As you all know, in 2014, the world gifted us with perhaps the greatest movie ever made about the HR world and its inherent challenges. And that movie, obviously, is Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar.

But for those of you who happen to think that seems like a stretch, it’s because you’re right, no, let me reiterate this is a giant stretch, but bear with me. Since there aren’t really any blockbuster HR movies, we’ve got to claim what we can. The good news is that there’s some actual overlap.

Think about it—as the dust storms of your day settle in on your planet of ever dwindling resources, you end up having to time travel through the unknown to save your employees from the knowledge gaps that will lead to their sure demise. But the movie does a fantastic job at predicting our plausible future.

Much like our hero stumbles into a space that lets him transcend time and the reach of our limitations, current trends in online learning are letting us do the same. Gosh, re-reading this I seem ridiculous. You’ll see what I mean in our three takeaways below.

What Is Online Learning Allowing Us to Do?

Online learning has become far more than just watching peaceful videos about learning to paint a garden that looks pretty good when you squint from far away. Making training or lessons available online gives employees and students the ability to personalize their curriculum. Effectually meeting them right where they are today. Which is hopefully at their desk or they’re totally fired, right?

But when your employees can watch interactive and involved videos on their own time, they can stop and repeat any sentence or concept as much as they need. And the ability to make presentations more modular means employees can skip over sections they might already understand, instead spending their time learning more relevant skills.

In addition to personalization, online learning gives you the ability to accurately measure any trends in knowledge gaps—and any lingering blind spots. No matter how aware of your surroundings you feel, blind spots will always exist for even the most skilled of drivers.

When you can see the progress employees are making in real time, and the specific areas where people are getting confused, you can use more of your time to respond to those blind spots with more efficient and tailored insight. It’s like finally breaking up with one-sided lectures in favour of more interpersonal guidance. And that interpersonal guidance is really smart and likes to rock climb... and rides a motorcycle to work.

Perhaps most importantly, online learning tears down the walls that can exist between collaborative communities—just without the unnecessary help of David Hasselhoff. Being able to learn from experts on a subject in a global community means standing on the shoulders of giants that have already done the heavier lifting for you.

If you give employees the time to learn something new and relevant every day, the value they add to the company will follow the same trajectory of their happiness with the company. And that usually translates to employees sticking around a little longer. Which is going to look pretty good in your quarterly review. And, you know, they’ll look pretty good themselves.

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Three reasons Interstellar was the HR blockbuster of 2014

What if every interaction you have had with a client was publicly listed on social media? It’s a scary thought right? Your every word for the world to see! Well to be honest, this isn’t too far from the truth. Social media is defining how companies interact with their clientele more and more and it is proving to be very powerful in making or breaking a company.

Well let’s imagine your expectations were exceeded in your last interaction with a support team. This customer service representative didn’t just fix your problem, they smashed it out of the ballpark! Doesn’t that make you want to tell someone? On the flip side, if you have just had a negative experience, that certainly makes you want to tell someone right? Why put someone else through that negative experience that you’ve just had! Well with social media within a couple of minutes the world can know. This means EVERYONE can find out what sort of company you really are and word travels fast!

So what are you doing to use this to your advantage?

What if I told you providing an awesome experience lies simply with a mindset, seems simple right? Instead of approaching every interaction expecting a problem, why don’t you think of how you can change that person’s day? Instead of just giving instructions or pointing out what to do, go the extra mile and walk them through it step by step. This could be the difference between a negative and positive experience. My suggestion, keep a note on your desk with a simple reminder, “Every interaction I make will be displayed for the world to see”. If you keep that in mind, I can guarantee you your mindset will change. You will even view your clients/customers differently. No longer will you remember them as “that guy with the payment problem” or “the lady who thinks everything is a problem”. You may actually want to learn their names, learn what they do, all of this can aid your interactions.

The defining moment in the new age of customer experience I believe, is going from dealing with a problem, to assisting a real life person. These have two very different meanings and should redefine how you do business.

