LearnFlow Immersion

Many entry-level jobs require relevant prior work experience, creating a catch-22 for career changers and first time job seekers. For the few who can afford it, unpaid internships are a solution. For everyone else, how can they close the "experience gap?"  

LearnFlow Immersion is a new, affordable way to get the benefits of "learning on the job" before applying for the job. It lets learners experience the day-to-day tasks associated with a range of entry-level jobs, such as sales associate or data analyst. They complete real tasks and get constructive feedback on how well they performed from a real expert. Feedback includes personalized content on how to improve weak areas. Once competency is achieved their work is added to a certified portfolio along with a testimonial from the expert. 

LearnFlow Immersion closes the gap between training and doing, enabling jobseekers to demonstrate they have the skills to do the job.

LearnFlow Immersion is solving the "not enough relevant experience" problem that many job seekers find after completing training. They can't get the experience without a relevant job, and can't get the job without the experience. In the meanwhile, they're likely working lower-skill jobs to make ends meet and can't afford to take an unpaid or low-pay internship, or can't even get that without experience.

LearnFlow activities can be done when convenient for the learner, at their own pace. They can do their current job while developing new skills and building their portfolio.

LearnFlow also enables better career discovery - opening a window into what jobs really are like day-to-day. Before committing to expensive, time consuming training for a new career, LearnFlow can be used to simulate what it would be like working in that job and help focus re-training or upskilling in the right direction. This increases the speed of training and the likelihood of success.

Finally, LearnFlow helps jobseekers to stand out by allowing them to demonstrate how they can apply their skills in a range of roles. Their portfolio of skills and evidence can paint a compelling story to an employer who is looking for adaptability and initiative.

LearnFlow Immersion learners use a browser-based app to access a library of careers and roles. Once they select a role they will see a collection of common activities for that role. For each activity, an employer assigns via pre-recorded video as if the learner were working for them and provides data or resources needed to complete the task. For example, for a data analyst role the activity might be to cleanse the data in a CSV file. Each activity also has hands-on how-to videos presented by professionals in the role. 

When they're ready, the learner completes the task and submits their work into the LearnFlow system. They are automatically assigned an expert reviewer - someone who has been in a relevant role for at least 2 years. The reviewer uses a carefully designed rubric to evaluate the work and provide very specific feedback and a testimonial if the work demonstrates competency. 

Based on the reviewer feedback, the learner will be offered targeted lessons that show how to address any issues raised. Once competency has been demonstrated, the work and expert testimonial will be added to their experience portfolio, which can be shared with prospective employers.

We are primarily targeting individuals who are struggling to get the experience they need to get a job in their chosen careers. We are also helping career changers ensure the job they are targeting is right for them before they invest too heavily in specialized training.

Currently we are working with underserved high school students and community college students by helping them obtain virtual internships and co-ops. This is part of a program run by Northeastern University and Northern Illinois University and sponsored by an NSF grant. See: https://edsystemsniu.org/resou...  and https://impactlearning.simplec...This solution removes the requirement for there to be a specific employer/intern relationship and therefore greatly improves the scalability of the networks that are already being developed.

We are closing the gap between getting training and the getting experience needed to secure a job.  Many of today's jobs don't have formal apprenticeship programs and internships are often unpaid. This creates a burden for those who can't afford to take time off from paid work to gain the relevant experience employers require. 

LearnFlow Immersion: 

• increases access to affordable learning that builds & credentials skills - it will be free for learners and is high quality because it involves human feedback & certification from real experts
• enables learners to make informed decisions by virtually trying out roles 

Practera has a global team of 40 full time employees. Within our company 5 employees are currently dedicated to the pilot of our LearnFlow and LearnFlow Immersion solutions. 10 FTE are part of the engineering team enhancing Practera and LearnFlow technology based on early customer feedback.

We also are partnered with Northeastern University and EdSystems Center at Northern Illinois University where there are 5 researchers and policy experts who are helping us deploy LearnFlow Immersion in a variety of contexts.

We’ve just been nominated as a finalist for the 2020 diversity employer of the year as part of the Women in Digital Awards. 70% of our leadership team and 60% of all employees are women, including women of color. For a small technology startup of 40 people, we believe much of our success comes from the experiences, networks and capabilities of our team, who hail from 18 countries and speak 29 languages. 

