Aligning Curriculum to Outcomes, Ease Skillways™ Transforms the Learner Experience
Skills-based learning design, continuous improvement, flexible pathways enable equitable learning experiences for all learners.
Derry, NH - Ease Learning announced the official launch of Ease Skillways™, a learning delivery system that is unlike anything else being used to develop courses. Leading up to the official launch, Skillways has been adopted by a number of professional associations and higher ed institutions. It is now available to all organizations with a focus on delivering effective, skills-based courses or training programs.
Skillways is a game changer for any organization looking to deliver equitable, skills-based learning. For years higher ed institutions have struggled with creating programs that were aligned with workforce needs, could meet the learning needs of a very diverse student population, and provide insight into whether the learner was developing critical competencies and how effective the learning was. Additionally, the existing technologies forced a very linear pattern of learning. With the increased interest in creating modular, stackable experiences, institutions needed a solution that could deliver on this new approach without compromising on academic integrity. Skillways, which integrates directly into the LMS already being utilized, solves for all of these issues.
What is unique about Skillways is that it was developed from the perspective of a team of expert learning designers who have been involved in online learning since its inception. For courses developed in Skillways, it’s not just taking a face-to-face experience and putting it online, it’s about understanding the flow of learning, the cognitive load and the overall student experience. Best practices in learning design informed all aspects of the product design and the result is a technology that will transform the learning experience. Colleges and universities will now be able to develop the programs that they have been wanting to but didn’t have the technology that supported their efforts.
Skillways is a full featured skills based learning experience solution enabling skills based learning design and mapping, embedded delivery of modular stackable learning experiences in any LMS or equivalent, and rich data/analytics grounded in the granular measurement of achievement of skills.
Progress and achievement are tracked in real time with Skillways and it yields true currency for credentialing. Skillways aligns curricular learning opportunities to real world skills allowing the learner to hone individual skills and grow their overall capabilities towards marketable skills and career paths. It also provides the structure for the incremental building and measurement of learner’s skills enabling the development of modular, stackable, reusable content.
Ease Skillways allows for granular outcomes to be mapped to course, program, institutional and workforce goals, resulting in an online learning product that is highly relevant to the student, and is aligned to workforce needs, while also ensuring that program and institutional goals are considered. Mapping of skills within the curriculum enables actionable data insights and boosts learner retention, and ultimate skill attainment. Because learning activities can be linked to specific learning outcomes and skills, there is greater insight into learner progress as well as skill achievement and evidence of learner competency. Skillways also provides early detection of equity gaps, and opportunities for intervention to help learners be most successful.
Labor market data from various top providers such as Emsi/Burning Glass and workforce competencies, such as those required by NCLEX for nursing or those developed internally integrated into Skillways bringing a level of alignment to content and learning outcomes that can’t be easily accomplished through traditional learning design, or not without extensive arduous, manual mapping.
Beyond the traditional letter grade that doesn’t provide any real insight into skill development or proficiency, Skillways has a built-in mechanism that tracks how the learner is engaging with the content. Skill mapping is connected to rich formative and summative assessment options and assessments are relevant and can be based in real-world situations. Skillways provides a dashboard that shows heat maps of competency, and in depth views of learner performance tracking to marketable skills. This information collectively can be downloaded and shared in a report that is incredibly useful during an accreditation process.
Skillways also fosters a modular course structure; the model needed to create stackable and reusable content. Content that is meaningful to more than one program can now easily be modified and reused.
Institutions who adopt Skillways benefit from the continuous improvement framework built into the product. The Ease Learning team analyzes the information gleaned from Skillways and provides actionable recommendations to improve the learner’s experience.
The technology can be used as part of an institution’s existing LMS or independently. If a school adopts a new LMS, any content designed within Skillways can easily be migrated into the new LMS.
“I began as a learning designer more than 20 years ago, and was frustrated by so many of the limitations that I found in the technologies being used to create online learning. Our curriculum approaches were limited in a standard LMS, and most importantly we could not really see the resulting attainment of proficiency around applied knowledge and skills. Skillways changes this and sheds light on what learners’ can actually DO, and creates an entire universe of data to reinforce equity for all learners. We have taken our expertise in learning design and created a technology that we believe is a game-changer. Modular, sharable content; flexible learning pathways; skill mapping at the most granular and expansive level; insight and alignment into actual marketable skills; these are all things we heard were important during our development process and we have delivered on these areas and more. I’m excited to see how the impact our customers will have on student success, meeting the needs of the labor market and institutional transformation through programs designed in Skillways”
To further ensure success, Skillways comes with 24/7 end user support to support faculty and students. The Ease Learning help desk can also support an institution’s existing LMS and other third party tools.
To learn more about Ease Learning Design embedded with Skillways, contact us.