Microsoft 365 offers a lot of applications that can help our users get their jobs done. But in order to take full advantage of the tooling, they need to understand what the possibilities are and how it all works. So we want to provide our users with an information portal, where they can find that out. But Microsoft 365 evolves all the time: new applications are added, existing applications are improved and expanded, new connections are added, tying these applications together. So how do we keep that information up-to-date?
We used to set up information portals and fill them with relevant content, but it is rather time-consuming to keep those up-to-date. It usually came down to one person managing the site. And when that one person leaves the company or gets another role, the information portal starts to fossilize…
Microsoft Learning Pathways helps us to outsource a lot of that work to Microsoft: they update the toolkit, and they update the information about the toolkit. See also Microsoft’s documentation Microsoft 365 learning pathways. I’m setting up Microsoft Learning Pathways for some clients, so let’s take a look at some lessons I learned when I got down it.
1.It is an information portal, rather than Learning Management System
When I started talking about Microsoft 365 Learning Pathways with HR people who are really in the learning business, they had expectations based in the name, that it would be a full Learning Management System, with courses, testing, tracking, certification and everything. It’s not.
Microsoft 365 Learning Pathways is more like an information portal, where you can find information about the applications and instructions on how to use them. Users consult the portal when they want to learn something.
So it went down a lot better when I called it an information portal. It actually is based on the Communication Site template, so it looks like the other information portals that we had in our environment.
Microsoft 365 Learning Pathways home page
2.The learning content is hierarchically structured with reusable assets
The content is organised in a structure that is mostly hierarchical, though the actual content can be used in different branches of that topic tree. The high-level structure is fixed, but we can add lower levels ourselves.
The M365 Learning Pathways structure of Categories, Subcategories and Playlists
- All of the information offered in Microsoft 365 Learning Pathways is organised in three main Categories for the end-users: Get started, Scenarios, Products. Plus a category Adoption tools that is more geared towards Owners.
We cannot add our own category. - Within those Categories, we have Subcategories: the different scenarios and different products, like SharePoint.
We can add our own Subcategories.
This hierarchy is strict: each Subcategory belongs to only one Category. - Within the Subcategories, we have Playlists. For example: Intro to SharePoint Online, Share and sync with SharePoint.
We can add our own Playlists.
This hierarchy is strict: each Playlist belongs to only one Subcategory. We can create a copy of a Playlist to include it in another Subcategory though. - Within the Playlists, we have Assets. For example: What is SharePoint, Find and follow sites and news. The Assets contain the actual content.
We can add our own Assets.
We can re-use an Asset in as many Playlists as we want.
The M365 Learning Pathways structure: the Playlists contain Assets.
3.The M365 Learning Pathways web part displays the content
What makes it the Learning Pathways instead of just a regular Communication site is the Learning Pathways web part that displays the actual learning content to the users.
As a user, you an browse the playlists: click on a playlist to open it and then browse the asset using the Next button or the pulldown menu.
Please note: we’ve experienced that not all users see that they can navigate through the playlist. So we have added a line of instruction at the top of the web part.
Browse the Assets in the Playlist using the Next button or the menu.
As the owner, you configure what you want to display on a particular page: the top level allowing the users to drill down the categories, subcategories and playlists. Or maybe a particular Playlist or even one Asset.
Configuring the M365 Learning Pathways web part to display the top level.
Configuring the M365 Learning Pathways web part to display a particular Playlist.
4.The Assets are bite-sized pieces of content stored elsewhere
The Assets with the actual content consist of introductory videos and instruction videos of maximum a few minutes each, plus a short text version of the instructions. Some Assets are text only. By the way, the videos do not all have the same style: some have a voice-over, others do not talk but give their explanation in written text labels.
Each Asset is a URL in the catalogue. Either in the portal, elsewhere in your Microsoft 365 environment or elsewhere on the internet. The standard content provided by Microsoft all lives on the internet, at https://support.office.com.
5.The content gets updated quarterly by Microsoft
Microsoft updates the content four times a year; they don’t have fixed dates. For example, they will announce a list of content updates next week during Ignite (March 4th 2021) via Driving Adoption – Microsoft Tech Community. So the information about new features does not become immediately available in Learning Pathways. We have to wait for the next update.
When the content is updated, it gets streamed to our Learning Pathways automatically. Not need to pull it in, because the Microsoft’s content lives on their site.
6.Standard Playlists don’t work for us, so we use custom Playlists
You can use the standard Microsoft Playlists offers in the catalogue. However, we found that they did not work for us. Usually we want to add something, remove something, change the sort order, change a title. And you cannot change anything in a standard Playlist.
So we create custom playlists, often starting from a copy of a standard Playlist. In a custom Playlist, you determine the details of the Playlist as a whole, like the title, the summary and the image. Please note: you can select the level and audience, but you cannot add any choices. That is a pity, because most audiences don’t make sense to innocent users.
A custom Playlist, with some standard Assets and custom Assets.
In the custom Playlist, you can search for and add existing Assets.
Add existing Assets to the custom Playlist: standard Assets and custom Assets.
Or you can add your own Assets: add a title and a URL, for example of a page created in the portal. The custom Assets are indicated with the people icon in the Playlist.
A custom Asset: a page created in the same portal.
7.Microsoft has more Assets than you can find in the catalog
I could not find everything I needed in the catalogue. Fortunately, Microsoft has more Assets online, so I did not have to create the content myself.
- Other topics found in support.microsoft.com. You just need to tweak the URL:
Replace microsoft in the root url with office;
Replace office after the language with client;
Just include the article GUID, not the title;
Add at the end ?embed=true.
For example, the new poll functionality in Team Meetings did not become immediately available in the catalogue. But it was available on the internet:
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/poll-attendees-during-a-teams-meeting-9923b7d4-ea97-4aa2-b8b8-b45fefe7d454 becomes
https://support.office.com/en-us/client/9923b7d4-ea97-4aa2-b8b8-b45fefe7d454?embed=true - Versions in another language than the standard languages. Just take the original Asset URL and replace the language code.
For example, the intro video on SharePoint https://support.office.com/en-us/client/c17b6824-cc22-478f-8757-497cc6b57121?embed=true becomes https://support.office.com/nl-nl/client/c17b6824-cc22-478f-8757-497cc6b57121?embed=true
So, yes: Microsoft 365 Learning Pathways is very helpful. But is not “automagically” providing us a learning portal that meet our needs with one push of the button. We still have to do some manual work.