Whether you like it or not your company is being reflected by every little experience. Every client/customer has a voice, use them to your advantage!

Einstein was known for a fair share of important things. To this day, we use him as a nickname to denote intelligence, or sarcastically when someone’s made a mistake. He discovered the theory of relativity, is the father of one of the two branches of modern physics, and inspired decades of very interesting hair.

But he’s also known for following quote that’s often falsely attributed to him. If you read a self-help book in the early 90s, or have ever been on the internet, you’ll probably know the one.

“Everyone is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”

Even though this quote wasn’t penned by our guy above, there’s as much truth here as there is fallacy. It does a great job of illustrating the value of diverse talent. But we also tend to use it as an excuse when we struggle with new information.

There are certain skills everyone needs to learn in the workplace—often being asked to climb a tree. But maybe the fish really sucks at climbing a tree because they haven’t been given both the time and resources they need to climb the three? Since there isn’t a marine biologist nearby, let’s talk about what online learning is doing to help that fish make the climb.

The exciting thing about e-learning comes down to the response from millions of students and viewers worldwide.

Khan Academy is an example of one of the earlier organizations that’s seen so much success. And their humble start began when a hedge fund analyst recorded some personalized lectures for his extended family. (You know, presumably to help them fall asleep).

After posting those videos online, people slowly started to stumble on them online in a similar way we just fall into something like this. Even more shockingly, they were actually excited about math. The rest is history. So what made this approach so appealing? Let’s tackle that in three points below.

The ability to pause and repeat ideas, review things they should have known weeks or years ago, all at a self-guided pace helps to eliminate knowledge gaps altogether. Even teachers have started to reap the rewards of online learning with their students.

By having students watch personalized lectures at home, it frees up the time spent in class to do all their homework at school. Suddenly, students are getting the one-on-one time they need to succeed. And teachers can even have real-time data that shows them how much time their students are spending on each problem or video. Imagine the impact that has at a school.

Imagine the impact that could have at work.

2. Adapt Learning to Meet the Needs of the Learner

Think back to your awkward days in school. That hairdo you thought was so great? Your braces. Yeah, you were looking good.

Despite your best efforts to look like this, how many times did a class move on whether or not you got the material? While you might have managed to hang on, some students get left behind when those blind spots accumulate. Which solves the mystery of that one student that was totally brilliant that decided to live on a train for the rest of their lives.

Whether students get a good or bad grade—the class usually moves with or without them. The same thing can happen at work. Online learning takes a different approach. Instead of moving ahead without knowing the ins and outs, e-learning doesn’t leave you behind until you’ve mastered the information. How many of us would know how to ride a bike if our parents had moved on after two weeks? But here you are now, never forgetting how it all works. The epitome of that saying. All because you got to stay on and fall off until it finally stuck.

Our current system can often discourage experimentation and failure but does not expect mastery.

We need to encourage experimentation and failure with the expectation of mastery.

3. Transferring Ownership of the Learning

Dead Poets Society resonates with so many people because it was all about his teacher getting his students out of the book. And, you know, although he kind of sort of got fired for it, that’s not the sort of world we live in today. Once students or employees feel like the have a full grasp on something in their own time, they’re going to be that much more confident—and capable—in contributing ideas that lead to important breakthroughs and innovations.

Knowing when employees had to pause a video, how much time they spent watching it or training. Knowing exactly what they’re spending their time learning, what they’re understanding, and what they’re struggling with. That gives you the kind of power, confidence, and precision that would make doctors mistake you for a surgeon. Though, we’d recommend not taking them up on that offer.

When students have the resources and time they need to stick with something until they get it, what we’re starting to see is that those that used to appear slower actually tend to speed up after they’ve mastered a principle they’re struggling with. Suddenly, they look gifted. Or rather, we make the discovery that they were gifted all along.

