Jun 7, 2021

9 min read

Microsoft Viva Learning

Personalized learning experience through Microsoft 365

Go deeper on Microsoft Viva Learning, a central place for individuals and teams to discover personal learning content and build skills within the flow of everyday work. Swati Jhawar, Principal Program Manager for Microsoft Viva, joins Jeremy Chapman to share options for setup, learning content curation, and integration with your existing learning management system.

Microsoft Viva has four modules (Connections, Insights, Topics & Learning) that deliver new employee experiences in the context of their work. Viva leverages the foundational technologies of Microsoft 365, Microsoft Graph and AI to deliver a modern employee experience platform.

With Viva Learning, you have a center for personalized skill development that offers a unique social experience where learning content is available in the flow of work. It recommends and manages the progress of key trainings all from one place and is built on top of SharePoint, Microsoft Search, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Graph, and Substrate.

QUICK LINKS:

01:00 — What is Viva Learning?

02:35 — See the personal learning experience

04:46 — How to share content

06:40 — Content within Teams app and others

08:04 — Setup for admins

09:03 — How to configure required training

10:14 — What’s next for Viva Learning?

10:46 — Wrap up

Link References:

Watch our Essentials episode at https://aka.ms/VivaEssentials

Build out your SharePoint site with a step-by-step guide at https://aka.ms/SPVivaLearning

For the latest news and updates go to https://aka.ms/vivalearning

Check out the rest of our series for Microsoft Viva at https://aka.ms/VivaMechanics

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Video Transcript:

- Up next, I’m joined by Principal Program Manager, Swati Jhawar to go deeper on Microsoft Viva Learning, which creates a central place for individuals and teams to discover personal learning content and build new skills all within the flow of their every day work, as well as your options for setup and learning content curation, including integration with your existing learning management system. So Swati, welcome to the show.

- Thanks so much, Jeremy, for having me here.

- Thanks so much for joining us today. And of course, before we go into Viva Learning, if you’re new to Microsoft Viva, it comprises four modules with more to come that deliver new employee experiences across knowledge, communications, learning, and insights, all in the context of your work. Now, these leverage the foundational technologies of Microsoft 365, Microsoft Graph and AI to deliver a modern employee experience platform. In fact, you can learn more by watching our Essentials episode at aka.ms/VivaEssentials. And one of the foundational experiences then in the new Viva platform is learning. So Swati, can you explain what we’re solving for here?

- Sure. I think as everyone can appreciate, so much has changed over the past year, especially how we work. And as we’ve adapted how we connect, learn and consume content, that has shifted almost entirely to the digital medium. And this trend is here to stay. Most of us want to learn and grow in the new skills either for our personal growth or to complete the job at hand more effectively. But during our busy work days, this effort can easily get deprioritized. With Viva Learning, we have created a center for your personalized skills development. It’s built on top of the foundational technologies of SharePoint, Microsoft Search, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Graph, and Substrate. And it is designed to give you a unique social experience where learning content is available in the flow of work. Additionally managers, mentors, subject matter experts, buddies, and others can recommend and manage the progress of key trainings all from one place.

- And a huge advantage here is that this really extends your investment in Microsoft 365, and everyone can now more easily up their skillset within the context of their work. Key personas here for Viva Learning: that’s spanning every day users who are seeking personalized learning, their managers all the way through to knowledge admins, and of course, our IT pros to configure Viva Learning for their organization. So why don’t we make this real and start out with a personal learning experience?

- Sounds good. Let’s get into it. So in my case, I’ve already installed the Viva Learning app in Microsoft Teams. And if you are part of the preview, you can install it like any other Teams app. Inside the app, you’ll see learning content that your peers have recommended to you, content you have bookmarked, content trending in your organization based on views, recently viewed content and items from Microsoft and our partners. In this case, these are the learning catalogs exposed from Pluralsight, edX, Skillsoft and Coursera, which you can use provided that you have an account already set up with them. If you know what you’re looking for, up on the right, you can query Viva Learning for available resources. I’ll just go enter communication. And you’ll see a lot of suggestions from our partners and Microsoft returned here. I’ll click into Communicating Effectively 2021 Update item from Skillsoft, and I can choose to open the course in my browser or to recommend it to others. I can use the copy link and share it however I want, whether that’s in Teams chat, channel, or email. I’ll click recommend, search for Megan, select here, add a note which is optional. So let me go ahead and add ‘really liked this course on communication.’ I can optionally add a due date for tracking. I’ll change this to June 5th, and then hit recommend. Now, if I go into the manage recommendations, I can see all the content that are recommended to others and can easily check the status, which is helpful. Say if I’m a manager and I have recommendations to everyone on my team, this is where I can track the progress. One thing to note here from a privacy perspective: recommended learning is only visible to the person who made the recommendation and to the one who received it. I can send them reminders through one-on-one Teams chat, or delete recommendations from the list if they are not valid anymore.

