In her review of Complete Curation from Anders Pink, Laura found a powerful, easy to use tool for curating learning pathways and auto-tagging content with relevant skills.
Complete Curation from Anders Pink is an AI-powered learning content curation tool equipped with skills mapping and useful workflows to manage, maintain, and publish targeted and up-to-date learning pathways. Complete Curation provides the ultimate, indispensable tool for any organisation needing to accelerate their processes of curation and building learning pathways.
The result is like hiring an additional resource into your L&D team to boost its efficiency.
While large corporate organisations can benefit because they have the volume of learning content and complex skills taxonomies, smaller organisations can benefit too, because they might have limited resource, with curation falling to a small team or even one person.
All-in-all, Complete Curation is a very elegant way to solve a complex problem.
Who are Anders Pink?
The team at Anders Pink have been in learning technology for a long time. They’ve designed and built digital learning courses, blended programmes, learning management systems and grown successful businesses, including Kineo – now a leader in the global learning market.
Since launching Anders Pink in 2017, it’s grown to become a fully integrated feature in the world’s leading learning platforms, tools and apps. Now more than a million people access continuous learning through Anders Pink. With their acquisition by Go1 (the fastest growing elearning company globally) at the start of 2023, the future looks bright for Anders Pink and the many diverse clients who are currently benefiting from their innovative products.
How does Complete Curation work and what problem does it solve?
Complete Curation significantly reduces the time it takes to search, aggregate, and curate content, and then build targeted learning pathways of the most relevant content for learners. It also helps clients get a better return on their content investment because they have full visibility of all the content they own and licence.
It enables them to target meaningful content to address each learner’s upskilling needs and can map and index learning content to skills using any skills framework or taxonomy.
For skills-focused organisations, it enables them to identify the learning content required to plug skills gaps, making it easier and quicker to upskill and reskill their workforce, thereby ensuring they are future-fit.
Complete Curation uses Anders Pink’s Content to Skills Mapper to automatically tag any content using any skills taxonomy (internal or industry standard). It even auto-updates content skills tags when frameworks change – an essential feature in the fast-paced landscape in which we find ourselves keeping our workforces relevantly skilled.
Some of the USPs that we felt really mark Complete Curation out are that it provides a natural language search using a skill, question or phrase (including a learning objective or outcome), so you could use a meaningful query such as ‘moving into leadership’ to get the results you need. It employs filters such as asset types, languages, durations and providers, and there is no limit to the number of skills within a mapped taxonomy, and no restriction on the number of content assets searched.
It also searches freemium content on the web alongside your other content sources, meaning curated learning plans can be kept fresh with the latest online content.
Complete Curation has been built in response to the challenge faced by L&D when it comes to curating learning pathways in their organisations. Many organisations have a vast amount of learning content, either created internally or via external learning subscriptions (e.g. LinkedIn Learning, Udemy, Coursera etc).
Manually searching across all this content is both difficult and hugely time-consuming due to the sheer volume across multiple libraries and platforms. There might be a series of spreadsheets to sift through, skills might not be tagged against content, and there is much room for human error.
Even when content is all organised within one LMS or LXP, the task to search and curate content natively is still hugely time-consuming – a challenge many platform vendors are well aware of, evidenced by Anders Pink’s growing number of market leading platform partners who are utilising Complete Curation to boost their own native content filtering and skills tagging capability.
The benefits of Complete Curation to an organisation as a whole or to any L&D department, is the huge reduction in the time taken to search, aggregate, curate, and build learning pathways. They can receive a better return on investment on the content, because they’ll be able to utilise more of the appropriate content that is mapped to the skills that they are developing within their organisation.
They also have a better view on which subscriptions have more value and which ones they could dispense with, enabling L&D teams to make better content buying decisions.
A powerful tool for any organisation, no matter how big or small
Complete Curation is an incredibly powerful tool for any organisation, big or small. For smaller organisations, those who might only have a single individual in their L&D team or other limited resource, it can increase their capacity and adds value by facilitating intelligent curation of all the different learning content that an organisation might subscribe to. It then makes it a much easier task to create the required learning pathways that can be targeted to what their learners need and what the organisation wants.
