Lumina Emotion is a Learning Pool winner and an ABP finalist

Showcasing the Lumina Emotion Virtual Blended Qualification

Lumina Learning creates psychometrics to help organisations transform their people, one human at a time.

The blended Lumina Emotion Qualification has used learning technologies to make a unique and innovative contribution to the delivery of our qualification, which has shaped L&D delivery within Lumina Learning and beyond into our Practitioner community.

The blended Lumina Emotion Qualification has positively impacted how we train our Practitioners to deliver people solutions, helping us stay ahead of the game, especially throughout the pandemic. The success of the qualification has been recognised, not only winning an award for Most Innovative Use of Learning Technologies at Learning Pool but also being announced as a finalist for Excellence in Learning Interventions for the upcoming ABP awards.

The challenge

Before introducing a blended learning qualification, we qualified Practitioners to use Lumina Emotion on a robust two-day face-to-face programme. During 2019, we had been exploring options for taking a more modular blended learning approach to our qualification process. However, when Covid-19 hit in March 2020, we realised that we had to speed up this process to enable us to deliver virtually.

We qualify Practitioners in our psychometrics, which involve a mix of content to ensure the tools are understood and interpreted by participants effectively. We always use a very collaborative approach to our learning solutions to ensure effective transfer of the learning between participants. It was important to us to retain this element in the design, providing a solution appropriate to the learning requirements, audience characteristics, and fit within the practical constraints of the virtual delivery.

As a global organisation, with Partners and Strategic Alliances worldwide, any redesign of our qualification needed to include consultation with these key stakeholders, be translated, and used consistently worldwide. To meet our ongoing goal to credentialise our qualifications, we also wanted to achieve International Coaching Federation (ICF)-CCE accreditation for our qualification once redesigned to meet the need of many of our Practitioners.

We had clear learning outcomes defined, but as we had added additional features to the Lumina Emotion Qualification, it had become increasingly difficult to cover the entire curriculum in the two-day programme. A clear rationale for the mix of delivery methods needed to be established to ensure a seamless learner experience.

The solution

There is evidence of a successful implementation strategy, including alignment with organisational goals, engagement with key stakeholders, marketing, support and evaluation.

To transform our qualification into a digital learning programme to deliver effective and lasting improvement in the quality of our newly qualified Practitioners, we took a root and branch approach.

We started by reviewing the current content and the key elements to ensure Practitioners were competent and confident to deliver Lumina Emotion to their clients, following the process below:

We designed the new virtual qualification to combine both synchronous and asynchronous learning.

The design process was iterative, taking feedback from our global Partners, Strategic Alliances, Facilitators and Practitioners. A vital part of the Lumina Learning approach is the collaborative and interactive nature of Lumina Emotion. Therefore, we wanted to keep this approach to the new qualification, even though it was entirely virtual.

Implementation and iteration of the qualification took place during 2020.

We piloted the qualification design with our Partners and Strategic Alliances initially, then iterated based on feedback.

Over the last 15 months, we have continued to evolve the qualification based on feedback from participants to the following format:

It was vital to gather feedback from participants to enable us to evolve the design and content ensuring learners were supported effectively throughout the programme.

We started by ensuring the facilitators were confident to deliver this new format.

The feedback received on these measures throughout 2020 and 2021 was overwhelmingly positive.

Feedback survey 2020 / 21

We also analysed satisfaction with the structure, content, quality and satisfaction with materials provided. 

In addition, qualitative data (below) provided evidence of lasting improvement in the capability of learners to understand and deliver our psychometrics.

Stream functionality and the feedback were key messages in our marketing of the virtual qualification to our stakeholders who were sceptical that the qualification process could be as effective virtually.

Steps were taken to engage learners with the subject

In a typical cohort, we often have deeply experienced occupational psychologists, experienced (non-psychologist) consultants, students, and HR professionals.

To support and engage our learners, we included optional units in the Lumina Learning Experience Platform (Stream) for differing audience members, eg:

• Additional units for learners with a high level of prior knowledge of psychometrics who wanted a deep dive into aspects, e.g. theory and validity
• For Practitioners who wanted more practical applications of our psychometric, examples of how to deliver the content virtually and in a face-to-face situation

Stream allowed discussion between participants and enabled them to ask questions of the facilitators. These questions were answered within Stream, built on in the virtual classrooms, and used in self-reflection. Stream also enabled us to engage learners by testing the learning and understanding using the gateways and comments functionality.

Your project has made an impact in terms of individual and organisational performance

To grow our business globally, our Partners replicated our qualifications locally. Where English was not the first language, we made our qualification materials, design and Stream available for translation. Virtual Lumina Emotion Qualifications are currently available in Dutch, French, Japanese, and German, with more underway.

The average participation on our qualifications has increased, and we now have a global reach for our English qualifications. This consistent participation rate ensures we minimise our delivery costs per learner whilst maximising the quality, by limiting courses to twelve participants at any time.

Before 2020, we typically ran one public face-to-face qualification every 2-3 months in the UK, with an average of 7 participants. From April 2020 – June 2021, we ran nine qualifications with an average of 9.5 participants per programme.

Number of Practitioners attending Public Emotion Qualifications 

For our Partners and Strategic Alliances for whom English qualifications are an option, putting forward participants to attend virtually on our centrally run virtual qualifications has freed the Partners to focus on business development.

Practitioners were taught about the psychometric, how to use it and to deliver it virtually, a skill that many of them did not possess pre-pandemic.

Key Impacts

1. Moving to virtual delivery using Stream in a blend with virtual classrooms or face-to-face has combined multiple regional courses into one consistent global programme.
2. The innovative design of these qualifications enables the exchange of ideas, perspectives and shared experience with a more diverse group of participants.
3. Average participation on our qualifications has increased, ensuring we minimise costs whilst maximising quality.
4. Practitioners become familiar with virtual and blended delivery enabling them to replicate our approach with their clients using the skills learnt and the learning objects developed for Stream.

The virtual blended Lumina Emotion Qualification has been submitted for numerous awards, collecting at least finalists positions in these 3 categories