We have the ambition to create a tool that provides micro-learning to train cognitive biaises. Today we have a prototype. Last spring, we had only a vision to lead us. As told in a previous post, one of my colleague detected a need in an industry and an opportunity for us to create a new tool. He gathered a small team and invited us for a kickoff meeting. We were all motivated. How could we proceed?

During the kickoff, we jolted ideas around, and used sticky notes to draw the project. It was important that we all had a common understanding of the tool we wanted to create. This kickoff meeting was also the moment when we created a team spirit and built personal commitment.

Ownership, responsibility and role

As motivated as I was to play my part, I needed to understand how I could contribute to the project and how much time it would involve. We started by writing down the outputs we expected from the meeting. The expectations were various.

Our expectations for the kickoff meeting

Kevin expected us to take ownership. The initial idea came to him and he wrote a paper about it. He expected us to work as a team and take ownership. This is what he means by ‘Co-sign Whitepaper'.

To me ownership meant responsibility. The moment I commit to a project means that I stop saying ‘Kevin's idea' or ‘Kevin decided' or ‘Kevin meant'. I start saying ‘we think', ‘we decided'. It also means that I committed myself to play my part, make time to work on the project.

I needed to understand, the role that I would play, in other words how, with my competences I would contribute to the project. This is expressed as ‘Where do I position myself?' From the beginning we are a multidisciplinary team. We have learnt to contribute with our respective skills. Understanding my role leads to better planning. If I understand my tasks and how I relate to the other team members, I can organise my agenda and be available when I am needed.

During this meeting we also decided how we would communicate about the project to our stakeholders', which at this point, were internal. We finally defined the next steps and decided the content of the next workshop.

Map the idea – understanding with drawing

We were sitting down, listening to Kevin. Sitting around a table is so limiting! Ideas cannot express themselves, they keep eluding and the energy slowly runs low. We couldn't see what Kevin was explaining. After a moment of deep concentration, I tend to relax a bit, which means that I am not being this concentrated. At some point, we were all running low on energy. Thus we started drawing.

White walls are a blessing. Someone starts drawing and you can add up your idea, then everyone can see and add his/hers.

It started with a sketch, and step by step it became like a map. A map of the idea, where we could navigate, see the stakeholders, start apprehending who we needed to talk to, what we needed to understand, what remains unclear, what is our role, our strengths and weaknesses.

Let your team take ownership by drawing together the idea.

It very much looks like this: drawing, talking and gesturing. When you stand, the flow of ideas wraps you up and before you realize it, you are ‘in it', you take ownership and you belong. You stand and draw together. It has nothing to do with sitting and looking at someone talking, you are part of it.

Our drawing got more complex while our understanding of the situation got clearer.

Be kind to your blue side and deal with uncertainties

Have you ever heard of the DISC assessment? That test attributes colors to people after a test. I never took it myself, but I often heard some friends refer jokingly to it. When they refer to the ‘blue colleague', they talk about his preciseness, attention to detail and his capacity to be systematic. As I started this project, I realised that part of me, that I will call my ‘blue side' backed off, because it was unconvinced. My blue part tends to refrain the overly enthusiastic and risky part (I don't know the color of this side yet ;-)

In other words, during this meeting, my blue side realized that there is a huge part of unknown in this project. When you start an innovation project, you have to be aware of the fact that some uncertainty and risk will always be present. During my studies and work life, I have been trained to try to avoid mistakes and evaluate risk. I usually try to have a fairly good idea of the success I expect  from my actions before I perform them. Starting an innovation process is the contrary of this. It is jumping in the unknown and imagining something that does not exist… yet. You need to be open-minded and accept the risk and unknown.

To conclude: we mapped the project and I accepted the probability to fail

It was time for me to accept that mistakes are part of the game and to come to terms with the probability of failing. An innovation process is made of ups and downs, test, success, mistakes and iteration. The risk is part of the game.

During this first meeting, we mapped the project and the stakeholders It gave us the necessary common grounds to start working together. To draw the project allowed us to clearly see the expertise we needed. We planned the next steps and organized the first workshop where we would invite other experts. The project had officially started.

