How do you get your learners to focus on your content?

With so many distractions, staying focused on anything is a real challenge. At OutCons, we aim to change that and enable quality learning. Too many people get carried away by social media and their smart phone apps, which turn out to be a burden for lifelong learning and successful career development. One research suggests that the average person unlocks their phone 110 times a day! If we assume that a person’s day is 16 hours long, that accounts for roughly one smart phone pick-up every 15 minutes! And if all other activities the average working person has are added, it makes it very difficult for an educator to help someone learn, stay focused, and remember the learning material in order to implement it later.

How can you help your learners focus on the content?

1. Organize!

The key factor is the organization of the learning process. Make sure you establish an easy to understand schedule and course length. In our experience, breaking up learning into smaller chunks (5-10 minutes max) will help your learners focus and then get the break they are looking for.  A good distribution system (like Ayris) can help you distribute multiple chunks of learning, let your learners step away and then promt them to return through notifications and events. Within the calendar in the Programs menu of Ayris, you can schedule events for the upcoming weeks, months or even years. All you need to do is plan and organize the events, and Ayris will do the rest for you.

2. Set Goals/Gates

Set goals after each step of the education process. Setting an exam or questionnaire survey to supplement each course will allow you to keep track of learners’ performance and knowledge obtained. Engage all users by setting personal goals too. This will challenge the learners and they will be more willing to commit to the task and complete it.

3. Communicate the Schedule

Make learners aware of the time they need to accomplish the course.  If they are behind schedule, you have the option to send them a customized notification to proceed with the assignment when they can, by utilizing distribution tools like Ayris. All you need to do is be realistic about these time estimates and give students ample time to accomplish the course at their own pace. In this way, you will also have an indication of how committed the student is to learn and develop.

Many organizations we have worked with have giant libraries of content. One client we worked with had almost a one learning course per employee!  This client continued to post new courses in an effort freshen up their available courses, but failed to retire out dated content. This made it difficult for users to find new and releveant training. Distributions system make it so only the courses that are assigned to users are available to view.

Once your learners have gone through their program, allow for time to apply the learning and relax to prepare for the next challenge!

Mass Upload of Course Completions is Now Available on Ayris

Good news for everyone working with course completions! Batch course completion is now available on Ayris and this means two things for all of our users - smooth course completion process and peace of mind. If you have used another learning management solution in the past or you currently need to upload course completions for existing courses, our neat new feature will help you bring all of those learning history records on Ayris in no time.

You can access this feature on the "Learning" tab and then navigate to the "Manage Course Completions" menu. From there you will be able to select the courses for which you wish to submit course completions, for as many users as you like.

The other great add-on to this menu and probably the most important feature for learning managers is the mass upload of course completions from file. The "Import from CSV" button is created to help you upload learning completions quickly and easy. Once you press the button, a pop-up window opens allowing you to download a template which shows how course completions must be entered to successfully import them on Ayris. On the same window, you can also find brief instructions to support your successful submission of course completions on Ayris. Enjoy!

Learning Content Distribution with Ayris in the World of Online Education

Learning management systems serve great purposes today. They are a powerful tool in the hands of the companies who decided to constantly develop and widen the horizon for their employees and management staff. Companies with an LMS in their possession are constantly building learning materials related to the area of business and shaping it into online courses, surveys, and exams, etc. Most of the time getting this learning content accessible by their employees results in months of complicated content integration. But let’s skip this part and try to observe a common fact that happens next – people are not willing to go to LMS’s unless they are going for company mandated content. Courses like workplace safety, fire safety, company culture and trainings are among the best examples. Why is that?

Employees typically try to get closer to the state in which they are comfortable in doing their job and at the same time the manager is satisfied with the results. This makes them willing to cover whatever job related course is assigned to them.  But going out on their own, registering for classes, searching for courses to improve their job, and taking classroom courses to do so, is a rare occurrence unless they are specifically tied to new job title. What we did with our learning distribution system is cut short that distance between learning content and learner for the learning professionals. Months of content integration with complicated LMS now can be used by learning managers to better understand their employees’ needs. Lost hours on low content quality can be used to develop better structured and more engaging content so people can learn with ease, at their own pace. Most importantly, from a user’s perspective, is they do not even have to register for the system – you get what is distributed to you by your manager, team lead to you in your email and launch right from your inbox, regardless of device. Really, as simple as that and managers can still track completions.

Learning today is not just having content. It is about making it accessible and easy to reach. People lose interest really quick and shorting the distance between learner and the learning material is key. It’s like creating a market place, matching supply and demand for knowledge. Ayris serves this exact purpose but better – making it easy and fast for everyone involved.

Provide Online Education as a Sport Exercise with Ayris

The way each one of us see things in life is different. Also the way we all do things in life is different as well and thank God, because every day this creates awesome achievements made by great personalities. We often want to learn more about how these people accomplish these things in order to apply it to our own work. We quickly start to use their technique but soon find out that we come up with mixed results and we struggle to reach our desired goal. The template we chose to follow is somehow not right. So how do great athletes do this? How can their techniques be applied to online learning to enhance learners’ education?

Athletes most often surround themselves with the best equipment they can afford. Educational organizations tend to do the same in order to create great online learning content.  However, if the equipment, or learning solution can only get you so far. At some point it is on the learning organization to properly utilize the new solution. Even the best baseball bat there is and the most expensive football shoes can’t make someone a great baseball or football player. The same it is with learning – even the best LMS or the best tool for creating online courses out there doesn’t ensure improved skills and qualities in employees once it is completed. It will however provide the users, or athletes the means to reach their goals.