Three ways Einstein has helped online learning

Juliana was anxious. She had jumped from a plane only three times in the last three years. Her friends needed her now. One of the members of their 4-Way skydiving team, in the last minute, couldn't participate in the Brazilian national skydiving competition. So, they turned to Juliana for filling in. With just a few hours of actual team practice, they went over the choreography movements on the ground just before climbing on the plane to perform their first official jump of the competition. They nailed it. At the end of the day, Juliana Sé and the team were Brazilian national champions.

In the same day, on the other side of the world, oblivious to what was happening to my cousin Juliana, I was listening to the audio book "The Rise of Superman" by Steven Kotler. The book is centered around explaining the concept of 'flow', especially among extreme sports professionals. "In positive psychology, flow, also known as the zone, is the mental state of operation in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity". In his book, Kotler goes on to explain the rise of super athletes that are achieving seemingly impossible feats, breaking records more and more, faster and faster, and younger and younger in current times. These extreme athletes are performing stunts and achieving results that the previous generation of athletes deemed impossible, only to be then superseded by the next generation of athletes in a faster, exponential cycle. Kotler explained that these athletes are more and more accessing the state of flow, which enables them to perform perfectly in circumstances that they themselves never practiced specifically for.

But how do younger and younger people are being able to break world records and accomplish impossible feats faster and faster? Kotler mentions that, due to the advances in positive psychology, people are better understanding and practicing how to get to this state. He also gives a hint about the Roger Bannister Effect but, in my opinion, he falls just a little short in disclosing the real catalyst for the rise of super people: online video.

Chris Anderson, curator of TED, perfectly understands and explains the power of online video in breaking barriers and pushing innovation and performance forward (see his TED talk below). Basically, online videos allow for people to publish their feats to millions of others to watch. In that audience, people mirror and evolve from what they have watched and, in turn, publish their own videos. This creates a virtuous cycle that enables rapid evolution of any sport, art or activity. Online video capitalizes on the Roger Bannister Effect, allowing people to erase the mental blocker that deems a certain performance "impossible". It gives people real examples of what can be achieved and helps them trigger and exercise their mirror neurons, so, when they get into flow, they can achieve similar and greater feats.

But what all this has to do with learning and corporate training? Everything. Research on mirror neurons have shown that watching someone perform an activity fires the same neurons that would fire if the person was doing the activity themselves. This means that video examples of a well done activity should be one of the most effective learning tools available for mass training. Chris Anderson observes that our brains have been trained for millennia for learning by watching and replicating, while written or just explanatory teaching has been in effect for just the last few centuries. Video examples have the benefit of capturing the best practices while conveying all the nuances of nonverbal communication, with the added benefit that they can be replayed over and over again. And this is not only tied to extreme sports. It works with any human activity or behavior, being it in sports, arts, business or in the personal arena.

So, to uncover a bit more of Juliana's feat, she had been top in her sport before retiring to raise her son some years ago. She had won several national and international titles in other modalities and also was one of the people responsible for developing the skydiving wind tunnel technology currently used to speed up skydive learning worldwide. The team was also top in their sport, having won over a dozen national and international titles. But Juliana was out of practice and barely trained the movements with her recent teammates in advance. However, her partner was one of the team members and she had watched the practice videos many times just prior to the event, visualising her part in it. When the time came, she got into flow and her body simply knew what it needed to do. And she then became a national champion of another modality that day.

Flow, online video and corporate training

Gone are the days of being sent away from the office for days on end to get your staff trained. In todays society we do everything from banking to shopping online, so why not save time and money by training your team online too. Great! But what about keeping your team engaged during the process, won’t they get bored and skim over the material?

Anyone can open up a training program and click next through to the quiz page, but how many of those people have learned something from the experience? If your team are not engaged with the content, you could be left open to mistakes that could cost you substantial amounts of time and money.  One of the most important parts of compiling any training programs on or offline is keeping your team learning and excited about the experience.

It’s not hard to put together an engaging online training experience, and we are going to take a look at some great tips on how to create a fun and rewarding experience for both you, and your team.

