Balancing Act

However, it’s vital to never treat them as substitutes for human interaction or the work you do with your learner. AI and Machine Learning should be used in a balancing act, allowing learning paths to become more personalized, saving time, making curation faster and more efficient, alongside using good judgment and discernment to understand what the next best steps for your specific learning journey and career development are.

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What learning technology inspires you the most?

Learning inspires me, full stop! I’ve personally been challenged in my own learning in the way that I prioritize my time — that’s been my main obstacle to learning. In terms of technology, I’m a big fan of book digests and audiobooks and the convenience they offer — you can listen while you go for a walk, during your commute — allowing you to absorb their knowledge.

The Future of VR and AR in Learning

What I really get excited about is the prospect of what VR and AR can offer us, particularly with VR. I’ve been working a lot with some publishers that I hope we’ll see on OpenSesame soon, who are doing some amazing things around coaching in diversity and unconscious bias, using VR and offering a fully immersive experience with the learner. You know the old saying “walk a mile in my shoes” Essentially, that’s what VR allows you to do with sensitive topics. For example, Diversity & Inclusion has been a bigger topic of late, moving from compliance and tokenism to something that organizations are understanding is a key differentiator and will create a better and more productive workplace. VR helps to make the experience of this more tangible for people who can be on the receiving end of what you are referencing and experience it first-hand. Another benefit is that this can help to trigger a reaction that is impactful enough so that your impact-to-behavior is shortened. Compare this to more traditional learning — there is a more prominent forgetting curve and a need to reinforce that learning message and revisit it more often, so that we can really impact behavior and rewire the brain so that this turns into a habit. With things like VR, you drastically shorten that, and it allows you to put the conversation out there and really have people rethink a lot of their beliefs around some of those topics. I’m extremely excited to see where we will be going with that.

The Blended Approach for the Win!

It’s very crucial for me to add that I don’t think there is one single piece of technology that is better than the others. I firmly believe that the best approach is a blended approach — there are as many different learning styles and preferences as there are colors in the rainbow! It’s really a case of the more blended your approach, the better you are to cater for your learners and what works for them at any given time. I’m personally looking forward to what VR can bring, especially with the devices costing less and less.