Our company was founded in Australia and we currently have employees in Australia, the US, UK, Canada, Germany, China, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Singapore and India. 

As we grow our team in the US we are focusing on recruiting from community colleges and HBCUs to ensure our team innately understands the challenges faced by the learners we are servicing.

LearnFlow Immersion is built on the award-winning Practera Experiential Learning Platform. This platform is unique in its ability to quality assure learning outcomes and employer outcomes for a range of experiential learning solutions, such as projects, internships, apprenticeships and mentoring. 

The innovative aspect of LearnFlow Immersion is the ability to practice doing the activities of a real job while getting feedback from real experts. This is made cost-effective by leveraging the Practera platform, which greatly simplifies running large-scale experiential learning programs. 

The business model for LearnFlow Immersion is also innovative. Access to the learner will be free. We will seek to have the associated costs covered by education institutions such as a community colleges, and by employers who will pay when a learner completes a specified # of their chosen activities. E.g. by finishing 3 Salesforce activities Salesforce will pay for an annual license for the learner. The benefit for an employer to subsidize is they get a pipeline of qualified candidates to chose from with minimal effort along with goodwill and brand awareness.

Gig-economy platforms like Upwork and Fiverr let people do activities, but they are not associated with roles at full time jobs. There is also no learning support and feedback designed to improve skills.

Virtual internship platforms like Forage are recruitment platforms for employers designed to make the employer look appealing. LearnFlow Immersion shows you what roles are really like and is focused on helping demonstrate the skills needed to be successful.

Behind LearnFlow Immersion is the Practera platform, which has been successfully used by 3/4 of the universities in Australia and a rapidly growing number of universities and K12 institutions in the US.

The Practera software platform is used to deliver remote internships, real-world projects, learning in the flow of work and other forms of experiential and work-integrated learning that develop the professional skills needed to succeed and grow in the workplace. Due to COVID and travel bans, we have also been a key response for many of our university customers to engage and retain students who are overseas and support fully-online internships and projects.

LearnFlow builds on Practera by providing a library of learning built around real workplace activities. It also interfaces with systems of work like Slack, MS Teams and others to make it easy for experts and employers to engage and provide feedback.

Practera's super power is the way it handles feedback.  The key to learning by doing is figuring out what could be done better. This often involves an expert's observation and feedback. Ensuring this process happens in a high-quality, timely manner involves a lot of workflow that Practera streamlines. It has many unique systems for collecting feedback and ensuring the feedback links to actionable insights and learning. Machine learning helps experience managers identify issues just-in-time, which allows for cost-effective large-scale deployments. 

Practera has been used successfully in a wide range of situations and there's extensive research demonstrating the effectiveness of experiential learning on Practera. LearnFlow is currently being piloted by CVS Health and Salesforce.com and was just recently used to power the City of Boston's summer youth employability program.

• Using Technology to Structure and Scaffold Real World Experiential Learning in Distance Education

• Examining the value of learning analytics for supporting work-integrated learning 

• Practera: An Online Platform to Support and Scaffold Experiential Learning 

• James Wolff MD MPH :: Papers and Presentations

• Quality in Online Project-Based Learning

• Sydney's employability program wins AFR award — Skills and Employability Network and Practera powers Job Smart Edge

• City of Boston Summery Youth Employability Case Study

We have conducted longitudinal studies of employment outcomes from learners who have participated in Practera programs over the last 7 years and have found that having participated in experiential learning is a major factor in both employability outcomes as well as career progression. 

Our findings are that it's not just being able to point to an experience, but it's being able to talk about the experience and relating it to the job opportunity that differentiates candidates. This is why well-designed experiential learning that involves reflection and feedback is essential = it helps the learner build a narrative around what they did, what they learned and how it will help them succeed at the job.

The design of each LearnFlow Immersion activity follows well established experiential learning pedagogy. Even though the activity is "simulated" the feedback is real which builds confidence and ensures the narrative is authentic. We believe, and know from our own extensive experience as employers, that ability to confidently and authentically discuss skills through relevant experiences is the best way to move to the front of the recruitment list.

Practera's objective is to be the world's leading platform for experiential learning. To get there, we need to create a movement - an upswelling of educators who believe in the power of experiential learning and use Practera to create innovative solutions.

