In her Fuse AI Courses review, Laura found a comprehensive, competitive suite of elearning tools. This solution can drive business performance by helping you create impactful learning experiences at speed.
AI Courses is the new game-changing authoring tool from Fuse. This is a premium option that’s available to all customers using Fuse LMS and enables them to rapidly create and deploy high-quality elearning content to diverse and disparate workforces.
It empowers Learning and Development to operate at the speed of business, adopting and benefiting from more agile processes and solving performance problems fast. Additionally, organisations can bring their product offers to market much faster by rapidly developing the necessary customer education alongside it in-house.
A significant and welcome unique selling proposition of AI Courses from Fuse is inclusivity and accessibility, as it allows multimodal content to be consumed in the format and language that the learner prefers at the moment they need it.
Empowering In-house Teams to Create and Migrate Content
A significant benefit of AI Courses is how it empowers internal teams to create high-quality content, and the speed at which they can deploy this. What once took months to navigate through design, development, review, and release processes can now be accomplished in hours.
The ease with which the AI Courses tool can be used means in the hands of non-experts it democratises, empowers, and enables the decentralisation of content creation by knowledge workers and subject matter experts within the business.
However, this tool in no way eliminates the role of a learning designer – if anything it supercharges them in terms of their creative output and efficiency, because the more skilled someone is at prompting AI Courses, the better the output will be.
I can also see how it could accelerate digital learning transformation for organisations migrating legacy SCORM content into more engaging, diverse, inclusive, accessible, and bite-sized formats, whether they are migrating content into the new tool or undertaking a learning platform migration as part of their broader digital learning transformation. A ‘lift and shift’ when migrating content suddenly becomes much more of a ‘shift and uplift’.
Who’s it for?
AI Courses is aimed at large organisations that have their own in-house training teams, organisations with frontline workforces, or smaller companies with multipurpose LMS solutions where there may be fewer in-house resources available to create professional-grade content. Pricing is extremely competitive, being half the price of many traditional authoring tools like Articulate, for example.
Simplifying Learning Design
The AI-powered authoring tool works by asking the user to input learning objectives, which ensures that the resulting content output fulfils those objectives. So, if you are a learning designer with more knowledge about certain learning design theory like Bloom’s Taxonomy for example, your instructions and the prompts you craft will be much more directive, producing higher quality content.
Steve Dineen, the President of Fuse, likened it to the idea of giving both Lewis Hamilton and the average person off the street a Ferrari. Lewis Hamilton will break records with it, you or I however will simply drive faster.
This illustrates that, in the hands of a skilled professional or learning practitioner, this tool will significantly enhance their outputs, resulting in extremely polished content. I don’t believe that AI can fully replace effective learning design, which relies on sound pedagogical principles and the ability to infuse creativity in a way that effectively engages hard-to-reach audiences.
However, it can certainly have a huge impact on simplifying the process, speeding up delivery, and increasing output.
On the other hand, when placed in the hands of someone without that learning expertise, it provides them with the capability to build a basic course, which they would not otherwise have with a more complex tool that requires a steeper learning curve and lacks the AI power behind it. As with any generative AI tool, the quality of the output is determined by the quality of the input.
In a nutshell, the more directive the user is, the better the output.
Revolutionising Induction Training with AI
I was shown firsthand how an induction course could be created in a matter of minutes by simply pointing the AI Courses at a company’s website for its source content. Using accurate prompting, the course was specified for a specific audience and given a certain tone.
It was simple to set up how many sections were needed for the course to be divided into. The resulting output was a great first draft where other sources of information could then be incorporated if required, making the whole process super quick and easy.
This is a game changer for organisations needing to spin up content quickly on things like new processes or policies.
Another feature is the ability to load custom dictionaries into AI Courses, which are important for many companies. This means uploading industry-specific language, acronyms, or company-specific brand names so that these are always recognised.
Loading custom dictionaries hugely enhances the accuracy of the transcription, which in turn improves any subsequent translations. Additionally, localised custom dictionaries can be created for multilingual purposes.
This is a great feature and not one readily available in some other competing products.
A Focus on Inclusivity and Accessibility
Inclusivity and accessibility are key for today’s workforce. With a team that includes neurodivergent and multilingual members, as well as colleagues with learning disabilities or visual or hearing impairments, the Fuse team have prioritised inclusivity in their product design and understand how crucial these areas are to removing barriers to learning.
AI Courses includes a narration feature that allows the learner to choose whether they want audio or not, and the multilingual feature which enables the course to be created in multiple languages so that the learner can study in their chosen language. The audio can also be streamed by the learner, similar to a podcast, allowing them to listen without navigating through the course.
The three key areas that Fuse have focused on in relation to inclusivity are the multilingual auto-translation of text and audio within the course, the ability to present content in various forms that are more accessible to neurodiverse individuals, and ensuring accessibility at the moment of need. When someone has a question or needs information at a specific time, they should be able to quickly surface and find it.
This is where AI Courses, embedded into the Fuse LMS, using AI Answers to surface content will be incredibly powerful.