There is nothing worse that sitting through a 3-hour long program only to find out that there was half an hour of material relevant to your position. With the use of a good learning management system, you can now easily create fully customizable courses in no time at all. Break your training program up into a series of shorter modules that can be slotted into a range of programs so your team only needs to complete the sections that are relevant to them. This not only keeps your staff more engaged, but gets your team back to work quicker saving you time and money.

Every night people head home and turn on their TV. Why? Because they like stories. Not only that, by presenting information in a story format it helps the student to develop logical connections between information, and increases the ability to remember details throughout the process. Stories are great for business or a group of students due to the fact that they can be easily molded around different concepts to create a range of scenarios relevant to your learning area.

When you walking into to training and get handed what feels like a ream of paper at the time, you are immediately disheartened. With the amount of technology available in the world today, it’s crazy to not take advantage of the options available and mix up your program. There are a number of things that you can incorporate, from video interviews and role playing, through to audio segment and interactive testing. The options are all there and easy to use, so make the most of them and mix things up!

In a world where we the average attention span is growing shorter and shorter, it’s harder than every to hold a student’s attention in the classroom. Rather than try to push through, why not adapt your program to suit the modern way of consuming information. Breaking your material up into a series of short modules give the impression that the student is moving quickly through the program and keeps them engaged. Also, by staggering your program and only setting targets of a few modules a week keeps the program moving, and lets the student absorb the information without being overloaded and drawn away from their primary role for large periods of time.

There aren’t many better motivators for people than turning something into a competition and putting some rewards in place. Everyone loves winning something no matter how big, or small the rewards. This can be as simple as starting a program where the team that completes the most modules with the highest average test score wins a free lunch, or an social outing at the end of the month. Everyone loves winning something, and that can be coupled with building some great team culture along the way then everybody wins!

I hope these tips have been helpful with planning your next training program. Remember an engaged team is an educated and efficient team!

How to create an engaging online training program

It is a fact that, for all well performing organizations, developing employees isn't just a HR problem anymore. It is an organization-wide strategic challenge directly tied to overall organizational performance and growth. However, the subject is so hard, convoluted and filled with deep change that most people find daunting just to start thinking about how to tackle it.

Let's take an example close to my heart: Customer Service. How would you develop your Customer Service Team to be among the top in the world? One that consistently promotes excellent service as well as lasting positive memories at every customer interaction? The basis for everything is the organizational culture. You have to properly define meaningful core values, hire people with those core values, consistently incentivize positive behaviour and set a way of measuring progress towards that objective. However these initiatives mean nothing if you don't train and constantly develop the team towards what you consider excellent customer service. They need to become experts in areas such as: how to properly listen to the customer, probing for the real problem behind complex situations, communicating in a very effective manner and with amazing rapport with each client, and easily navigating and leveraging your organization's systems and processes with the aim of creating the much sought-after positive outcome with a lasting memory for the client.

At our time and age, technology plays an important role in this. But how should you use technology to promote this deep important learning in as many people in the Customer Service Team (or any other part of your organization) as you can? Training Managers tend to gravitate between thinking in terms of instructor-led, face to face training versus online training. However, there are two larger aspects to consider before that: Structured versus Unstructured Learning. Structured learning happens in both face-to-face training and online training, and so as unstructured learning.

In structured learning, information is presented in a structured manner (live presentations, offline slides, videos, documents, books, etc.), learning activities are done as directed and assessments are applied to check if the employee has learned what has been intended to be learnt. This is the traditional approach.

Some people would argue that unstructured learning is more effective. These are the learn-on-the-job approaches and happen with the natural experiences and interactions the employee has. Examples for enabling more unstructured learning in an organization would be: to assign a peer coach or shadowing experiences, create knowledge bases and making it easy to search and access it when the need arises, job rotations, having an active online internal social network and instant messaging where everyone can help everyone, provide collaborative online spaces where information is presented as it is being developed; and actually doing the job, when employees enquire for knowledge with peers as the need arises (if the work environment is set as open and accepting).

How to take advantage of all what technology promotes in order to enable a better blend of structured and unstructured learning, and better overall training and development results?

