This piece originally appeared on the Learning Pool website. I wrote it when I worked there.

LxPs are big news in the learning world and the phrase ‘the Netflix of Learning’ is being bandied about to explain the revolutionary new learner experience that they’re creating. The Netflix comparison is useful to describe the intuitive design of the new platforms, but streaming services also had a huge impact on the content itself. LxPs will change the landscape of learning design.

We’re living in the golden age of television because online platforms have freed shows from the rigid constraints of television scheduling. Instead of trying to fit a TV show into half an hour with ad breaks, they could be whatever length suited the story.

There’s even interactive content in TV shows now, as we’ve seen from Netflix’s Bandersnatch, a choose-your-own-adventure style show which blurred the line between TV and videogames. The LxP will do the same for digital learning: It can be the length that it needs to be and it can be in the format that best suits the content.

The style of the content will change too. Shows on terrestrial television generally have to appeal to a mainstream audience and follow some fairly traditional standards when it comes to the topics it covers. But online platforms have changed that, creating a space for content which is more niche or addresses taboo subjects.

Learning designers are often limited by the audience for their learning. They’re told that the solution has to appeal to everyone across all ten offices scattered across the globe, with all their different levels of prior knowledge, cultures, ages, interests, and attitudes. And that often means that any quirky elements which make that piece of content stand out as memorable or interesting are removed and you end up with the One Show of learning. Bland, inoffensive, forgettable. It’s a dull experience for learner and learning designer alike.

With our LxP we can target content at specific users and, with the trend towards smaller chunks of learning, it’s far easier to swap out for interchangeable chunks of targeted content. We considered this when designing our new campaign about single-use plastics.

Imagine taking an office full of people and trying to convince them all to cut down on single-use plastics? There isn’t going to be a decent one-size-fit solution for that. Some people are going to be happy to get straight to ‘how can I do it?’ so why waste time preaching to the choir with a load of content about WHY they should be cutting down on single-use plastic?

Similarly, there’ll be a lot of sceptical people who don’t think that one person buying less plastic wrapped bananas will make any difference, so it would be pointless to immediately push them information on how to reduce their plastic waste.

And then there will be some people who simply don’t know much about the issue, so telling them to stop being sceptical or giving them advice on how to change isn’t going to be of any interest to them, they need a third approach based around learning about the issue.

To address the disparity in learners’ needs, we regularly assess their opinions and feelings on the matter and give them content tailored to them.

For example, we’ve created a piece of interactive fiction called ‘Laminate the Earth’ for sceptical learners. It takes a tongue-in-cheek approach to the issue and encourages learners to try their hardest to destroy the environment at the behest of a shadowy individual.

The idea is to create something intelligent, amusing, and unpatronising which engages sceptical learners and encourages them to consider the issue from a different angle. Such an esoteric piece of content would never exist in the one-size fits all world of the LMS.

The new landscape of learning design has space for character and flavour. In our next blog we’ll be talking about how data is shaping this new landscape.