It goes without saying that 2020 certainly was a year of challenges for all of us in the learning and development profession. Elliott Masie referred to it as a year of pivots and published an e-book about it. Personally, in my 35-plus years of working, I can’t ever remember a time where we were forced to pivot so quickly to ensure the people in our organizations could continue learning and performing in the ever-changing moment. From the shut down of almost all face-to-face learning to the boom of Zoom, Teams and others, we have had to get creative, experiment and find new ways to get messages across that drive new mindsets, behaviors and knowledge.
It is forced innovation, where we are so compelled to act with speed that we take the basics of what we know about the science of learning and apply it in new and different ways — because we have no other option except to do nothing, and we all know that isn’t really an option.
One creative application emerging is the use of text-based learning, an idea that is not actually new. Having worked in the wireless business, I remember when it came out in the late 1990s. In 2006, Masie wrote about the promise of text-based learning after returning from a trip to Africa and seeing how local governments were using it there to educate the population on measures to prevent the spread of AIDS. And today, we all send and receive hundreds of text messages every month when there isn’t time for a phone call. Or, if you are like my college-age kids, it seems to be the only mode of communication!
In the midst of the pandemic, companies like Amazon, Pinterest, Twilio and DuPont and government organizations like the State of California have begun to leverage text-based learning as an essential and complementary part of their delivery methods.
Beyond the ubiquitous access now in place, text-based learning makes a lot of sense as a viable delivery method if done right. Incorporating the latest emerging neuroscience concepts, such as spacing and nudges across multiple days, is showing better retention and overall impact. The possibilities for learning in the flow of work are also a reality given our “always with us” love of our devices. When delivered in small bites across several days, it has proven to be a winning mode of delivery.
DuPont Sustainable Solutions’ L&D team faced the reality that even if their clients could get employees to come back to work safely, there would be wariness about personal safety in the new normal and the threat of a second wave of infection. The DPSS team needed their safety training offerings to be ready for anything and accessible by everyone.
“With COVID coming and everyone working from home, we saw a real challenge with meeting client training needs and addressing important content without actually being in-person,” says Nancy Kondas, the global practice leader for branding and communications at DuPont. “We started to use it internally within DPSS to deliver safety training and actually had a handful of our clients use it as well. Many clients heard about the platform and its capabilities and thought it was a great way to deliver knowledge and sustain capability. It became clear to us that text-based training is an important alternative delivery method for compliance training, especially for those who don’t have connectivity.”
The DuPont team leveraged a learning platform from Massachusetts-based Arist Holdings, a new startup dedicated to text-based learning. The platform enabled DuPont to send text messages with graphics to learners that were at most about two screens long and were spaced across multiple days — as many as 21 days in some cases.
DuPont isn’t alone. The state of California also has seen how text-based learning is a viable delivery channel for learning at scale. In August 2019, Governor Gavin Newsom announced the launch of Listos (Spanish for “Ready”) California, a campaign from the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services to help build resiliency in vulnerable communities at high risk for wildfires and other disasters.
While the team had an ambitious goal and generous resources, they also had a unique challenge: Many of the communities they were trying to reach had limited internet access. According to the Public Policy Institute of California, up to 25 percent of California households don’t have consistent broadband internet; that’s tens of millions of Californians. For vulnerable communities, this figure is even higher.
Again leveraging Arist, the Listos California team built a 7-day text-based learning program for Californians that enabled them to:
- Sign up for county-specific emergency alerts
- Set phone numbers, contacts and evacuation routes
- Pack a “go bag” to be ready at a moment’s notice
- Create stay boxes for shelter in place
- Encourage friends and neighbors to participate and stay safe
In a conscious move to ensure inclusion, the team also translated the text-based learning into Spanish, Tagalog, Cantonese, Vietnamese and Korean.
“Making disaster preparedness accessible to everyone is at the heart of the Listos California campaign, and now critical information that is accessible and in language will literally be available from the power of your personal cell phone,” says Justin Knighten, co-chair of Listos California.
An approach like text-based learning was useful for California because it’s an easy way to reach tens of thousands of remote learners, and the content is simple enough that it can be reformatted or translated. The same undertaking with rich media or traditional e-learning tools would be far more complex and difficult to execute consistently, not to mention more challenging for the learners to access.
What does the future hold for text-based learning? It is apparent that enterprises are beginning to see it as a viable channel for delivery to reach large audiences in an efficient way. Neuroscience points to concepts like spacing and brevity as key elements of how people really learn. More and more learners are looking to learn in the flow of work.
As Masie told me recently, “I think text-based learning is one of the most undervalued delivery methods. The fact that nearly all of us have the device in our hands at any moment creates a huge opportunity for the learning professional to directly engage with learners and get feedback. Every organization should have it somewhere in their delivery strategy.”