How to be open to innovation?

You have to be open to new challenges, which is difficult even close to impossible if you are stressed out or under tight deadlines for example. During my first year at Liip (2016), I undertook many projects that had started before I had arrived. As a result, I had little time for planning or strategies, I undertook what was already started. During this first year, everything was new, I was in the turmoil of an event, or in a middle of a project, my whole energy was focused on current tasks.

Before Christmas 2016, my knowledge of the enterprise and the field had exponentially expanded. It allowed me to grasp the necessary bigger picture of my enterprise's needs and challenges. Simultaneously, many projects came to an end, as a result, I was not under tight deadlines. In other words, I was open to new challenges and ideas. I had cognitive capacity to take on new challenges. When Kevin, a colleague I barely knew, approached me, I welcomed his project with an open mind.

Sorry, we have no time to innovate!

An idea that takes 30 minutes to explain but a clear call to action

I do not recall the exact situation of our first actual discussion. We were probably in the open space we call arena. He most probably caught me on my way to the cafeteria.

Note to self: grab people when on their way to the cafeteria, when they are neither in a hurry for a meeting, nor in deep concentration.

Sorry Kevin, the first time you explained I did not understand your idea. It took about 30 minutes of explanation for me to understand that it was about learning, innovation, banking and compliance. It probably did not help that I had no prior knowledge of these fields.

At this point, what Kevin expected was clear ‘come to a workshop'. As I had no urgent deadlines at the time, I accepted. I assumed that I would understand the idea at the some point.

The importance of the team and the setting

At Liip, we have the possibility to undertake innovation projects when we see a business opportunity. Nothing forces us to join or undertake one. I could have decided to perform other tasks that I saw more fitting

Why did I accept to join the workshop? Three important factors simultaneously played a role there:

• Firstly, I had an open mind, I was cognitively open to something new.
• The second thing that convinced me then was Kevin's enthusiasm: he had a vision and he convinced me. I saw potential in this project.
• Thirdly, I felt valued and trusted that my competences were needed. Honestly, this is flattering and energizing. Who is not appealed to have the possibility to make an impact?

Additionnally, I also not only got along, but liked the other colleagues invited to the workshop. In such an innovation process, trust and kindness are necessary. The team is meant to go through uncertainties. Though the vision is clear, the way to reach it is not. The composition of the team is important and this fact should not be underestimated.

Note to self: notice the importance of a vision in the very first step of an innovation project. Someone has to have an idea, and has to be able to share this vision with others to onboard them.

The next steps: the initial workshop

As planned by Kevin, the next step was to organise a workshop, where we would meet and test the idea. I expect it was a vulnerable moment for him. As long as you think something for yourself and plan it in your head, it is all fine. The day you open your mouth, it is for the worse or the better. After this workshop we could have all backed off and turned to other projects. It was a turning point.

To conclude, you guessed already?

It turned out well for Kevin's idea, in the sense that we shared his enthusiasm and we saw business potential in his idea. In other words, the story was just starting. At this very early stage of the innovation process, my ability to be open-minded to something completely new and the fact that we saw business potential in the idea mattered most . The fact that Liip provides an environnement prone to innovation is also highly relevant. As a team, we know, we are supported to dedicate time to investigate new opportunities.

And yes, I take notes to myself about what a leader with a vision is, because I think everybody is someone's leader and someone's follower. It is neither good, nor bad, it is just a role, where you have to play your best part. I am learning good practices to be both.

Recently we decided to explore the edX platform. It's an open source Learning Management System (LMS) and authoring tool. EdX is one of the most popular MOOC platforms alongside Coursera and Udacity, but unlike the two others their code is open source and you can host your own MOOC platform. EdX has been created by MIT and Harvard and is listing other well known universities as contributors. Also, in September 2013, Google, who was previously experimenting its own LMS (Google Course Builder), decided to join the open edX platform as a contributor too. The platform is implemented mostly in Python and they created their own component architecture called XBlock (https://xblock.readthedocs.org/en/latest/). On paper edX sounds great, but how does it compare to Moodle or Totara? Does it fulfill the criteria our clients are targeting?

