Persona on air

Yaiza Temprado, Senior Engineering Manager

She’s currently driving a B2B stream at Busuu, the world’s largest community for language learning.

Along with making the Busuu platform increasingly compelling for businesses and managing B2B platform integrations, Yaiza provides guidance and assistance to fellow colleagues, so they are on firm ground growing professionally and achieving exceptional results.

When a vendor met a client for the interview

Oxagile, an EdTech software services provider, endeavors to establish the two-way trust relationship with all of their clients. It helps make it a pleasure to not only do successful business with them, but also reflect on what’s going on in the business domain arena. It’s a great way to keep the finger on the pulse, while getting to know their partners better.

Busuu is no exception. A while ago, Oxagile had a call with Yaiza not to discuss project updates, but to encourage her to disclose some secrets of either B2B eLearning or personal success.

Yaiza Temprado was adverting to simple things that never cease to bother EdTech businesses caring about their brand image, strategic vectors, process effectiveness, or employee growth.

Corporate learning trends – all shaped by the needs of ease of use and tailored approaches

Integrations

The bigger our clients are, the higher their anticipations from smooth integration with our solution tend to be. When we’re just one of the handful of eLearning service providers for our customer, the latter doesn’t want to spend time and effort switching between the systems. Instead, they’re waiting to have all the required info and features, from APIs to single-sign-on services, available with one single click. And the urge to give our clients this opportunity is what we really put emphasis on right now.

Microlearning

Equally attractive for B2B and B2C segments, the concept of microlearning, or absorbing smaller-size pieces of learning along the training path, is picking up steam. Let’s say you’re going to master level A1 in Spanish. Traditionally, the course will take you six months, which is mentally exhausting, not saying that our attention decreases as the time goes by. So, we’re cutting the course into smaller pieces.

Customized learning paths

Do you know what one of the most frequent learning requests from businesses is? They’re daily asking for a customized learning path, tailored specifically for their students, instead of a generic experience. And that’s where artificial intelligence might be instrumental.

Specifically, chatbots are beating social anxiety – when learners feel ill at ease, while talking to someone using a language they don’t know, speaking with a machine is likely to eliminate the embarrassment. And at this very time, the B2B market finds AI attractive because of its much lower rates in comparison with the hours of a teacher’s involvement. Seems like a nice deal, both in terms of price and learner comfort.

Analytics

Not long ago, it was enough for market players to partner with an eLearning software provider to make sure they’ve made a sound investment of their money, aiming to cover corporate learning needs.

Today, they want data-driven proofs that this collaboration is worth the investment, therefore, analytics is changing the role from an extra value to a must-have. As soon as the objectives of eLearning software analytics are twofold, let me take a separate look at each.

The power of analytics to estimate ROI and learning efficacy

One thing is analytics for a user. Each learner needs evidence of their progress, and that’s where a key difference between B2B and B2C lies. While there are lots of casual learners throughout the B2C world (imagine a guy at the bus station, entering a language learning mobile app to reduce waiting time with a quick English quiz), B2B is marked by more intent students driven by the desire to advance in their careers or meet managers’ expectations.

To convince these goal-oriented trainees that they’re gradually progressing, we need to make it crystal clear for them. And here the data accumulated in vivid reports is the best indicator speaking for itself.

But how can businesses know their investment is worthwhile? Here comes another dimension of analytics that eLearning software providers should introduce within their solution. Enterprises are much happier having access to information at the top of their fingers, which shows the effectiveness of ROI. And it’s not about the multitude of graphs – they’re longing for simple, concise insights on whether they’re investing right.

Talking Busuu

While the majority of our competitors are making a B2C product the cornerstone of their offering, we’re putting efforts into making a fairly mature B2B solution for our big clients. In addition to seamless integrations, single sign-on services, standardized APIs, meaningful reporting – all just mentioned during the EdTech trends talk – we’re focused on self-service.

The idea behind it is to declare our client the king of the system. They are welcome to do whatever they need there, get all requested data in two clicks, and manage their learners in a variety of ways, while eliminating the middle layer or reducing it to the bare minimum.

The ability to self-serve is paramount for the enterprise representatives who prefer to quickly get what’s needed for a call or a meeting on their own, without overcommunication and all the associated anxiety.

Getting through LMS integration hurdles and headaches

What we’re trying to do now is to standardize the processes as much as possible. This is pretty much aligned with the big companies’ strategies, as they are also prone to follow certain standards rather than search for unique solutions that are tricky to maintain. Among the examples is SAML 2.0 used for a single-sign one by 95% of enterprises.

While talking about self-serve run automation, we refer to a SCIM protocol for managing identity data implemented so far. Put it simply, if someone leaves the company, he or she is magically removed from the learning platform, which reduces the maintenance effort on the business user side.

As the adoption of SCIM is looking good, we’re moving on in this very direction, cutting down or automating integrations to the max.

Implicit factors to nurture the success of businesses

#1. Collaboration. “remind yourself that no one knows everything.”

For me, the only way to collaborate effectively is to get all the voices in the same room. When we’re thinking about the things we’ll have to tackle during the next few months, this is not about separate discussions between product leaders, tech specialists, or business strategists, as the isolation doesn’t work. We all get together for a few hours to hear what problems bother business representatives, dive deeper into product approaches, and get some input from the technology side.

It hardly sounds like rocket science, but putting business, tech, and product specifics together is the only way to go ahead, whatever strategic milestone you’re trying to hit.

#2. Coaching. “It’s the most rewarding way to make people grow.”

If you tell people what to do, they’ll most likely execute it efficiently. But this type of collaboration won’t let them learn and when you’re absent, everything may fall apart. I’m always the proudest person in the world when I go on vacation, and nothing happens. There are no emergencies or recessions when I come back to work. And on the contrary, if I were missed severely, it’d mean I’m not doing a good job. The last thing I want is to be indispensable, and the clue to avoiding it is coaching as the method to let colleagues tackle their own challenges by themselves.

One thing to remember here is that you shouldn’t coach anybody who’s currently stressed, as they can get even more frustrated. More direct methods like mentoring may come in handy, and this is a manager’s responsibility to hit the mark in each particular case.

#3. AI. “Treat artificial intelligence as your companion, not a threat.”

People around are a bit scared about AI trying to win their positions. But I presume the fears are overrated.

This is like our relationship with Excel, for instance. Some years ago, there was a difference between staff who were able to use Excel for their job and those who weren’t. The prior case was far more efficient.

AI is going to be the same thing. Professionals who’ll know how to leverage the tool’s strengths for their daily routine will be unbeatable by those who won’t. Suffice it to know what exactly you want to achieve. As soon as you’ve done with the preliminary groundwork, it’s time to involve AI tools to exponentially expedite the process.

Bio:

Victoria Moiseeva

IT content manager with 8+ years of content creation experience. Currently specialized in writing pieces of copy highlighting EdTech, Video Streaming, and AdTech domains.