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Big


solution to data overload? Big data! Big data is one of the most talked about innovations of the 21st century. Most businesses are talking about it but the majority are yet to fully embrace the concept. By not acknowledging big data, businesses are missing out on significant improvements – the potential to answer any number of questions and dramatically increase productivity and decision- making and improve customer retention. At Skillsoft, more than 19 million people have learned from around 60,000 of our assets to date. Much of the data that has been generated is in the past – that’s more than 15 years’ worth of detailed data. When we decided that the time had come to explore our data, we initially thought about adopting a research-led approach by working with students and educational institutions. Skillsoft is a business, however, and it needs to work with other practising businesses. That’s why we decided to partner with IBM for a joint-development agreement. It takes things beyond basic ‘number-crunching’


A


t Skillsoft, we know that employees are constantly bombarded by data and interruption – texts, voice mails, conference calls, meetings and emails. Our


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opportunity


John Ambrose on how big data is transforming the learning landscape


activities because the organisation focuses on customers’ and business’ operations. We’re excited to have a joint-development


agreement with IBM where we’ll build a powerful, new big data engine that will enable us to optimise e-learning experiences and uncover new learning patterns, which can be applied immediately so that the system is continually improving. Our aim is to make the learning experience better for our customers. Key components of our joint effort with IBM include:


• Engagement engine – mine usage patterns to understand users’ evolving interaction preferences in order to identify optimal times and channels for engagement with users. • Recommendations engine – create personalised learning recommendations leveraging user-content interactions, content ontologies and temporal consumption patterns. • Visualisation techniques – to provide visual context for the recommendations to explain to the user why certain personalised content recommendations are being made along three different dimensions: people similar to the user liked this content, content similar to content the user liked, and popular content. Big data is one of the most exciting business developments of the modern age, and the insight it can provide can really help the


learning industry. It’s a topic that plenty of people are talking about it, but few are actually talking about the real business benefits of investing in the technology. There is too much focus on marketing analytics and businesses are missing out on a powerful means to drive business intelligence. Big data is a big opportunity and ignoring it could result in businesses failing behind their competitors. n


John Ambrose, senior vice president, strategy and corporate development at Skillsoft, is speaking more on this subject at the World of Learning on 30 September. Skillsoft will be based in the VIP Lounge on both days of World of Learning.


Learning Magazine


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