Athletes and learners must absorb the specific exercises and the assigned learning content until it is second nature for them. Work ethics and consistency creates the difference in education the same way it does it with sports.  The greatest athletes are magically gifted with talent, but what sets them apart is their willingness to perfect their craft. Whether it be studying film, physical drills to improve their given talent, the best are always improving. If you’re an athlete that is going into a slump, you are going to step back and make some adjustments. That starts with re-evaluating your approach, define possible causes of the issues, try not to repeat it and do the process again and again. How is that related to online education? Great athletes and great employees are bred, their qualities are constantly improving day after day to reach perfection. They simply have to follow their methodology consistently.

Therefore we have to distribute learning content as a sports exercise. Every fitness instructor will tell you “You can’t stay in shape if you do not maintain your body every day”. It is one thing to reach a fit body, the hard part is to maintain it.  The same it is with the mind – you must keep it in shape in order to provide you with added value. As the great Dale Carnegie says “Only knowledge that is used sticks in your mind”.

Ayris, the learning distribution system that we created focuses on this – providing the fastest and easiest way for both teachers (learning professionals, content creators) and learners (students, employees) to exchange knowledge. Providing the environment and facilitating the process between the two parties by providing the supply (learning content from the learning professionals) and the demand (from the students and employees) is existential to improve both. It helps companies in their desire to reach their staff easily and distribute the learning content they need on every day basis to become better employees inside and outside of the office. It does the same for all occupations and professions, it can be used by students, yoga groups, sports coaches, teachers, learning managers and many more to distribute their learning content among their peers. The sky is the limit when it comes to different purposes that Ayris can be used for. Simply create great learning content, let Ayris distribute it, and make sure it is used as a sport exercise for the mind – you will be surprised by the results.

Sharing Knowledge And Building A Corporate Learning Culture With Ayris

We have come to an age where we share everything. It's been part of the human nature for centuries. We help others in order to create a more sustainable environment but a term like "sharing economy" has never been more important in any point in time than now. Sharing knowledge has pioneered the sharing economy, followed by sharing transportation, houses, or home improvement tools. We now have numerous free courses and platforms providing free education, but when we come to closed environments like working groups or companies, we face another challenge - we need to dig deep into our pockets and allocate budgets for having a trusted LMS (Learning Management System).

The question here is how do we retain our employees via improvements and continuous development, in order to strengthen our productivity and reduce unnecessary costs. We can make people go and watch a video on an external platform like YouTube, but how do we track their attendance, views, or actual accomplishments of the assigned job? How do we track progress, how do we extract surveys and follow up on tasks associated with the learning content? How do we offer access to such a service so that it is affordable to every individual or legal entity? Those are the questions that the developers from OutCons asked themselves when they created Ayris.

With Ayris you are in possession of your own content and you are provided with the means to create, distribute and track it as you wish. Every company has such content, this content can range from an internal procedure document or price sheet, to online articles and videos. However, for items that don't go into your LMS, yet you share with employees, it is hard to track and report on actual consumption of the content and knowledge. The worst case scenario is an internal procedures breach which we all try to avoid. To better track all of this, you need to create the necessary learning material which is especially easy with an external link or a storage link (for content uploaded on the platform), and assign it to your target audience. You can associate different types of follow ups on this material like tasks, surveys, and exams to test how well the assigned content has been comprehended by your colleagues, peers, and associates, as well as get detailed reports on this. Going through those steps consistently will enable you to get a comprehensive view of how people are developing and help them succeed and navigate employees in doing so. 

Ayris is perfect for content creators to gain more information on the views on their learning content. We do not ask you to sign contractual obligations to publish materials with us and you are the content owner of everything you create or already own. Ayris is the means for you to distribute. You can even assign a direct link to your own LMS course. Ayris is the right tool serving the purpose of delivering content to the doorstep of your targeted audience. Simple as it should be, no boundaries, no complicated integrations, just easy learning accessible for everyone.

What is Ayris?

Ayris is a cloud-based Learning Distribution System (LDS). It provides an online mobile friendly tool for trainers and teachers to help them perform their training activities and facilitate the learning process via enhanced

Learning Content Delivery

What makes Ayris different from the regular Learning Management System (LMS) is the focus on the learning content delivery. There are a lot of arguments around the push and pull learning methodologies and their effectiveness. And Ayris tries to give the answer by allowing learning leaders to select the most appropriate way of providing learning materials to different kinds of audiences, in different environments with the aim to increase the learning effect. More information about the LDS model can be found here.
Ayris emphasizes on the simplicity of the learning distribution by leaving the learning source issues behind. Ayris can offer various types of learning content from different kinds of content sources keeping this hidden from the learner to ensure smooth and transparent learning process.

The learner is free to select his own learning place. It could be just his mailbox or the Ayris' user interface, or even set of generated Ayris links distributed via text messages, spreadsheets or documents.

Learn without a learning system? What? Is this possible?

Yes, it is! Learners are able to go through the full learning plan without even touching the system directly. Isn't this nice?

Ayris can be used as a standalone learning environment as well as a supplementary layer on top of existing training systems and sources to build a single point of learning experience. Ayris may help shorten the path from the learner to the learning content by unifying blended or not well structured learning environments. It can deliver strongly focused content to the right audience, execute highly flexible training programs and provide the necessary learning achievement measurements.