Originally published May 17, 2019In the modern workplace, employees are encouraged to learn quickly and apply new information efficiently to solve problems. However, traditional onboarding practices are still a part of the organizations where employees work. These traditional methods vary from multi-day in-person sessions to lengthy and potentially isolating online learning courses that are difficult to navigate. However, by carefully planning the learning content that new hires will engage with, the onboarding experience can help create a culture of continuous learning within the organization. Continuous learning culture is important because employees use knowledge to expand their skillsets, which lets them adapt professionally. Easy adaptation then helps the organization respond to changing professional environments and industry developments. Continuous Learning Culture is achieved by implementing bite-sized learning, meaningful assessment opportunities, and incentivization of employee performance in the onboarding process. Using bite-sized learning to capture and keep employee attention By changing more traditional onboarding events into multiple short, continuously available pieces of online learning, workplace learning begins to match existing company workflows. Some tips for making bite-sized learning: Online learning should be accessible on mobile and stay under 20 minutes per learning event.Use scenarios found in your workplace as the foundation to your learning activities or events instead of being theory-based. Employees can then remember and use information more effectively when the need arises.Examples of bite-sized learning in Brightspace: FAQ discussion boards where new hires can engage with existing employees to get answers to common questions.Short eLearning modules, videos, or infographics available for new hire at the point of need hosted on D2L’s responsive platform, Brightspace. Use meaningful, ongoing assessment so learners know how they’re progressing No one likes to be in the dark in their first few weeks of a new job! Use more quick, formative assessments at a higher frequency to help new employees understand where they are on their path to job proficiency, and to help them pass compliance courses with flying colours the first time. Some tips for making meaningful, ongoing assessments: Meaningful assessments are assessments that help achieve business goals. So, to write meaningful assessments, first create great Learning Objectives that help you to reach Business Goals. Read more about achieving business goals with meaningful learning objectives. Once you have great Learning Objectives, you can create quiz questions, discussions, and other assessments that achieve the objectives and measure what you want to measure. If learners already know content, let them skip it. Buck the trend and try a quiz before the content for once, instead of putting it at the end of the module; flipping the approach gets learners to sit up and pay attention. Little do they know you set up Release Conditions in Brightspace so they only review the module content mapped to the questions they got wrong on the quiz!Examples of ongoing assessments in Brightspace: Use the Quizzing Tool to incorporate ungraded tests into courses at regular intervals.Incentivized performance and participation Respect the time new hires are putting into their learning by incentivizing them to participate. This can also apply to existing employees, not just new hires. By incentivizing existing employees to assist new hires, you are creating a self-sustaining culture of learning in the workplace that can take some of the burden off of HR or the L&D team. Some tips for incentivizing performance: Prizes or awards should be tied to tangible incentives in the workplace to make them worthwhile for learners.You can incentivize employees for completing extra training or achieving high grades on existing training, among a host of other metrics.By making it obvious that there are incentives from the beginning, employees will be more likely to engage with training and learning from the beginning; don’t make the main prizes unexpected. Introduce small, unexpected prizes to surprise and delight employees!Examples of incentivizing performance in Brightspace Create discussion forums for employees on any topic that maps to a Learning Objective you want new hires to accomplish. Employees can upvote posts in the forum on Brightspace. The employee with the most upvotes on their post can receive a prize at work for having the top post that month.Create a badge for the employee that completes the most training modules that month, with a demonstrated proficiency of over 80% (use data in Brightspace to evaluate this performance). If you need more help with developing a great onboarding journey that creates a culture of learning in your organization, get in touch!