Online Courses on Best Practices and Actual Application

Boost Course Completion on Social Networks

These are just 3 quick examples that allow for using technology to blend structured and unstructured learning in the work environment. Here at Go1, we are always thinking about the future of learning in the corporate environment and how to leverage technology to make it more effective and fruitful for both the organization and the individual. We are always internally experimenting with new ways of tackling these types of challenges. At the moment we have some very interesting internal projects (a secret for now), aimed exactly tackling and leveraging the merge of structured and unstructured learning. Keep tuned and check our blog in the future for news about it.

Structured vs unstructured learning in the workplace

Help us to make the next Go1 release our best yet by joining our Early Release Program! Whether you are a Go1 expert or you’re new to the platform, we are looking for users who are passionate about the Go1 experience and want to help us to develop the best training programs and new features possible.

By joining the early release program, you will get the opportunity to test drive some of our exciting new features, product improvements and much more, all before it is released to the general public. You will also get the chance to provide us with valuable feed back on the platform which will not only improve your experience, but help to shape Go1 for all of our users.

To join the Go1 early release program, please contact us at support@go1.com, and we will get you set up!

We know that you already love Go1, but that doesn't mean that can't keep improving our product to make your experience even better! Each month we will be releasing new product updates that will help to improve our service and enhance your training experience.

To make things easier for you, all updates will automatically activated for you so you always have the latest tools at your fingertips.

If you have any suggestions on to improve Go1, so that we can make your learning experience as effective as possible, please let us know! [Include link to contact relevant team member]

Students can now see a list of all assessments and items they need to complete from all enrolled courses in one location.

Admin users can now create a Learning Pathway so that students can either pursue that pathway if it's a part of their role, or explore it out of pure interest.

Courses may or may not need to be done in a specific order for eg. Course A > Course B > Course C.

If it does need Courses to be completed in a specific order then it works the same way that module completion does, e.g. having completed Course B outside of the learning path should already mark Course B as complete inside the learning path.

Admins can now Import a CSV of AVETMISS information for students.

Admins can now setup dependency settings for courses, modules and quizzes, requiring students to complete Module A before being able to enroll into Module B.

Admins are now able to customise vocabularies and terms (taxonomy)

Implementation of auth0 service enabling easy configuration for SSO using services such as Office365, ActiveDirectory, Google, and many more.

Username field on sign in page is now case-insensitive

New marking options are now available for long answer questions

Students can view profile rather than only edit details

The menu has been redesigned along with other interface elements for better student user experience

Multiple display and functional improvements have been added to front facing website features

A range of speed, functional and display enhancements  have been added to the report builder

A range of speed, functional and display enhancements have been added to courses

A range of speed, functional and display enhancements have been added to workshops

A range of speed, functional and display enhancements have been to quizzes

The ability to define how many workshops apply to module completion in cases where not all modules are required for completion

If a certificate is not uploaded, 'Download Certificate' button is not displayed

Students can now see the status of all courses in their Dashboard/My Courses

Date fields now default to null rather than an obscure date

'Average' option is now available in histogram report builder

Certificates are now automatically emailed to student upon completion of a course

You can now embed an audio file to play in a quiz question

If you would like any additional information on any of the above listed features or enhancements, please do not hesitate in contacting us.

If you work for a large company that hasn't implemented a learning management system, chances are your company is not a leader in your industry. Enterprises around the world are integrating LMS at a dramatic rate.

Maybe you've only briefly heard of LMS and aren't sure how one can benefit your firm. This article will clear all that up, as we share some of the top factors that lead our clients to use our LMS.

LMS Allows You to Create an Excellent Company Culture
A strong company culture inspires innovation and growth. Everyone wants to work for a company with a great culture. That's why people are willing to take jobs for less money at companies like Google, where they can be part of a culture they believe in.
An effective way to build a strong company culture is to invest in the knowledge and training of employees. When a company can provide additional value to a person's life, besides their paycheck, it keeps them motivated and focused on the big picture.