- And you mentioned also that the learning experience also becomes more social. So beyond the recommendation process that you just showed, how else then would you share content?

- So we now know based on the recent workplace learning report from LinkedIn, the more the social experience for learning, the more interested and engaged employees tend to be. There are a couple of ways you can do social learning using the Viva Learning app. Let me show you a few of them. I’ll click into the Lay out pages with Word item here. And from here, I can copy the link to the learning asset I’m in and share it directly in chat or email. But even better than that, I can search and share directly within a chat using message extension. For example, while composing the message, I click on the Learning icon under the ellipsis. This pops up a search window and I can search for what I’m looking for. Say, communications. Here I select the courses we saw earlier and share it with message ‘highly recommended.’ Optionally, I could @mention to members of the team on chat, but I want everyone to take this so I’ll just share it as is. That said, beyond chat, another way to share Learning is by curating Learning content based on a specific goal and pinning it at the top in the Teams channel on chat. Here, you can select the plus sign, choose Viva Learning Preview app, give title for your tab, search for the Learning assets on the topic of your interest, say communication, and select the ones you want to pin in the tab. From here, you can choose to post a message to Teams channel, and once you hit Save, the tab is created and team is notified. It’s easy for the team to add and unpin content at any point of time later.

- Right, and the nice thing about this in the tab experience is that it can also help you onboard new members of the team with relevant learning. But can you show us then the experience when you start to consume content within the Microsoft Teams app?

- Of course. So I’m back in the home tab, and I click into this Microsoft Word learning content here. If I hit the play button, you’ll see all of the chapters in line to help me learn how to create great page layouts in Word. I’ll play the video, and you’ll see the integrated experience within Teams, and for Microsoft trainings, LinkedIn learning content, and the SharePoint content library. This all can be consumed within the Viva Learning app. That said, in order to view third-party content sources, we take you directly to the content providers native experiences online.

- Okay, so how is Viva Learning then surfaced in other app experiences across Microsoft 365?

- I’m sure many of you will be using Microsoft Teams. That said, you can get to Viva Learning from other Microsoft 365 endpoints, such as Office.com, SharePoint, and others. And you can search in Microsoft 365 experiences where we surface and present Learning on cards. So this is made possible through integration with Microsoft Search. And of course, Viva Learning is also surfaced on other Viva experiences like the Viva Connections company dashboard or in the Viva Topics pages.

- Got it, but I want to switch gears here because the Microsoft 365 admins are watching as well. So what would it take for them to light up the experience?

- It’s super easy to pull in the content catalogs from Microsoft and from our partners for the Viva Learning app. You can even configure internal learning content hosted in SharePoint. From the Microsoft 365 admin center just go to the settings, then all settings, scroll down to Viva Learning and select it. Here, you just need to choose the providers you want, and that content will automatically flow into your experience. For internal SharePoint-hosted content, you need to point to your SharePoint site where you can centralize all your Learning content. And we have a great step-by-step guide for building that site out at aka.ms/SPVivaLearning.

- Right, and this is a really great way to personalize Learning into the apps and tools that you and your users use every day. But that said, I think one more thing that we haven’t touched on yet is how to configure required training. So how would that process work?

- I’m glad you asked. So later this year we’ll be adding the configuration steps for getting learning management systems content into the Viva Learning app. This will also surface required training configured in your elements. For these providers, we will use site authentication to scope content and experience to your organization. As you can see here, for instance, with the settings for Cornerstone OnDemand. Also, we have created a new AD role for knowledge admins. This role can configure the settings we just saw. And in the future, we’ll be adding more experiences for content curation and recommendations. For example, you will see how a knowledge administrator can add a new featured set of learning content targeted to the entire organization.

- Right, and this should align to how you’re already managing learning content today and really ease the burden for our global admins watching. So switching back though, to the personal Learning experience, is there anything else to look forward to?

- Yes, there is quite a lot coming soon to Viva Learning. One of the areas we are focused on is deepening Viva Learning’s personalization with sections focused on required training, AI generated recommendations for your interest and learning paths. Also, based on your permissions, you will be able to access content from your SharePoint Library. And you’ll be able to keep track of your completed trainings in last one year.

- Right, these are gonna be super helpful to easily find, and also get back to your content. So for anyone watching who wants to get started with this, what do you recommend?

- So we are on preview now. So if you are a preview customer, you can start trying everything out today. And I encourage you to keep checking back to aka.ms/vivalearning for the latest news and updates.

- Thanks so much, Swati, for joining us today and the excellent overview of Viva Learning. And thank you for watching online today. Also don’t forget to check out the rest of our series for Microsoft Viva at aka.ms/VivaMechanics. Subscribe to our channel if you haven’t already, and we’ll see you soon.