We believe LearnFlow Immersion is one of those solution that will be transformative. Over the next year we'll focus on a few key high-growth careers (sales, medical assistants, data analysts) and build a very compelling library of LearnFlow activities. We'll partner with major employers in the selected sectors and create a network of experts. We'll partner with Workforce Development Boards to deploy the platform to the learners most in need of upskilling and access to employment.

We would like LearnFlow Immersion be used by several thousand learners within a year and hundreds of thousands of learners in 5 years. To get to that scale we'll need to partner with a large number of organizations - both to reach learners but also to provide expert feedback.

We would also hope that within 5 years there's a natural synergy between LearnFlow for corporate training - where companies are upskilling their own staff, and LearnFlow Immersion. We'd expect LearnFlow users within companies to become LearnFlow Immersion experts and for the companies to be supporting LearnFlow immersion as part of their CSR activities.

We are a small team and have an even smaller presence in the US. We need to bring on more people and will need to raise capital to support the growth of initiatives like LearnFlow Immersion. 

We expect that LearnFlow Immersion will be loss-making for several years and really will rely of sales of LearnFlow (which is in pilot stage) or Practera to fund its ongoing existence. 

We also need to ensure that we hire future employees from the communities we're trying to serve. We'll need their experiences and insights to know if the product will even be usable and useful to our target demographics. 

We are currently focussed on building a network of partners that can help us sell and deliver. We believe that partners can help us navigate entering a new market and also gives us access to talent we currently can't afford to hire directly. 

Over the coming year we'll be hiring more people to help with the development of content and recruitment of employers. We have several related proposals in progress as "Practera" but there's a major overlap between the resources we need to sell/deliver our core Practera offering to higher education and those we need to scale LearnFlow and LearnFlow Immersion. So the more successful we can be with Practera, the more we will also be able to grow LearnFlow. Core Practera sales also provide the cashflow needed to support and sustain LearnFlow and/or raise capital at good terms.

Finally, we are actively looking to recruit from non-traditional sources both for diversity benefits but also so we have employees that deeply understand our target audiences.

Currently Practera gets a lot of data around how learners in formal secondary and tertiary education develop skills during experiential learning activities.

For LearnFlow Immersion, we'll be able to gather data from learners who are "in between" formal education and employment. This will help us better understand how people are navigating the employment gap and where we can inject learning and supportive services to close the gap. 

We are also working on getting long-term career progression data to cross reference against experiential learning performance. We will gain this if we are successful of getting LearnFlow deployed widely as an upskilling platform within companies - we'll see the direct impact of experiential learning over time by looking at the rate of career progression within the company associated with completing particular LearnFlow modules.

The LearnFlow initiative is a joint venture between Northeastern University and Practera. We have dedicated team members from both institutions and access to combined resources.

Our team has been working with marginalized populations of learners from the beginning, when we first started helping international students in Australia gain access to work experience. Australian employers did not want to engage with international students due to language, cultural and long-term visa issues. We created several models of engagement that took these aspect seen as "weaknesses" and turned them into strengths that employers now seek out. Specifically we focused on projects and capabilities that leveraged the cultural knowledge, market knowledge and personal networks to engage exporters who needed first-hand insights on how their products could be sold into the student's home countries.

Similarly, with LearnFlow immersion we look to leverage the diversity of background of the learners into a strength for employers. For example, experts within our employer companies are not just providing feedback, but they are learning how to communicate effective across socio-economic boundaries. This is an essential management skill needed by organizations that want to improve their diversity within.

We partner with Northeastern University - we are working with them to develop and commercialize the LearnFlow line of professional skill development products. We also partner with them through an NSF grant to provide Practera as a virtual internship platform to their network of community colleges and K12 institutions within Massachusetts and Illinois

We also partner with the Institute for Experiential Learning, who are helping to train educators on how to design technology-enabled experiential learning.

We partner with the World Association of Cooperative Education (WACE) to help universities provide high-quality project-based learning for students looking to do transnational work experiences online.

We partner with the Australian Collaborative Education Network (ACEN) to run a grants program for educators who are looking to develop innovative models of experiential learning at all levels.