First steps

Installing a local instance is fairly easy since they provide a vagrant box and the documentation is good. But on the other hand, you will need to run three different servers with three different port forwardings. One for the LMS, one for the CMS (authoring tool) and the last one for the forums (this one is written in Ruby). Moodle or Totara use the same tool for standard users and administrative users which can lead to a bad user experience. So having different tools can have advantages and disadvantages.

Managing users

One key feature Moodle and Totara are offering is the user management. This is also one of the first requests we usually receive when dealing with offers. With Moodle and Totara there are lots of ways to authenticate a user and also to enroll them to a course out of the box. You can also easily manage roles and create groups (even dynamic groups with Totara).

In edX a user can authenticate if he creates first an account on the platform but edX is built on Django so any authentication method from this framework should be available on edX too (e.g. LDAP authentication).

It was not so easy to find how you can restrict the access to a course, this seems to be feasible depending on different settings (they were not explained in the user documentation, but understandable from the code documentation). You can create groups but it's not clear yet if you can have groups platform-wide too.

Inside a course it's easy to manage your staff team, define your teaching assistants or other admin users. You can even add beta testers so that some students can test your course before its official public release. You can also have discussion moderators for your courses.

Multilanguage

Having the platform in several languages is possible, and courses in different languages too. But you cannot have the same course in different languages (which is the same for Moodle and Totara, you simply need to create a course for each language). A good and bad thing with the current state of internationalization is that it's a work in progress. It's bad because if you want a german edX platform, the translations are not finished yet. But it's good because there are working on it and plan to finish it for the end of second quarter 2014 and they have a translation tool where anyone can contribute (https://www.transifex.com/organization/open-edx). By default, it would use the browser language, but if you're logged in you can also have a user language (at least it's configured that way on www.edx.org).

Hosting

Configuring manually your server to host an edX platform is really difficult, there are a lot of requirements and dependencies to install. For Debian some of them don't even have a package. But they provide a way to install it using Ansible requirements which seems quite easy to do. They also provide some script to execute update which is nice.

Interaction between users

Like on Moodle and Totara, you can have discussion forums for a course. There is a nice WYSIWYG editor with the possibility to preview your post first.

A nice feature of edX is the ability to comment any exercise or theory page and allowing others to upvote/report those. It's a pity though that the comments aren't ordered by upvotes by default.

Students can find study buddies using Meetup communities. EdX can also integrate Google Hangouts.

Reporting

EdX comes with basic reporting tools. One can generate for example the list of enrolled students and the grade reports. Compared with Totara's custom reports feature, edX has still plenty of room for improvement.

User Interface

Generally the interface looks very nice. The UX-UI concept is very strong and has a clear consistent interaction level. You can also implement custom themes as Stanford did for its own instance. Without going into details, it seems edX has a nice base theme and state-of-the-art Interaction Patterns but they don't have a responsive theme – only the home page is responsive.

Learning experience

The learning experience is appealing and has the same feel as new online platforms (team-treehouse, codeacadamy, …). Courses offer a lot of options out of the box: video integration (via Youtube), multiple question forms (radio buttons, checkboxes, dropdowns, text, maths inputs, …), Google Hangouts, discussions, text, announcements, integrating an Iframe, full-screen images, zoom images, imaged-mapped input, drag and drop answers, electrical schemas, LTI integration, … but there are bad things too. For example, the grading system is not suitable for the usual Swiss grading system (grades from 1 to 6), it's apparently made for the American grading system (from F to A).

Conclusion

EdX does less things than Moodle but does them nicely. It's also better suited for open education which can be achieved in Moodle and Totara too but the user and learning experience seems to be better on edX. Sever configuration, user management, access restriction, internationalization and reporting, all those things are easier to set and ready to use out of the box with Moodle (reporting especially on Totara) and cannot be neglected. Some might say that Moodle does too many things but from a business point of view it's easier to adapt client's requests that way. Also the community around Moodle is bigger which is a great thing from a developer point of view. But to end on a positive note, edX provides a roadmap on what they are working or will work on, thus we will keep an eye on this innovative platform and check if their improvements could fit future client requests.