AI Courses is deeply integrated into the already-powerful Fuse LMS, where various AI consumption techniques are used to access the source of information. One of these is AI Answers, a Google-like search that enables natural language searching.
This functionality pulls from various sources of information and learning assets within the LMS, resembling a ChatGPT-style search on the corporate knowledge base that exists within an organisation’s internal LMS. It utilises a large language model that answers questions in a more conversational style, sourcing information from specified parameters.
AI Answers basically allows anyone in an organisation to ask a question and receive an answer within seconds, pulling from various sources of content within a particular course, multiple courses, or even a community. For example, in sales enablement, a salesperson who has completed training on different products and sales techniques may want to refresh their knowledge just before an important call with a customer.
Rather than going through the content again, they can just seek a quick recap on pricing, key benefits, selling points, and positioning strategies. This tool provides a concise summary, serving as a useful refresher right when they need it.
Usefully, parameters can be set to exclude social communities to ensure that accurate and appropriate information is provided, avoiding inaccuracies that may arise from user-generated content.
Delivering a Boost to Learning Through Adaptive Personalisation
A future iteration planned for this personalisation layer will involve the algorithm noting the preferences of the learner. For instance, do they prefer audio, video, or interactive components?
The algorithm would then serve up more of the preferred content, allowing for quicker creation of variants in the background by L&D or subject matter experts. This adaptive personalised layer could respond based on the learner’s preferences, delivering content in a way that is more effectively received and ultimately has a greater impact on learning or behaviour change.
AI Coaches in Training and Development
A new layer of advanced functionality on offer within the Fuse suite is the introduction of AI Coach, which serves as a sophisticated coaching configuration engine. This coaching tool can be directed towards specific bodies of information and content sources and can be prompted to behave in particular ways, such as adjusting tone and formality or being instructed to avoid bias.
Currently, the coach is set up by L&D and supported by Fuse. Coaches could be used for a huge variety of purposes, including leadership development, management training, and sales enablement. They help guide individuals to find their own way while utilising the designated body of knowledge as source material.
Similar to how AI Courses benefits from the expert prompting of a learning designer, the AI Coach requires directive prompting to ensure effective coaching outcomes. It can be set up to utilise specific models, such as the GROW model or the ELEVATE model, with all specifications managed in the background.
For instance, coaches can support and guide autonomous learning. A learner might ask, “What might help me with xyz?” and the coach will suggest various options, which may include consuming content or practicing specific activities or skills.
Additionally, a learning programme or pathway, such as one focused on leadership development, may incorporate coach led reflective aspects. In this scenario, a coach would prompt the learner to reflect on and practice what they have learned from the formal content included in the blended pathway.
This functionality could be a great boon for learning academies and training companies looking to productise and monetise their expertise with lower-cost lighter touch training tools (compared to the time of their experts). With AI Coaches supporting customers or trainees in an asynchronous manner, the expertise of SMEs can be used to add value where it makes more an impact to the bottom line.
Currently, the AI Coach operates in a text-based format, but will soon incorporate voice and avatars as well. This area is poised for rapid growth and development, and I am excited to see how it can be utilised by various organisations, including training companies and those focused on sales enablement. This is a separate product to AI Courses.
Enhancing User Experience in the Fuse Platform
What else is new within the Fuse platform? Well, there’s been a significant enhancement to the user experience. Left-hand menu systems and navigation options have been implemented using the same framework as platforms like Spotify, Google, and YouTube, which will be very familiar to users from the apps they use in their everyday life.
The importance of simple navigation cannot be underestimated. While powerful search features are incredibly useful, simple navigation aids browsing when users don’t know exactly what they are looking for.
Since the platform will be more akin to the entertainment platforms that users of a learning platform are accustomed to, it will be much better received by users and easier to use.
Ultimately, the primary reason organisations tend to move away from a learning management system to another is due to the user experience. In my opinion, anything that vendors can do to enhance and optimise that experience is a significant advantage.
Conclusion
Ultimately, an AI-powered elearning authoring tool needs to prove it’s worth by being easy to use in the hands of the lay person, as well as an experienced learning designer.
I love this example from Steve Dineen, who used AI Courses to turn his son’s school homework assignment into something more engaging, effective and accessible for his ADHD within minutes. He took the homework’s thirty-minute video, uploaded it into the AI Courses tool, which then auto-transcribed the content from the video, chunked it into relevant sections, extracted text around it, and added interactivity using prompts.
This included creating characters in the style of Japanese anime, which his son loves. In just five minutes, and with no training, Steve had transformed what could have been a boring homework assignment into something truly enjoyable, allowing his son to have a much more impactful learning experience.
To offer a compelling business case, an AI-powered authoring tool needs to offer great value for money, and the ability to make an impact quickly on efficiency and output – which AI Courses certainly demonstrates.
Not all AI authoring tools are created equal. I’ve seen other new AI powered authoring tools and a lot of the functionality demonstrated in AI Courses is not there yet in other tools.
Combined with AI Answers and AI Coach, Fuse has a very competitive suite of tools to drive business performance through speedily deployed impactful learning experiences.
Learn more about this powerful AI-powered elearning authoring tool on the Fuse website.
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