Practera's business model is to sell our experiential platform and associated services to educators/educational institutions; including Universities, community colleges, corporate learning, K12 districts and other institutions with an education mandate. We deliver value by significantly reducing the cost of experiential learning, enabling greater accessibility and allowing for innovation in design and delivery models.

The most common use of Practera by our customers is to deliver project-based learning with real employers to develop skills and boost employability. These experiences can be embedded in curriculum, provided as part of careers services or made widely available to a community such as all international students in a state.

We often partner with our customers to create new solutions powered by Practera, such as LearnFlow, which is a partnership with Northeastern University targeted at corporate training. LearnFlow Immersion makes the platform available to jobseekers, not just existing employees. 

The business model for LearnFlow Immersion is B2B - we're asking educators, employers and other institutions to fund access to the platform to the learners who need the skills to become employable. We don't think it's fair or equitable to charge the learners directly. We also rely on a small network of full-time experts supplemented by volunteer contribution of employers and other experts to provide feedback.

Practera itself is a venture funded company that periodically raises capital to fuel growth. We were bootstrapped for many years and can become profitable by reducing our investment "ahead of the curve" if needed.

LearnFlow Immersion will seek awards, grants, donations and other funding while in the early stages of growth. In the medium term, we expect it will be a way of building interest and excitement in our LearnFlow corporate training offering. Sales of the corporate training solution will subsidize providing LearnFlow Immersion for free to learners. 

In the long run, we expect many LearnFlow customers will directly support LearnFlow Immersion by sponsoring the costs associated with learners who engage with that organization's recruitment-focused learning content. This will bring them a qualified stream of talent for recruitment and broad brand awareness and goodwill.

Practera has raised a Series A (2017) and a bridge round (2019/20). We are currently break-even. More details are available upon request.

We will be likely seeking a Series B in the next 12 months.

The LearnFlow initiative will cost between $500-750k in 2021 spread across technology development (30%), content development (30%) and sales (40%). 

We believe that our LearnFlow Immersion solution is a novel and powerful way for under-represented jobseekers to level the playing field. But the technology and content is only a part of the solution. It will require a network of employers and experts willing to engage and provide feedback. 

Our experience is that employers quickly see the value once they participate. They realize that they are both giving back to the community but also identifying talent they might never have considered. However, getting them onboard happens fastest when they are referred in by a trusted party.

This is where we believe the network of Challenge partners can help - by promoting our solution to employers, helping us demonstrate the value of LearnFlow for the communities they're trying to reach as well as for their own staff that need to upskill and reskill. 

The grant funding from winning the challenge would be a great catalyst, and we are prepared to match that with our own investment and external capital as needed. But of even greater value is the endorsement and support of the Challenge partner network - we would value this highly and even without a corresponding cash reward that would greatly help us progress this solution.

Practera is still a relatively small edtech startup and new to the US market. Northeastern provides our collaboration with a lot of access to academics and their network of employers. However there are still many things we will need in order for our LearnFlow initiative to be successful:

- We believe that our business model for LearnFlow is sustainable but would greatly appreciate insights from others who have built public good services linked to a for-profit entity

- On technology we're increasingly needing to integrate with a wide range of systems, e.g. LMS/LRS, CRM (Salesforce), HCM (Workday), ERP and more. Support from a partner like IBM would be really helpful

- We are looking for ways to grow faster and service more educators and students. Funding, sales, market and talent are all areas we need help. We also have a very australia-focused advisory board and would like more diversity. 

JFF - we're currently talking with JFF and seek to find ways to collaborate further

Workday - we believe integration of LearnFlow into Workday and similar human capital management systems will be essential - both for development of existing employees who are upskilling/reskilling but also for accelerating employment of LearnFlow Immersion career changers by ensuring a timely matching of candidates with roles where they have demonstrated competency through Learnflow Immersion.

IBM - we started working with IBM pre-pandemic and their New Collar Apprenticeship team helped us with the initial designs of LearnFlow. We'd love to re-engage and work more closely

Salesforce.com - we have active partnership discussions around workforce development. Since sales is such a widely available job and salesforce is a key platform it's a core career focus for LearnFlow immersion

CVS Health and other large healthcare providers - we are partnered with them to pilot our LearnFlow solution right now but seek to more deeply partner around LearnFlow Immersion providing pathways to employment within CVS and the healthcare sector.