LMS Helps Attract and Maintain Quality Staff
The most talented employees want to work for the best companies. Top performers don't stick around at companies that don't value them. Too many companies overlook this aspect and it hurts them in the long run.
Good employees aren't just looking for a big salary -- they want to work for a company that they can grow with. Just think about it, what kind of employees are you going to attract if you only compete on salary? Top performers will always have high-paying options, but finding a company that they love to work for is rare.

LMS Improves Your Competitive Advantage
Technology is evolving at an exponential rate, along with the international marketplace. Leading enterprises can't afford to play catch-up, they need to stay ahead of the curve. Traditionally, large companies have been notorious for adapting slowly, but that's starting to change.
Learning management systems allow a company to identify top performers early on and move them into senior roles quicker. This removes a lot of the office politics that typically gets in the way of identifying the best young talent in an organization. It also creates an environment that rewards performance, which is ideal for maintaining a competitive edge.

LMS Makes Compliance More Convenient
In many industries compliance is a necessary evil. But that doesn't mean it has to be as much of a hassle as it usually is. By implementing a LMS your company can store all of its compliance training materials in one place, you can set timelines for completion, and it takes the hassle out of creating reports.
Moving forward, compliance through LMS will be standard due to its ease of use and saved labor hours. No company would ever want to return to the old way of handling compliance after using a solid LMS. Quite the opposite actually, the market for LMS is rapidly expanding due to increased demand. Is your company on board yet?

The general disdain for Blackboard among students and professors is well-known. Being the major player in the LMS world led many universities to select them by default. But the landscape has changed in recent years and forward-thinking universities are finally moving on.


It's easy to jump on the bandwagon and bash the company at the top, but sometimes the criticism is justified. In this case, Blackboard's product simply sucks and the people have spoken. Blackboard's reluctance to evolve presented a valuable opportunity for competitors -- one that several have capitalized on.

Browser compatibility issues
One of the biggest complaints for years was the lack of compatibility with Chrome. While Blackboard has done their best to remedy this, many users still report random bugs when taking quizzes in Chrome. You'd think they would be motivated to fix this by now, after all, Chrome is the most widely used web browser today.

A clunky interface
Ten years ago all interfaces were clunky. But we've come a long way since then and sadly, Blackboard hasn't. Despite being one of the most requested updates, Blackboard has yet to implement a drag n' drop feature.
Overall the system feels very slow and rigid, like an old PC. Users complain of too many warning screens and required steps to handle basic tasks, such as moving an item from a folder to subfolder. Newer LMS are smooth and operate like you would expect software in 2015 to run.

Blackboard isn't intuitive
Perhaps the best thing about every new software program and tech gadget that's been released in recent memory is their intuitive nature. Unfortunately, Blackboard never got the memo about this trend.
Changing available options for students requires a number of "switches" that are not intuitively laid out. If you don't get the right combination, that particular feature doesn't work at all. The process can be tedious to say the least.

Doesn't prevent cut/paste in quizzes
Alternative LMS wised up to this quickly. Counting on the honor system for not sharing quiz answers hasn't proved to be reliable, which is why other programs don't allow a student to cut and paste from within the quiz. Blackboard still hasn't figured this one out.

Dated grade center
Would you use an internet browser that didn't allow multiple tabs in this day and age? Of course not. Not allowing the grade center in Blackboard to be opened in its own browser tab is inconvenient and time-consuming for teachers who already spend hours grading assignments.

Blackboard is slow to adapt
Blackboard continually reminds shareholders that they are investing heavily in R&D, but the customers aren't buying it. Blackboard waited too long to start revamping their system and now they are struggling to keep up with the newer, more innovative companies in this space.
Perhaps they took their lead in the market for granted, or maybe they just don't have what it takes to deliver what consumers want. Either way, the damage is done and savvy universities are taking their business to companies that put usability first and marketing second. Is your university living in the past or looking ahead to the future?

Why Blackboard isn’t at the top of the class

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