Winning Isn’t Everything

Patrick Weir
14 posts

Fulcrum Labs recently won a Brandon Hall Award for our work with Allegiant Travel Company on their Flight Operations Basic Indoctrination training course. Naturally, it’s a huge honor to be considered, let alone win Best Advance in Compliance Training. But the award is especially meaningful to Fulcrum Labs because it speaks to our vision to bring innovation to online learning through a combination of adaptive technology, premium content, learner-centric experiences, and data analytics.

Of course, if you’re going to improve something, it’s important to understand the state of the art. Here’s how the 2016 Ethics & Compliance Training Benchmark Report from Navex Global characterized the state of innovation in the field.

“There is limited technological innovation in compliance training delivery. Most organizations are focused on basic “blocking and tackling” when it comes to ethics and compliance training delivery: planned training activities tend to focus on adding courses, assigning courses based on learner risk and focusing on middle managers. The challenges facing programs hinder their ability to focus on program innovations and advancements.”

When we looked at the features of our Flight Operations Basic Indoctrination course with some of the other types of features and attributes identified as state of the art in the Navex report, we saw that we are on the cutting edge, especially when it comes to modernizing training to appeal to millennials, streamlining courses, and gamification. But there’s actually a lot more room for innovation in the training and compliance pipeline. In fact, according to the Navex report, adaptive learning technology—the ability for the course to dynamically change based on the learner’s needs—isn’t something most organizations are currently doing.  It isn’t even mentioned.

That’s what makes the Brandon Hall Award so meaningful to the Fulcrum Labs team – it recognizes a significant innovation in online learning—the arrival of adaptive learning. The Flight Operations Basic Indoctrination course is the first in the aviation industry to use adaptive technology, custom content, and a personalized learning approach. Rather than focusing on basic “blocking and tackling,” we used adaptive learning technology to help Allegiant personalize and improve a learning experience that hadn’t changed since 1960. By allowing pilots to move at their own pace, the adaptive learning platform targets the right module to each pilot’s specific need. An experienced pilot can prove competency and move on, while a less experienced pilot can focus on areas they find challenging.

Our mission to innovate online learning and turn students into learners and learners into confident subject matter masters. This award is a testament to that mission and while winning isn’t everything, it sure is nice!