For larger organisations who are likely to have huge volumes of learning content, including internal content on SharePoint, content across several learning platforms, and multiple external subscriptions like LinkedIn Learning, Coursera, Udemy etc, it saves a huge amount of time by aggregating content from disparate sources. It maps the content to skills taxonomies, then makes the curation task and the creation of learning pathways much simpler, targeting learners with highly relevant learning content.
So, even though large and small organisations will have very different challenges and will benefit from the tool in slightly different ways, the very real benefits on offer are of equal value.
It doesn’t matter where you are on your skills journey
If an organisation already has an existing skills framework (or taxonomy), which larger corporate organisations probably do, then Complete Curation is of huge benefit. You can upload your own and then all the curated content will be automatically tagged with the skills from your own taxonomy.
Equally however, an organisation that perhaps is not quite as far along on their skills journey can benefit from the tool’s default skills taxonomy. This is an industry standard called Lightcast, which has 32,000 skills and is a brilliant addition as it allows those organisations that haven’t got to that point in their thinking about skills frameworks to get up and running and in a position to progress to the next level, fast.
With skills undoubtedly already the ‘new currency’ in the career landscape, this is a no-brainer for enabling fluidity amongst workforces and a skills centred L&D agenda.
No LMS or LXP? No Problem
Anders Pink partner with a growing number of leading LMS / LXPs (and are flexible about developing integrations with new partners), but an interesting aspect to the Complete Curation tool is that an organisation doesn’t need to have an existing LMS or an LXP in place to benefit from it, and as such don’t need to be as digitally mature.
Obviously, having an LMS or LXP to create learning pathways and assign them to learners might be considered ideal, but because of the way the curated content can be exported, you don’t need this. You can export a curation as a csv file or as a publicly shareable html link.
This means that an organisation that perhaps is much smaller, or hasn’t yet invested in an LMS, possibly because it hasn’t got the number of users that warrant that investment, can still benefit. They may still have learning content from a variety of content subscriptions in addition to internally hosted content and can still use this tool independently to help deliver the appropriate content (including the curated web content) to their users.
Taking Content Curation to the next level with generative AI
Finally, if Complete Curation is like having an indispensable content curator drafted into your team, the new release from Anders Pink harnessing the power of generative AI is going to accelerate the skills and competency of your new content curator. In addition to everything Complete Curation already does, it will possess additional AI capabilities, reducing human intervention by the curator or learning designer even more.
With generative AI technology, it will be able to respond to a search query by generating a list of sub-skills or competencies that can then be broken down into sub-sections, auto-generating a pre-built learning pathway (or learning plan or playlist, depending on your LMS terminology). This can be edited before publishing.
AI curations will allow the content curator to define both the proficiency levels and desired duration for a particular learning plan. It will then intelligently produce a learning plan divided into weeks, with curated content targeted to the preferred skill level – even auto-generating intro text for those sections and sub-sections. This massively reduces the time required by a learning designer to design and copywrite a learning plan and decide what learning assets might be appropriate.
For example, let’s say you wanted to create a learning pathway for people stepping up into their first management role. You decide that this will be for beginners, and you want it to be a paced programme over a six week period.
You can input those parameters and Complete Curation will generate the appropriate content into the appropriate subsections together with the into text (that now just needs to be edited rather than created from scratch), thereby creating a quite sophisticated learning pathway or plan.
Ordinarily, you’d have someone spending days designing and curating a pathway like this; sourcing the appropriate content, pulling it into the plan, writing the appropriate text to position it correctly to its audience etc. However, Complete Curation’s generative AI features will do all the heavy lifting for you and then simply require the curator or learning designer to review it with a human eye to ensure it is appropriate and edit it accordingly.
This massively reduces the time needed by a learning designer to decide on which assets are appropriate to form part of a defined plan.
We feel that this is a very exciting addition to the Complete Curation toolbox.
Visit the Anders Pink website to learn more about this exciting, AI-powered tool for L&D.
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