Everyone needs a little academy time

We’re big fans of just getting on and doing things. That’s how we started. And when we did, with a few people in the same room, it was pretty straightforward to communicate a best practice, insight, new idea, or lesson learned. Now we’re over 50 employees and associates, over several locations and time zones. All the more reason to make sure we’re sharing, there’s so much more to share.  But it takes a little more effort – and technology – to make that happen

How do we share? Well, we’ve put a lot of time and effort into building the Kineo Academy. Put simply, it’s where we share and communicate our ideas and information. It has knowledge, communication, community and e-learning at its core. It’s an online resource everyone here is familiar with. It’s also how we help new staff and associates integrate into the team and get productive at Kineo speed – no matter where they are in the world.

E-learning for the people, by the people….

We’ve written elsewhere that e-learning generally works on scale. Rapid e-learning bends that rule, making it more viable for niche audiences. Having lots of people in the organisation who are passionate about e-learning and can design and build it really well and really fast…well, it’d seem downright rude not to use e-learning, wouldn’t it? So if there’s a new process or tool, an early task is to develop some e-learning to support it and put in the Academy.

We have developed e-learning for our values, how to use various systems and authoring tools, and this is a key part of the academy. As you might expect, there’s no two hour monoliths here – we’re talking 5-10 minute hit and run rapid modules. Our designers are quite critical of anything that drags on a bit too long, you’ll understand….

The Kineo Academy includes lots of resources you would find on a traditional intranet such as online forms, templates and the good old telephone list. Spending time with these resources is a key part of induction to Kineo now.

But the thing that really makes it work is bigger than the sum of its parts – the learning community. We believe that all our people have great ideas, but how do you capture them in a usable form? People at work naturally help each other but how can you make use of this to build up searchable knowledge bases? And with all the information out there, is it possible to keep your learners up to date with targeted news without even writing the content? We think so. We’ve made forums, wikis and RSS feeds work for us. Have a look at the screenshots to see how we’ve done it. If you like the idea, be quite encouraged – making this happen in your organisation is easier than you think.

Spend money? So last century...

Being Kineo, we reviewed over 300 proposals from fancy LMS providers and intranet design agencies, before choosing a particularly expensive solution from…nah, not really. It’s all open source of course – in this case Moodle. An organisation on our scale doesn’t need to pay for these kinds of tools. But even when we’re 5,000 people, open source will be our choice.  There are plenty of great free tools out there – it doesn’t make sense for us to spend on the infrastructure, but we do spend time designing and then critically supporting it. To do this you need champions for key areas, such as design, and rapid tools – and you need to make it the place where great ideas live in the organisation, not where they go to die.

We’ve helped ourselves…how about you?

We’re sharing some pointers about our Kineo Academy, because 1. We’re might proud of it. 2, We believe in open source, the potential of communities, and that web 2.0 and rapid e-learning can power them – and we want to show that we practice what we preach, and 3. maybe we can help you do something similar for your organisation. Interested in how open source tools can power your communities? Get in touch, we’re happy to help.